DaGeek247

And here I thought my device had suddenly ran out of ram or one of my apps started having major memory leaks.

Yeah, me too. Modern design has been incredibly disappointing for a while now.

Right. I haven't been able to actually do my own testing for life reasons, but I think it matters less what the actual numbers are here, and more that the guy stopped posting free 4k versions once the paid 1080p option came out; basically cutting his quality down in the name of, whatever benefit he gets from the paid 1080p thing.

In short, YouTube added a paid feature that encouraged the use of a shittier quality unpaid user experience. Worse, because it appears to be a choice on the creators side, instead of YouTube or the viewer, it shifts blame from YouTube, who created the situation in the first place, to the creator, who only took advantage of it (or used it because this is their job and they need the money to live).

This feature is limited to videos that don't have a better resolution than 1080p. It's also even more limited to videos that the uploaders choose to enable it on, or at least, se subset of 1080p videos, since I've seen new 1080p videos both with and without it. Finally, it doesn't apply to old 1080p videos.

if people upload at 1440p/4K, then it's just a non-issue anyway as they have much higher bitrates.

Yup. Doesn't make it any less frustrating to see my favorite nature guy's videos turn to shit just because of it.

Nature videos with the 'enhanced birate' option piss me off the most. Personally, they're basically unwatchable. There's nothing worse than watching a gorgeous shot of a waterfall, forest, river, lake, or whatever, and then getting ambushed by those fuckugly compression artifacts. Hell, I've seen dirt look bad enough to notice because of it.

DVDs did ~10mbps at 480p using the mpeg2 codec. YouTube doesn't recommend 10mbps until 1080p using x264 (mpeg2's successor).

DVDs 480p is better quality than YouTube's 720p, and YouTube only gets ahead of DVDs after you switch to 1080p or above.

Modern online streaming at 4k usually doesn't usually do any better than 20mbps (personal experience). Compressions helps, especially with av1, but for the most part, physical media is worlds better than streaming media is, because unlike physical media, the media companies have to pay for every mbps they deliver.

For whatever it's worth to you iirc they didn't downgrade the original bitrate, they just introduced better bitrate and locked that behind the subscription.

They absolutely did. It's a very obvious difference I noticed when they first released this "feature" and has been bugging the shit out of me ever since it came out.

It's reasonable for a free service to offer premium features

Very true.

Enshittification means ... changing the existing service to make it worse, to encourage people to pay for subscriptions.

Also very true.

YouTube cut the default bitrate when they added this "feature". It was incredibly obvious to my eyes the instant it was pushed out, and remains obvious everytime I come across one of these videos. If they had just charged for better bitrate, I wouldn't have cared. However, they also cut the default bitrate down, making all the videos that have this look really bad.

This is textbook inshittification, complete with the gaslighting bullshit of saying "we were always like this! Its your fault it seems worse than it was!" in every design decision involved in the process.

Actually I don't think it's that bad. There's nothing special about it, but it could have been a lot worse too.

Lol, I grew up with the 98se theme and xp theme, and at this point i just think they're both incredibly ugly. Peak windows desktop prettiness and usability was windows 7 for me.

Ublock origin has a script for that. I'd forgotten they did that shit.