In my business area (ISP), when doing carbon accounting, we have "scope 3" which includes the electric consumption we incur the electric consumption of our devices at user's home.
A first step towards reducing those externalities [1] is mandating that they power consumption Youtube incurs is accounted for. -- Another Youtube thing that made my computer screams is "theater mode", eating so much CPU for eye candy on so many devices ought to be at least declared.
[1] To explain the externality: Google probably does that because they make maybe +0.5% revenues by click to video, at almost 0 cost for them. Since the whole extra cost is paid for by the user (by requiring a bigger computer, by consuming more electricity). The price for the user to view a page without the embed and with it can be something like +20% at no gain for them. It's so small than no sane user make those computations, but if you start accounting like a company, you would see the difference. (Plus obviously all the ecological externalities)
> Another Youtube thing that made my computer screams is "theater mode", eating so much CPU for eye candy on so many devices ought to be at least declared.
Do you mean ambient mode, that adds the faded light around the video (which looks awful, but is supposed to mimic behind-screen synced backlighting)? Theater mode mainly just makes the video bigger and moves other stuff lower down on the page, so I can't imagine how it "eats CPU" any more than simply making the window bigger would.
A first step towards reducing those externalities [1] is mandating that they power consumption Youtube incurs is accounted for. -- Another Youtube thing that made my computer screams is "theater mode", eating so much CPU for eye candy on so many devices ought to be at least declared.
[1] To explain the externality: Google probably does that because they make maybe +0.5% revenues by click to video, at almost 0 cost for them. Since the whole extra cost is paid for by the user (by requiring a bigger computer, by consuming more electricity). The price for the user to view a page without the embed and with it can be something like +20% at no gain for them. It's so small than no sane user make those computations, but if you start accounting like a company, you would see the difference. (Plus obviously all the ecological externalities)