[HN Gopher] Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of ...
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Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of
"Enshittification" [audio]
Author : Trouble_007
Score : 258 points
Date : 2023-07-06 04:22 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (podtail.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (podtail.com)
| nologic01 wrote:
| The question is: can / will something be done about anytime soon.
| The age of innocence is long gone. The textbook on surveillance
| capitalism has been written. The importance of sane digital
| interactions and its role in helping solve _other_ more stuborn
| problems is also obvious.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I wonder what the people at the top of large corps (Pichai,
| Zuckerberg, Musk et al) think of this perspective and how its
| increasingly dominating the narrative about what they do. Are
| they mystified or perplexed by it? Worried? Or do they just
| think: _hey, you figured it out in the end_?
| prox wrote:
| I think the latter. These guys aren't consumers in the same way
| most of the public is. They are beholden to other bounds and
| checks which keeps them in place. I had the pleasure to go
| along for a week with a bunch of CEOs, one was a former
| billionaire and he had stories that really emphasize how
| insulated they are from the rest of society.
|
| I mean imagine that traveling is all by jet, that everyone you
| meet is at least a millionaire, that work can be done
| everywhere on the planet.
| mojo74 wrote:
| I was listening to a programme on the radio the other day and
| they highlighted the same thing as you. Put a billionaire in
| a party with average people (with money, health worries etc)
| and they would be unable to relate to any of the other party
| goers. So removed they are from general life that they might
| as well be aliens was the conclusion.
| sharas- wrote:
| Platform capitalism: this was uploaded on "podtail.com" platform
| Enshittification: Can you scroll this shit through to skip ads?
| ggm wrote:
| I compare this mentally to:
|
| * autotesting music for 'hit worthy' == music blandifies to the
| bangers and you never get interesting voices any more. but .. it
| works (for profit)
|
| * kindle genres like 'in the style of' and the tendency to more
| and more but worse and worse in fiction because.. it works (for
| profit)
|
| * politics descending to the lowest grab, not the highest goal.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| so what kind of algorithm would lead to the best outcome?
| ggm wrote:
| How about a heuristic instead of an algorithm.
| jmeister wrote:
| The problem is decline in elitism(in the arts, in politics, in
| the academy..) but nobody wants to hear that in these populist
| times. Democracy+markets are working extremely well for the
| masses, giving them exactly what they want.
|
| Ted Gioia the music critic has made a lot of good observations
| on these issues. In particular, artists, intellectuals and
| politicians of old used to lead, persuade, and pull their
| audience along with them. Today, everyone simply panders.
| ggm wrote:
| Strong agree, but said hypocritically as a net beneficiary of
| the degree dilution of the 70s and 80s.
| amatecha wrote:
| Funny timing, as I just described Duolingo's recent trajectory as
| being an example of "enshittification" to someone who was angry
| that they have to do even more "quests" this month than any
| previous one, to earn the monthly badge (merely a fun thing on
| your profile to look back on). Gotta drive that engagement and
| keep users in-app as long as possible...
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| This seems like a weirdly trivial thing to categorize as
| enshittification. It's just a vanity badge, not a core
| component of the app experience.
| reichstein wrote:
| If you ignore human psychology, ... well, you're probably not
| making a great app.
|
| Why have vanity badges, or other kinds of gamification, to
| begin with? Because it gives users an added incentive,
| through an added reward, a goal, which helps them get through
| something that could otherwise be too tedious or un-fun for
| them to endure.
|
| And if everybody agrees that the added goal aligns with the
| user's actual goal, that's a great strategy.
|
| But you get what you reward, because people like to get
| rewards. The dopamine rush of knowing you'll reach the goal.
|
| If the rewards stop helping users towards their real goals,
| and you've trained them to work towards your goals already,
| you'll get people doing daily tasks to get daily rewards that
| they shouldn't really care about. But they do. Because you
| made them care.
|
| And you might have replaced their intrinsic motivation,
| wanting to learn a language, with an extrinsic goal, wanting
| to get a reward. And if they then stop caring about the
| extrinsic goal, they just might stop entirely.
|
| Messing with people's motivations is dangerous, and "driving
| engagement" is the absolutely most useless reason to do so.
| amatecha wrote:
| The perceived significance of the reward is irrelevant and
| doesn't affect whether its degradation is "enshittification"
| or not. It's not excluded from that categorization because
| it's considered a "trivial" feature. In fact, I'd argue it's
| specifically a good example of enshittification because it's
| one of the very few things that's actually just "a nice
| thing" the developers added, that was previously a nice
| friendly thing to grant when someone gains 1000xp in a month.
| A cool badge. Fun. They didn't have to have this nice little
| thing, but they did. That's cool, right?
|
| If you use the app regularly (as you "should" if you're
| learning a language), you will absolutely certainly get the
| badge. Well, that is, until recently, because some of the
| quests can be difficult to accomplish. No longer is it just a
| nice consistent monthly thumbs-up in the form of a fun little
| badge, it's now a source of uncertainty and perhaps even a
| source of anxiety for people who are driven by "collecting"
| (e.g. "achievement hunters"). Sure sounds like
| enshittification to me, regardless of how big a deal it is.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > The perceived significance of the reward is irrelevant
|
| Completely false.
