Post AZx7GXTggrCJeliCES by blacklight@social.platypush.tech
(DIR) More posts by blacklight@social.platypush.tech
(DIR) Post #AZx7GXTggrCJeliCES by blacklight@social.platypush.tech
2023-09-20T07:36:29Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
All companies in 2023 be like "we'll start charging for every time the user unlocks their screen, we'll make a premium plan just to allow you refresh your feed more than twice a day, we'll force developers to pay $1000's a month for an API that so far they could use for free, we'll drop all of our open-source licenses and abandon all of our open efforts, we'll kill all of the alternative clients without notice (after insulting as freeriders developers and moderators who have put in a lot of unpaid work), we'll ban you if we notice that you don't use our official client, we'll come up with more ways to bypass your ad-blockers, we'll expand the network of data brokers, advertisers and gossipers we share your data with, we'll shovel more ads down your throat, we'll make an effort to change the Internet protocols themselves to account for surveillance patterns, and we'll make it impossible for you to copy your data out of our platform".Enshittification, removal of features people want and addition of features nobody asked have become the bedrock of how our industry works nowadays.Then, when backlash, boycotts and a rush for alternatives obviously follow, these failures of our industry rush to put together ridiculous statements like these ("we have heard you, we work closely with our partners and customers to find the best solution, we care about our customers, bla bla").No, you don't.If you really cared about your customers, if you proactively listened to us, if you genuinely loved the product you build, you wouldn't be in this state.The only thing that announcements like these say is "we are so deaf to our customers that we didn't even expect so many of them to go so mad, we expected to be so big that people would have had no choice but follow us, and the only reason why we are apologizing now is that we didn't know that there were so many open and free alternatives around comparable or better than our product that everybody would immediately rush to ".You failed at listening to your customers, you overestimated your size and impact, you underestimated the free alternatives to your product, and you failed to predict the scale of the backlash - in other words, you failed at running a business that creates products and services.When companies end up in this state, the damage is done. No further announcements can undo it. Everybody understands that these enshittified companies are desperate for money, and you can NEVER trust a business that is so desperate for money that it stops caring about its customers.The unhealthy and unsustainable form of capitalism that has fueled the growth of our industry for years is dying. But, before it dies, it's trying to take everybody down with it. It's time for whoever said that this economic model is the most efficient way to create products and services aligned with the needs of the customers to publicly acknowledge their macroscopic failure.The publicly funded IT industry gave us C, UNIX, the TCP/IP, the Web, and all the foundations we've built our things on.The VC-funded IT industry only gave us a bunch of companies with unsustainable growth trajectories, unethical business models, pathologic short-termism, literally zero innovation besides the "cult of user engagement", literally zero business models besides "scoop up and resell as much personal data as possible", and a complete deafness towards the customers.#Unityhttps://twitter.com/unity/status/1703547752205218265?ref_src=twsrc%5etfw
(DIR) Post #AZx7GYXGl1emwAOZSC by cnx@larkspur.one
2023-09-20T08:15:40.725827Z
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Surveillance, predatory subscription, DRM, etc. are just symptoms, @blacklight, if companies care about customers, they’re release their products as libre software. Especially in case of a tool, library or framework, being non-free would make it a burden to work against.Tho TBH I don’t have much sympathy for Unity’s customers, they’re perpetuating the exact same unjust of proprietary software down to gamers. Indeed they’re the lesser evil, but unless this is turning into a class action setting a precedence, there’s no morally correct side involved in the drama, because correctness implies absoluteness.
(DIR) Post #AZyH6Umr283X7BUE8u by cambridgeport90@social.platypush.tech
2023-09-20T12:00:07Z
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@blacklight I'm not defending them, certainly not,but I wonder if a lot of people don't have a method of thinking outside of the box? I have a friend, for instance, and the only way his company makes money off of his open source project is by selling hosting for it. People buy it.
(DIR) Post #AZyH6VbC0yK1dJ2QbY by blacklight@social.platypush.tech
2023-09-20T13:26:52Z
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@cambridgeport90 that's a perfectly legit business model - if there's some FOSS project that requires either skills or costs to run, there's also demand from those who want to use it but without those costs, and there's therefore a market for hosting.What enrages many in Unity's case, instead, is the "every time somebody installs a game that was built using our engine a "runtime fee" must be paid back to us".This is a very different (and very dangerous) business model.
