Enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author of The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse:
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.”
“Enshittification,” Cory Doctorow’s coinage describing the process by which internet media platforms become increasingly unusable and un-quittable, has been named 2023’s “Digital Word of the Year.” Here, we break down what the term means and Doctorow’s solution to the internet’s relentless enshittification.
I feel this deeply, but I worry we’re long past it. A platform has to facilitate these things. which means you have to surrender to the way the platform works to participate. And the truth is, no matter if it’s volunteers or a corporation, there is going to be an interfering element that you have to trust not to fuck with you.
The fediverse feels like it’s part of the solution, but not all of it. There are still gatekeepers here who are capable of abusing that position to “disrupt”, maybe not for “sponsored posts”, but for other reasons.
Craigslist can do it, it can be done.
Craigslist is the Achilles heel to the big tech bros, proof that they’re wrong, and Craig flag out refuses to change the site. It is what it is. And that’s it. I fucking love Craigslist, besides the various niche forums, all self hosted from their website -fuck reddit, it is hands down my favorite part of the internet.
Everything else is advertising, trackers and opportunists. The whole Internet feels like walking down a seedy alley full of grabby sex offenders in Mumbai.
That’s where I place advertisers in the social hierarchy, as peers to sex offenders, pedo’s and rapists, and I know I am not the only one with such designations. Maybe think twice about that marketing major, just saying.
Bill Hicks would have approved.
The problem with fedi is that you need some kind of lowest common denominator gatekeeper. So that a client can tell the server: I don’t want to see x,y,z and it works reliably.
In order to have that functionality, someone has to class that content first. You can’t trust the author implicitly, so you have to trust either the server or a moderation group.
How you define the mod group, be it random community member based on comment and post karma, or a trusted ring of insiders with votes, or some other method, data still needs a place to be stored.
isn’t that just subscribing to different communities though? and relying on the voting system, but that’s much more ostensibly democratic than just An Algorithm
Vote counting is an algorithm. I think a lot of people want a unicorn and are apalled when someone offers them a magical horse with a horn because it’s not what they wanted.
There was a project that I believe would have (will?) solve this problem of the platform, it is callede maidsafe. Basically the idea is that the users are always in control of their data and the services can only access it when the users want to use it. It worked by decoupling data and services and users own and control all the data they produce, meaning they can always take them elsewhere.
It also take remuneration of service/content provider into account, and all data is safely encrypted.
It’s been more than 10years and the project still hasn’t been released, I doubt it’s ever going to come out, but the idea was really cool.
I rember I built a small website on the system when it was in early stage, and an interface for git, it was really cool to use. Anyway…
The main driving force for enshittification is relentless greed for more profit. So the rules of the system matter, if they can’t own the users accounts that changes the possible strategies and likely outcomes.
Of course it’s possible that the sabotage the fediverse or that it sabotages itself but the underlying “energy” which feeds it development is different. And that matters.
This is part of the neoliberal propaganda, making people believe that greed does not have an effect on quality or morality of behavior, and of course that governments or non-profit can never be “efficient”. But that is mostly baseless.
You totally can create institutions with a different agenda or mandate than profit and it works. Of course they can also be captured or sabotaged.