|
| A vanity badge that's based on some effort, has a value
| equal to the effort required. Unlike increasing
| requirements for core functionality where you have
| increased effort for the same reward, increasing
| requirements for an effort-based vanity item increases its
| value in exact proportion to the effort.
| amatecha wrote:
| I think it's completely reasonable to describe the user-
| perceived degradation of a feature, regardless of its
| importance, for the purpose of benefit to the business
| and its profits, as "enshittification". Your opinion
| differs, but my opinion is not "false". I mean, believe
| what you want, but you're trying to invalidate my opinion
| by simply sharing your own, which I'm not sure has much
| purpose at all in a conversation.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > I mean, believe what you want, but you're trying to
| invalidate my opinion by simply sharing your own, which
| I'm not sure has much purpose at all in a conversation.
|
| If they have a different opinion that's fine too.
| Discussion shouldn't have a first mover advantage.
| sophacles wrote:
| > A vanity badge that's based on some effort, has a value
| equal to the effort required.
|
| Completely false
|
| Effort has no direct relationship to value in anything.
| See job wages for a few billion examples. There are high
| paying jobs that require little cumulative effort and
| little on-going effort. There are low paying jobs that
| require high cumulative effort and high on-going effort.
| manvillej wrote:
| to be fair, practicing is a pretty essential component to
| learning a new language. "increasing engagement" also means
| more practice. Its not an entirely selfish motivation.
| [deleted]
| ccooffee wrote:
| I disagree in this case.
|
| Duolingo formerly had conversational language lessons, which
| were 100% audio (not even able to see text on screen). These
| were phenomenal for actually learning to speak <language>,
| compared to the generated garbage in the lessons.
|
| Duolingo formerly had lessons that explain new concepts, like
| a particular verb tense. It doesn't seem to have any of them
| once changing over the to completely linear lesson tree.
|
| I believe that Duolingo has fallen into a logical trap. They
| can easily track app engagement. It is known that regular
| practice is the key to learning a language, but they
| incorrectly forget the quality of the interactions. I've got
| my Duolingo 800 day streak still kicking, but I've learned
| almost nothing with the changes over the last year or so. I'm
| not terribly sure why I even use the app anymore, as there
| are plenty of anki decks with the same quality content. (The
| only thing I'd lose is the speech recognition, but that's so
| laughably bad that it reinforces incorrect pronunciation.)
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| Their learning experience has got progressively worse with
| each update. Literally every time they do a major change to
| the UI they remove something useful. At the moment the tree
| is now divided into multiple sections. It used to be
| divided into concepts so I could choose what to learn
| about. Not really possible anymore. The only reason I am
| still using it is to preserve my streak. If I ever forgot
| and break it I'm pretty sure I'll just give up. It stopped
| teaching me a long time ago.
| andsoitis wrote:
| If someone gets angry about a badge in an app, it seems like
| they have a deeper issue to deal with.
| Nevermark wrote:
| If badges motivated learners to do things that benefited
| them, but now (they feel) badges motivate behavior that
| benefits the app maker more instead ... that would be a clear
| example of enshittification.
|
| Rule 34 needs a twin:
|
| Anything can be useful.
|
| Therefore, anything can be enshittified. And will be.
|
| Period dot period. QED. I have spoken.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > If badges motivated learners to do things that benefited
| them, but now (they feel) badges motivate behavior that
| benefits the app maker more instead ... that would be a
| clear example of enshittification.
|
| But you don't know that the aggregate user base feels that
| way. In fact, it might actually be much better for
| learners, like the top comment says:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611749
|
| The person I replied to talked about 1 person getting angry
| about the change, but that doesn't mean it is bad for
| everyone and is not evidence of enshittification based on
| data.
| vore wrote:
| How can it be a "clear example" when it's subjective by
| your own admission ("they feel")?
| Nevermark wrote:
| I used that qualifier because I am taking their claim at
| face value. I have no independent way of confirming or
| confuting the facts.
|
| But if their assessment of the badge change is correct,
| then it is a valid case of enshittification.
| yarg wrote:
| The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse
| incentives.
|
| This seems to be universally true, and when it becomes apparent
| that advertising doesn't work and isn't profitable, dark patterns
| are the best that you can hope for.
|
| Short of a company having the internal need for a generally
| useful distributed communications platform, as well as a
| willingness to release it relatively freely, I struggle to see
| how this gets resolved.
| troupo wrote:
| > The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse
| incentives.
|
| The need to have profit is the goal of any business.
|
| The problem isn't that. The need for profit has been entirely
| replaced with the need for continuous unimpeded growth. Which
| is decidedly not the same thing, but no one cares anymore, and
| profit doesn't even come into equation anymore.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I think part of the problem, but also reason for existing, of
| the growth whatever it takes mindset is, that as long as
| there is growth, no matter how artificial or not, you can
| keep up make-belief, that the business is viable and
| investors are going to belive either just that, or that they
| can enter now and exit before the bubble bursts. It does not
| matter to most investors, whether the business is actually
| viable in the long run, or makes any sense, as long as they
| see or believe there to be an opportunity to extract money
| out of the bubble.