(DIR) Post #AZyH6WEtdM55cRc8US by cambridgeport90@social.platypush.tech
2023-09-20T20:50:05Z
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@blacklight My friend also doesn't balk if he doesn't get money because someone wants to manage their own hosting. And that's why this is odd; these business who already have tons of money, are acting as if they don't have a dime to their name.
(DIR) Post #AZyH6WyctKf1uH0elk by blacklight@social.platypush.tech
2023-09-20T21:18:56Z
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@cambridgeport90@platypush.tech Well that's the point - they may be making a lot of *revenue* but that doesn't mean a lot of *profit*.Many of these businesses are expensive to run, they've always struggled to be profitable, and they've mostly been feasting on VC money all this time (Spotify and Uber are just two popular examples of companies that have probably struggled to be profitable since they've been around, so much that the news of Uber's first profitable quarter has recently generated some fanfare).Until recently it wasn't a big deal - for 15-20 years VCs were happy to splurge around money. Their goal wasn't much to seek profitability but market dominance (or at least the highest possible shares), under the assumption that profits would have arrived once market consolidation was reached.We're almost two decades down the line, Spotify dominates the area of music streaming, Uber that of ride-hailing apps, but most of those companies still struggle to be profitable.But now the VCs are starting to ask where's their money.That's why the mass layoffs happened earlier this year, and that's why companies have become more aggressive with monetization - either by sharing user data more aggressively, or fighting ad-blockers, or cracking down on unofficial clients, or locking up their APIs, or coming up with absurd licensing models, or wrapping everything into subscriptions, or charging for things that everybody took as granted.It's not a coincidence that so many businesses this year underwent such a synchronized and profound enshittification process, all while laying off big chunks of their stuff. It's basically their way of screaming "the cow has run out of milk, we haven't thought of how to build a sustainable business model in all these years, and now they're asking us to do it within a few months".
(DIR) Post #AZyH6XrZb2c4egiXPk by cambridgeport90@social.platypush.tech
2023-09-20T21:23:14Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@blacklight One of my friend's main reasons for owning a business in the first place is so that he can own a full rack of servers for himself and his friends to play with. So profit is actually rather secondary to him. good point. Regardless of anything, I would never fund anything via venture capital. I baught the book about the metaverse by Matthew Ball, and honestly I'm regretting buying that book, because that dude's a venture capitalist. Not that I have a problem with people making enough money to feel comfortable. I live in a relatively small condo. I have a feeling that even if I came into a million or more dollars, I'd not trade this little home for anything.
(DIR) Post #AZyHBhlcCXzAosOIYS by FourOh-LLC@pkteerium.xyz
2023-09-20T21:41:35.342959Z
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I too live in a smallish condo, and its paradise. I do not have a care in the world.
(DIR) Post #AZzugvV15RjSfsWyoq by feld@bikeshed.party
2023-09-21T16:38:24.609094Z
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> The publicly funded IT industry gave us C, UNIX, the TCP/IP, the Web, and all the foundations we've built our things on.Please don't rewrite history.Web/WWW: ok, CERN. Yeah. That's publicly funded.C and UNIX were invented at Bell Labs. That wasn't publicly funded.Most people know TCP/IP was built upon ARPANET which was a defense project. OK, you can argue it was publicly funded through our taxes and a bunch of R&D happened stateside at several universities and the RAND Corporation, but this wasn't some gift to the American public.the TL;DR is: the first full public demo was in DC in 1972, but it started in secrecy as Project CAM (not to be confused with Project Camelot, which it merged with later). The entire point of ARPANET was to help dismantle communism worldwide. Simulmatics Corp was basically a military contractor that worked on ARPANET 1961-1968 in South Vietnam to compile data on communists and make that database available to the military/government over a network. The data they promised to the military included:• Public opinion polls from all countries• Cultural patterns of all the tribes and peoples of the world• Archives on comparative communism… files on the contemporary world communist movements• Political participation of various countries.… This includes such variables as voting, membership in associations, activity of political parties, etc.• Youth movements• Mass unrest and political movements under conditions of rapid social change• Data on national integration, particularly in “plural” societies; the integration of ethnic, racial and religious minorities; the merging or splitting of present political units• International propaganda output• Peasant attitudes and behavior• International armament expenditures and trendsARPANET and TCP/IP was not some wonderful gift from a benevolent government using our public funds generously to improve technology in America or the world. It was a spy tool with very nefarious intentions.