For about a year, I’ve gotten notes from readers asking why our YouTube embeds are broken in one very specific way: you can no longer click the title to open the video on YouTube.com or in the YouTube app. This used to work just fine, but now you can’t.
This bothers us, too, and it’s doubly frustrating because everyone assumes that we’ve chosen to disable links, which makes a certain kind of sense — after all, why on earth wouldn’t YouTube want people to click over to its app?
The short answer is money. Somewhat straightforwardly, YouTube has chosen to degrade the user experience of the embedded player publishers like Vox Media use, and the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more.
Under pre-computer conditions, ideally a competitor would disrupt the market with some novel cost saving technique, more efficient processes, or some other way to stand out from the crowd and claw consumers away from the Big Thing.
Unfortunately, nowadays with computer stuff, it’s virtually impossible to build new or novel features that the Big Thing can’t immediately (or very quickly) copy and implement before the little guy can meaningfully establish themselves.
At this point… it comes down to the people. Nebula popped off not because they had a rad new feature or player, but because they had a certain target audience where those types of creators were releasing content there first, well before posting on YouTube. Same for Dropout. And because both of those endeavors aren’t subject to the same business model pressures as YouTube, they’re liable to only get better over time.
I don’t know how you do a social media site with that strategy though. Lemmy is the best I’ve experienced, but even this isn’t without its drawbacks.