|
| A bit like trying to extract energy out of vacuum, except,
| that due to our believe system of economics, it can actually
| work for them.
| the_other wrote:
| > The need to have profit is the goal of any business.
|
| This isn't true. A non-profit is still a business. Charities
| are businesses. Cooperatives can make profit. Also (almost)
| no-one thinks small businesses making modest profit and
| riding the ups and downs alongside others in a locale is a
| problem.
|
| The problems arise in companies that choose to only or mainly
| focus on profit. Most capital funds don't make anything
| themselves other than money, which they extract from
| businesses that do make things. You can claim that they're
| market-correcting forces that allow money to easily move
| between different areas of human interest... but ultimately
| their product is their own enrichment. The speed and
| convenience they provide might be an illusion created by
| their apparent success. It might be better that our markets
| and locales develop more slowly; if more smaller scale
| investors made a wider range of decisions, rather than a
| handful of large ones making most of them.
| yarg wrote:
| When the goals of the customers and the goals of the company
| are at odds, things will never work out long term.
|
| But I disagree that the continuous growth model is the cause,
| although I certainly believe that it frequently adds fuel to
| the fire (growing a company when it's making a loss on a per
| customer basis frequently leads to accelerating death spirals
| as well as all manner of desperate measures).
| troupo wrote:
| > But I disagree that the continuous growth model is the
| cause,
|
| When is the last time you've heard a company evaluated on
| profits (the actual measure of a successful business) and
| not on growth (of random metrics)?
| criddell wrote:
| Public benefit corporations (like Bluesky) can be run
| like that.
| sneak wrote:
| I think for-profit is fine; I think the need to profitably
| apply eight figures of capital is the problem.
|
| It's fine to seek profit; it's seeking triple digit millions of
| revenue that drives the problem.
|
| Is it possible this is simply a knock-on effect of too-low
| interest rates for so long? Too cheap VC money?
| yarg wrote:
| For profit might be fine - but for profit masquerading as
| free simply doesn't seem to work.
| gmerc wrote:
| Oh it worked alright. FB could have a 6% gross margin and
| operate forever - but people wouldn't bet phenomenally
| rich. Let's not pretend they even had to pay anyone off at
| their profitability.
|
| It only doesn't work for outsized expectations after a
| decade of interest binge party.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Maybe it is a sunk cost fallacy? I.e. not aiming for some
| stupid amount of growth is the same thing as telling the VCs
| you have failed and wasted their money.
|
| So going for some unhealthy revenue target is the path of
| least resistance, since the failure still is in the future.
| p-e-w wrote:
| > The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse
| incentives.
|
| Only because, despite their immense importance, those platforms
| are essentially unregulated.
|
| Imagine water suppliers were unregulated. There would also be
| "perverse incentives", such as doctors paying them to add
| poison to the water so they get more patients and can make more
| money. But nothing like that ever happens, because there are
| rules such companies must abide by. Therefore, they simply sell
| water for money, and that's it. There are no incentives to
| extract more profits through other means, because anything else
| is prohibited.
|
| I fail to see why analogous regulation wouldn't work for online
| communication platforms.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I find it weird that you think "regulation" is needed to stop
| people from committing crimes. That's _already_ illegal!
| Anyway your example is silly because no one would buy water
| from a producer that poisons it. The potential profit to
| doctors is low as well. At least you could have chosen
| something more realistic.
|
| Water being regulated is probably the biggest cause of
| shortages in the US West. Prices are set too low (especially
| for certain buyers) and it causes overconsumption. It's a
| classic tragedy of the commons that public management has
| failed to resolve.
| yarg wrote:
| Locality is one issue, and the fact that it's significantly
| less vital means that it's generally not a matter of life and
| death.
|
| As far as doctors bribing water suppliers to get more
| customers, the law is seldom enough to discourage bad
| behaviour when you're expecting not to get caught or the
| fines are too low for criminality to be profitable.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > There would also be "perverse incentives", such as doctors
| paying them to add poison to the water so they get more
| patients and can make more money.
|
| This is why anything recommended by a for-profit dentist is
| the opposite of what you should probably buy.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| The problem is, essentially, all of the wealth and power is
| concentrated inside of venture capitalists and rich stock
| holders. These are people who invest in a product without
| actually using or caring about the product, so it leads to
| perverse incentives to infinitely grow or corner a market at all
| costs.
|
| Family owned businesses, employee owned businesses, privately
| owned businesses etc all manage to better avoid this problem
| because they don't have to listen to outside voices telling them
| grow or die.
|
| It's not enough to be profitable and successful, but also you
| need to siphon as much value out of consumers as you can so you
| can pass along the money to these vultures. Then once the company
| has picked everything dry, they write it off as a failure and
| move on.
| DrScientist wrote:
| Isn't this just a function of a lot of these business models
| don't actually work?
|
| Ie a lot of these are the equivalent of giving away free (
| investor funded ) banana fritters, getting decent uptake and
| using it to declare that the market in banana fritters is huge,
| but when you start to charge for them it turns our the market is
| quite small.
