I’m not delusional about the state of social media and the web these days. I understand that companies want me to get sucked into their apps, consume more and more content, and give them more insight into my preferences so they can surface ads for me or sell me things. I get all of that, but every time I open YouTube these days, it feels like Google is violating the very implicit agreement we made many years ago: I watch videos I’m interested in and I get served more videos I might be interested in. That’s why I subscribe to YouTube Premium and pay a monthly fee to watch a bunch of videos ad-free.
However, the reason for my distrust is that YouTube has, for a long while now, started counting my passive views as real views.
