YouTube built something fun. The lawyers already knew what it was. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. YouTube announced something fun yesterday. No really. Genuinely fun on the surface. You can now create an AI avatar of yourself for use in Shorts. Record a quick selfie, read a few prompts so it can...

I've now written two posts about YouTube systematically degrading its free experience — background playback killed in browsers, lyrics paywalled after six years of being free. Each time I've said: this is a pattern, not a coincidence. This is deliberate, not incidental. So let's talk about what else has been going on,...

Four days ago, I wrote about YouTube killing background playback in browsers and how it was part of a broader pattern of systematically degrading free features to push people toward Premium subscriptions or their data-slurping app. Guess what happened this week? YouTube Music just put song lyrics behind a paywall. The...

Remember when you could open YouTube in Samsung Internet or Brave, lock your screen, and keep listening to music or podcasts while doing literally anything else on your phone? Yeah, that's done. As of this week, YouTube officially killed background playback through third-party browsers. No more workarounds. No more...