|
| Another way the business models don't work is the companies start
| off assuming no costs around policing - like a shop with no
| security whatsoever. Works fine for a while, but as it grows and
| people realise it's got no security they start to get targeted,
| and costs go up.
| trabant00 wrote:
| It's basically just "if it's too good to be true than it
| ain't". Which was obvious for me from the begging for free
| video streaming, lower cost higher quality taxi, lower cost
| higher quality hotel rooms, zero cost but quality banking and
| so on.
|
| Oh, wait, it's not just that. It's also greed. Greedy customers
| wanting things without paying what they're worth, greedy
| entrepreneurs not wanting to grow a business steady, healthy
| and organically, greedy investors, greedy software engineers,
| etc, etc.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Can we really say the customers are the greedy ones? I take
| some offense to that. Most people are just trying to survive
| with the options they're offered. If someone comes along
| promising a free solution to something i previously had to
| pay for, or even better, offering something for free which
| was never previously offered even at cost. By taking that
| offer I'm being greedy? What if it actually works, and it's
| free? I'm suddenly greedy for trying to save up to survive
| the housing market? Or student loans, or a million other
| things?
|
| What expectation of knowledge make the average person taking
| a deal, greedy? And how many people taking that deal meet
| that expectation of knowledge?
| Given_47 wrote:
| Yea "greedy" customers is probably unfair but I get that it
| was for effect.
|
| To flesh out the point I assume they were making is that
| customers unfairly adjust their expectations around an
| unsustainable, too-good-to-be-true edge case, rather than
| recognizing it for what it is. And consequently scoff at
| anything that doesn't now align with what they've unfairly
| shifted their expectations to.
| bsenftner wrote:
| We have an evil cabal of enshitification enforcers in the form
| of the entire advertising and marketing industry. They enforce
| the group think impressed on society, and will not put any
| energy into anything not following the current zeitgeist of
| shitty exploitation and only the legally required (reluctant)
| fair treatment of their consumer and their employees. Our
| society voices, both journalism and advertising/marketing, are
| owned by the Orwellian Capitalists and only what they allow get
| through... which is a declining human society.
| passwordoops wrote:
| >advertising and marketing industry
|
| Which today is primarily Google, Amazon, Meta, and yes, even
| Apple (0)
|
| (0) https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-privacy-analytics-class-
| act...
| throw0101c wrote:
| > [...] _and yes, even Apple_
|
| I was under the impression that Apple makes most of its
| money from margins on hardware sales, with services a
| growing percentage (Apple TV, App Store).
|
| The "advertising and marketing" that is involved with Apple
| is them _spending money_ on it so people know about what
| they sell, and not so much Apple _taking in_ advertising
| and marketing money (which Google and Meta do).
| smoldesu wrote:
| The bad part (from my perspective) is that I pay a
| premium for iOS/MacOS but still get ads anyways. Why does
| the App Store show me ads if I'm sponsoring it with every
| app I purchase? Why does Apple Music show me a pop-up ad
| when I accidentally auto-launch it with my headphones?
| Why does Safari _still_ want me to try the new one?
|
| Apple does not live or die off advertisements like some
| others, but they are _definitely_ a victim of this
| downward trend. As their margins on hardware shrink,
| their relationship with China comes under threat, and
| their monopoly on The App Store becomes less certain, it
| will be interesting to see how well they resist this
| pattern.
| passwordoops wrote:
| Nope, they have an extensive ad network that conveniently
| continues to track users, even when they opt out of the
| tracking that Meta and Google fought so hard against:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/app
| le-...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/10/19/appl
| es-...
|
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-is-an-ad-company-
| now
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2022/08/03/apple-ads-expansion/
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Part of their advertising IS their hardware. It's
| definitely good, but it's almost mostly fashion.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Actually no. Those companies are the primary _service
| providers_ to the advertising and marketing industry. But
| the industry itself predates them and exists (and would
| continue to exist) independently of them.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think you've missed the point of the parent comment. The
| point is that the _entire model_ only exists in symbiosis
| with what you call "enshitification enforcers". There is no
| mass market social media without the "evil cabal... of the
| advertising and marketing industry". There is no other model
| that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions
| of active users posting their own content with mostly no
| restraint.
|
| The closest to an alternative model that works here is
| wikipedia. They achieve it by having a different default for
| user generated content - that it doesn't remain unless it is
| strictly on topic (you can't just write your random thoughts
| and shitposts in an article) - and by having a social mission
| that attracts donations. (They also run incredibly lean,
| which other mass market sites could definitely learn from.)
|
| Another alternative model being pursued is the federated
| approach. I like this approach in principle but I don't think
| it will ever reach the mass market hundreds of millions of
| active users position of the mainstream social media
| products. Its solution to the problem is that some subset of
| power users will self-host and absorb the costs, either via
| individual altruism or something, or by developing some other
| model. I think this will end up centralizing, with a small
| number of nodes hosting most of the usage, and probably
| eventually falling back to advertising to cover costs. But I
| dunno, we'll see, maybe this will work.
|
| Another more successful model is to just not be mass market
| at all, like HN and other various message boards. This
| reduces costs both for hosting and moderation and can then be
| justified by some non-financial benefit (like tacit
| advertisement for YC in the case of HN, or by tight community
| camaraderie for niche message boards).
|
| Then another model that works is subscriptions. This drops
| the active user count massively and generally makes it harder
| to get traction, but I think it works the best of any of
| these when the stars align. I'd rather be Netflix or the NYT
| than Twitter or Reddit.
| dynamorando wrote:
| I'm curious - do you see a path forward for "public" social
| media?
|
| I had half an idea yesterday on this from HN:
|
| https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/
| indigochill wrote:
| One of the questions I don't see answered here (and is,
| IMO, the greatest obstacle, and the reason I've backed
| out of discussions to set up a similar geographically-
| oriented node) is who moderates, say, your city's
| ActivityPub node? If a corporation, we're right back to
| corporations moderating public speech. But even having
| governments moderating speech in a public forum feels
| weird to me since it provides an easy lever to bend the
| discourse to the interests of the incumbents.
|
| Or maybe to protect against that, there's a strict
| moderation governance document for that to the effect of
| "If it's not illegal, it flies". That could still get
| rough since there's lots of non-illegal content you could
| put on there which people wouldn't want to see.
|
| Independently hosted nodes still feel like the way to go
| to me. No hard authority, just people talking with people
| and moderating to set the tone they want for their
| community. If the moderators are jerks, moving to a
| different node should be easy (thus putting the power
| into the hands of the users to abide by the governance
| they find most agreeable) and not cause you to exile
| yourself from your civic community.
| dynamorando wrote:
| Does there exist a medium between host moderators and
| user moderation the makes this work?
|
| Wikipedia is self moderated and there are well moderated
| Reddits. The host of the ActivityPub site doesn't have to
| do all the moderation, and there doesn't seem to be a
| reason that users themselves couldn't "mute" troublesome
| posters from their own feeds, right?
| sanderjd wrote:
| If wikipedia were government run, they would have a much
| harder time legally, with their moderation approach.
| sanderjd wrote:
| This gets at why I think this is fundamentally a terrible
| idea. I think it would be a legal and social minefield
| the likes of which I'm not sure the world has ever seen.
|
| You know how community meetings and town halls are awful
| and fruitless because they're filled to the brim with the
| noisiest cranks and they can't be kicked out because
| they're still members of the public after all, and nobody
| else participates because it's maddening to be around all
| those noisy cranks? Like that, but _web scale_.
|
| I'm sure the noisy cranks would love this, but I'm not
| interested in it.
| dynamorando wrote:
| I want to acknowledge that feedback, because it's useful.
|
| As a follow question: is this a solvable problem between
| host moderation and user self moderation?
|
| In other words: Let's pretend NPR hosts a Reddit-like
| site whose primary objective is to facilitate discussion
| on topics shared by NPR.
|
| NPR doesn't outright ban everything unless it violates
| some terrible things.
|
| Could user moderation NPR Reddit also expand on this? So
| long as they fall under the same guidelines?
|
| I ask this question because it seems to me that there
| does exist some useful moderation: there are well
| moderated Reddits and for the most part Wikipedia is also
| pretty well moderated.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yes, there are private entities with good moderation. A
| public entity (in the US) with those same moderation
| policies would have a very hard time avoiding
| infringement of the first amendment.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Oh sorry I replied to you elsewhere. I think it's a bad
| idea, but I like your concept for how it could be
| implemented with federation.
| indigochill wrote:
| I expect that if federated social media takes off, nobody
| (among the mass market) will know that it's federated, just
| like email. It'll just be, like you say, a couple of big
| sites that happen to enable people to communicate with
| people on other sites (and also a handful of wizards who
| self-host).
|
| I think the killer feature of federation in general
| (particularly in the context of social media) is that it
| decouples user account administration (and by extension,
| data collection) from the network effect. I run my own node
| that just has my account on it, but I can still benefit
| from the network by federating with other nodes.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I agree that this is what it will look like if it takes
| off. But then those "couple of big sites" will have all
| the same incentives / problems as the current mass market
| sites, and will themselves be enshittified eventually.
| The model needs to somehow result in distributing the
| user load and thus the costs across many hosts such that
| it is a bearable cost for each individual host without
| requiring any deep pocketed support. But you and I are in
| agreement that that doesn't seem like the likely outcome.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" There is no other model that can pay the bills for a
| site with hundreds of millions of active users posting
| their own content with mostly no restraint."_
|
| The government can. These companies could be nationalized,
| or the government could make their own competing sites if
| they were interested in doing so. But they're just not.
|
| It takes more than just the means. It takes a will to do
| it.
| sanderjd wrote:
| The government can _afford_ to do this. In every single
| other way, this is a terrible idea.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Why? At least in the case of democratic governmwnts,
| there is more control and oversight than there is in case
| of Meta, Twitter or Google.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Just went into more detail on this in a different
| comment. Basically I think this would suck in the same
| ways that public meetings inevitably suck, but times a
| million.
| carapace wrote:
| The government _did_ : the Internet itself, eh?
| dynamorando wrote:
| I blogged about this yesterday after seeing a similar
| post on HN
|
| https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/
|
| Though I am not sure the political will exists.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Government funding of generic user generated content
| hosting is a terrible idea, IMO.
|
| But I do quite like your proposal for how it could be
| accomplished technically through federation. It at least
| sidesteps the problem of the government building it
| through their fundamentally broken technology
| "procurement" processes.
| DrScientist wrote:
| Sure that's an option.
|
| In essence that's a user ( indirectly through taxes )
| supported model.
|
| In the UK, the BBC follows that model ( the license fee
| is in effect a tax in all but name ) - and it's model is
| constantly under attack from certain quarters.
|
| Indeed the BBC has being doing pilots in the social space
| - with SOLID and data pods.
|
| See https://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/pilots/together-pod
|
| The key question here is any of this stuff actually
| important enough for centralized funded.
|
| Let's not forget, there is also the spectre of government
| control - you know the government security services will
| have full access.
| dynamorando wrote:
| I'm curious - have you used SOLID? Either as a developer
| or a consumer?
|
| I found myself struggling with Linked Data for quite some
| time now, and I have struggled with the idea that perhaps
| part of the problem with adoption of Linked Data is
| existing mental interia of RMDBS or other systems.
| DrScientist wrote:
| No not used it ( at least not knowingly ).
|
| I like the idea - kinda back to a decentralised web of
| peers like it was in the early days.
|
| However the complexity of the technology is certainty
| off-putting - I'm not enough of an expert to tell how
| much of that complexity is adherence to a tech stack (
| like RDF, SPARQL ) and how much is simply the complexity
| of the underlying problem.
|
| I would say the guys behind it seem fairly pragmatic. As
| an example while the technology allows you to self host,
| they acknowledge that most people won't be able/want to -
| and are looking to enable providers as well.
|
| I think one of the problems with the LD/RDF community is
| it can attract the type of person that things 'we just
| need a single well defined data model for the universe'.
|
| I think trying to get one schema to rule them all is
| doomed to failure - for two reasons
|
| - for ontologies to be effective all the users of that
| ontology have to have a _shared understanding_ of the
| ontology - simple a written down definition isn 't
| enough.
|
| - the world can be viewed from multiple angles - even if
| you could agree one view, it's not going to be optimal
| for all use cases.
|
| However as I said, the SOLID project doesn't appear to be
| falling into that trap - it appears very focused and
| pragmatic.
| dynamorando wrote:
| Interesting. I personally found the whole defining your
| schema up front to feeling like trying to construct the
| universe up front.
|
| I've been trying to work on an alternative solution to
| SOLID, but I'm always double checking myself just to make
| sure that I'm not just simply failing to grasp the
| concepts.
| DrScientist wrote:
| Exactly. Well put.
|
| The model that isn't sustainable is a permanently investor
| funded one.
|
| Often when these products launch - they have zero
| advertising, zero features to make money - they are totally
| aimed at growing market share - totally focused on the
| user.
|
| Then it's inevitably downhill from there - whether it's
| people not being prepared to pay ( eg Blue ticks ) or
| complaining about advertising or scrapping of data.
|
| One of the damaging effects of the large amount of investor
| funded products is that it makes it very difficult for the
| user supported ( paid ) ones to thrive.
|
| Perhaps the current state is because we are not at
| equilibrium - and as regulation, and the market matures it
| will become a bit more sane.
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| How much of enshitification can be explained by rampant
| managerialism?
|
| Managers need to feel powerful, hire more managers.
|
| Managers need to meet their performance targets or just want to
| carve their own little Mt Rushmore face in the product, wacky
| user hostile decisions ensue.
| otikik wrote:
| I think it can be explained better by a different -ism.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| When is this from? A few days ago (when it was already posted
| with a different url) or earlier in the year Februaryish when
| Doctorow wrote his stuff on enshittification of TikTok etc? Is
| this actually new?
| tomstuart wrote:
| This "podcast" is a radio show which was broadcast on July 2nd:
| https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/co...
| rvense wrote:
| Doctorow writes a lot, gives a lot of interviews and goes to a
| lot of conferences. He doesn't tell an entirely new and
| original story each time.
| cschmidt wrote:
| Cory's article about enshittification of TikTok, for those that
| don't like audio
|
| https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
| dinp wrote:
| I've been thinking about how enshittification, venture capital,
| shareholders and the life cycle of a company are in some ways
| related. Any company that has external investors is bound to go
| through this cycle of - building a great product - taking in
| external funding money - growing and then either being acquired
| or going public (or more commonly shutting down) - then all the
| head scratching decision making starts
|
| It's head scratching to users and outside observers, but the
| incentives are such that there is pressure to grow on a quarterly
| basis, get those charts looking good and individuals in the
| management chain are doing what they can to optimize their career
| growth leading to short term decision making at the cost of users
| and customers.
|
| The big picture thinking and long term decision making are
| incredibly hard. Very few companies are able to do this over the
| long term. Micosoft and apple are doing great currently and it
| will be interesting to see how stripe and openai navigate this
| process.
|
| My current opinion is that only small founder owned companies or
| foss organizations can avoid this trap over the long term and it
| involves not trying to squeeze out every last bit of value. Both
| of these require a certain level of financial security + there's
| the opportunity cost vs just going the vc route.
|
| VC funding is incredibly valuable and it opens up a lot of
| possibilities that small orgs can never hope for. I guess what
| I'm saying is: expect enshittification and enjoy the ride while
| it lasts and then jump ship when trouble starts. Jumping ship
| becomes incredibly hard with network effects, so that's the
| challenge we are seeing with social media companies now. Also
| once companies become too big to fail, it's a drag on society.
|
| Personally I would still go the VC route since I don't have a few
| million lying around and tell myself this is just the cycle of
| life (for corporates) to avoid existential questions and going
| down the rabbit hole of questioning everything around me. Sorry
| about the disconnected thoughts.
| glun wrote:
| This only happens when the users are the product or its a
| marketplace. Most business models dont suffer from
| shittification. But VCs love investing in the ones that do.
| gmerc wrote:
| Nah it happens to all public companies (see hasbro with
| magic/d&d) even when users are not the product.
|
| It happens when nobody wants to be the first to show flagging
| growth and investor expectations have not reset yet after a
| period of growth.
|
| It's just easier in tech to manufacture growth metrics you
| cant get checked on
| waveBidder wrote:
| d&d has weak network effects. wotc overestimated the effect
| though
| glun wrote:
| Sure, but in those industries the users leave, the company
| suffers and the executives get fired. VC are attracted to
| moaty business models where users cant leave.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| > the executives get fired
|
| By fired, do you mean receive multimillion dollar payouts
| and jobs from their friends at another place where they
| can do it all again?
| capybara_2020 wrote:
| It seems to be happening everywhere. Give the worst product
| you can get away with while using marketing to get people to
| keep upgrading before they realize how bad the product is.
| While progressively lowering the quality of the product each
| year. "Planned Obsolescence" is the physical product
| equivalent of digital enshittification.
| rjsw wrote:
| For an example of literal enshittification see water
| companies in England. Not discharging raw sewage into rivers
| and the sea would interfere with dividends to the PE owners.
| Fricken wrote:
| In Canada the once beloved brick and mortar retailer Mountain
| Equipment Coop shittified itself straight to (pandemic)
| bankruptcy hard and fast not long after the Harvard MBA types
| got their hands on the business. MEC was late to the party.
| Much of mall retail had already shittified itself ages ago.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would say the opposite. Consumers frequently reward the
| business models that do whatever it takes to lower prices in
| the short term, often sacrificing the long term.
|
| It is a constant struggle to convince people that your higher
| quality product/service is worth the extra cost, and
| obviously, many times it is not.
|
| But the formula for operating a successful, long term
| business is not as simple as "output the best quality product
| or service you can, and you will be rewarded". It is more
| like "output the best quality product or service you can
| relative to prices of competing sellers, and at prices your
| clientele can afford".
|
| Which may or may not include sellers that have access to much
| cheaper money (VC, bigger companies with other revenue
| streams, etc), or sellers operating in different
| jurisdictions with lower costs.
| sarchertech wrote:
| It's not that consumers don't reward quality. It's that
| more consumers reward lower prices, and once outside money
| is involved you have to chase growth instead of steady
| profits.
|
| Family owned businesses are often able to maintain very
| high quality. They'll just never make enough to satisfy
| people looking for huge returns, which is nearly anyone who
| doesn't have some deeper connection to the company.
| gadders wrote:
| 15 years ago I bought a ride-on lawn mower that gave me 12
| years of service, but was getting a bit long in the tooth.
|
| I decided to buy the next model up from the same company, not
| knowing in the mean time it had been bought by a PE company and
| the quality had gone to shit. The mower is bigger, but the
| engine is smaller and they are notorious for blowing a head
| gasket any time the mowing blades stall out.
|
| I was thinking of starting a web register of all PE PortCos
| (private equity portfolio companies) so people would know to
| treat the products with caution as the main way of reducing
| costs seems to be a) sacking people and b) cutting corners on
| product quality.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Which company is this? I've heard this referred to as
| "reputation mining".
|
| You buy a company with a good reputation, cut quality
| drastically, and profit for the decade or so it takes until
| everyone realizes the brand sucks now.
| yomlica8 wrote:
| It is all over the place. The worst part is when you
| realize reputation is always a trailing indicator the only
| rational action seems to be to buy the cheapest one and use
| the saved money for the replacement. Basically, optimize
| your life around rapid disposal and replacement which makes
| extra trash and takes extra time versus just having a good
| quality item you can rely on.
|
| My mower recently started to rust out and I dread buying a
| replacement. Aside from cheaply replacing poorly designed
| wheels fairly often I was 100% with this mower. But I can't
| buy it again because the march forward with redesigns means
| it is no longer made. Is the new one better? General life
| experience says, probably not.
| watt wrote:
| it's interesting how your reluctance in naming names in this
| instance actually ensures PE folks win.
| gausswho wrote:
| I have been considering for years to make something similar.
| A site that offers a company search and it will tell you how
| many PE tendrils are wrapped up in it. The data is out there.
| Anyone else want to join in? Is there an API we should be
| considering?
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I have an old cohort of co-workers who I went through the PE
| experience with and we pretty much use PE ownership of a
| company as a heuristic to avoid buying their products.
| Duracell batteries would be an example. A list would probably
| be helpful but depressingly long.
| high_5 wrote:
| I think Apple managed to escape this VC trap by sheer
| excellence.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Apple's been around for a _long_ time, and if anything I
| would attribute it to the force of will of Steve Jobs. By the
| time he was dead, Apple had such a huge cash pile that they
| 're no longer beholden to investors in quite the same way.
| They now only have to worry about ordinary market complaints
| from shareholders.
|
| (don't forget the Wilderness Years, Apple came close to
| death)
| rightbyte wrote:
| It is some sort of scam I think. The shareholders don't have
| the detailed knowledge and insight into the everyday work so
| the managerial class can squeeze out a dime for a dollar of
| some hard to measure asset like consumer trust or whatever.
|
| Also, I got this feeling bigger shareholders might think they
| are smart and part of the scam and that they will jump ship
| (sell the stock) before smaller shareholders notice.
|
| I guess e.g. Ben and Jerries would be all vanilla ice cream at
| this point of they were run in this way. You could always
| decrease the amount of nuts and fillings with 1% more without
| anyone noticing ...
| ralph84 wrote:
| > bigger shareholders might think they are smart and part of
| the scam and that they will jump ship (sell the stock) before
| smaller shareholders notice
|
| Absolutely. Decades of "you can't beat the market" propaganda
| has created a large class of "investors" whose only strategy
| is buy all of the stocks and hope for the best.
| rightbyte wrote:
| "It is hard to beat the market without insider info" is not
| as catchy.
| sharperguy wrote:
| I think the issue could be rooted in recent monetary policy
| rather than an inhrenent feature of the market itself.
|
| Artificially low interest rate environments lead to a lot of
| money in the hands of investors, which due to inflation slowly
| loses purchasing power over time. However, with large reserves,
| they can easily afford to prop up a business model which
| persistantly spends more money on bringing "free" features to
| user while charging very little. Those businesses obviously
| outcompete any business which do not recieve such investment.
|
| However, as time goes on, those investments must eventually
| earn a return. Switching from a model which loses money every
| year to one which must profit every year is invariably going to
| affect the quality of the product. Especially in an environment
| where directly charging customers for your service would be a
| death sentence.
|
| In the absense of such cheap credit, however, a truly
| competitive environment could potentially emerge, where
| businesses must be sustanably profitable from the ground up.
| Esentially this would mean the last 15 or so years has been
| wasted time in pursuit of this goal, as false monetary signals
| were steering us in completely the wrong direction.
|
| Some of todays tech companies may survive the transition, but I
| believe that most will eventually be replaced by completely new
| ones. Unless we go back to a policy of lowering interest rates
| to near (or even below) 0%.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Just don't understand how one could be convinced these days
| of the fundamental conceit that even a properly profitable
| company is necessarily going to provide good things for
| people downstream, or for society in general. What is the
| argument for that in general again?
|
| Because to me, if your not Twitter, your Wal Mart or Raytheon
| or BoA. If your not shittifying a platform you are pushing
| out small businesses from every town, price gouging
| government contracts for missiles, fooling elderly people
| with complicated financial instruments.
|
| I just can't really put together any argument at all, if am
| being honest, to justify the idea that companies with a self
| interest in profit will reliably help people or the world. It
| just does not at all feel rational, its like everyone in the
| world is dreaming.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > Just don't understand how one could be convinced these
| days of the fundamental conceit that even a properly
| profitable company is necessarily going to provide good
| things for people downstream, or for society in general.
|
| if one has worked in a number of business it should become
| fairly obvious that good products and good revenue are
| orthogonal phenomena (sometimes they align of course)
| > What is the argument for that in general again?
|
| i think the general conceit is that bad or good product,
| someone is paying and they are getting _some kind of value_
| so who is anyone to say its good or bad for society?
| > the idea that companies with a self interest in profit
| will reliably help people or the world
|
| wasn't this idea put forth strongly by milton freidman and
| the chicago school - "greed is good" [1] - because more
| economic activity rises all...? i have to admit intuitively
| it sounds good even if its probably b.s [2]
| > It just does not at all feel rational, its like everyone
| in the world is dreaming.
|
| well, at least some economists anyways....
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/dealbook/mi
| lton-...
| kaashif wrote:
| Let's remember that Adam Smith was against the idea of
| the joint stock company, a company where the shareholders
| and managers are different people.
|
| He thought that smaller, owner operated businesses would
| outcompete joint stock companies, primarily because the
| incentives between owners and managers were aligned.
|
| Managers managing other people's money will make worse
| decisions over the long term than managers managing their
| own money.
|
| That was his theory back in 1776, things didn't turn out
| that way obviously.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > That was his theory back in 1776, things didn't turn
| out that way obviously
|
| well, i guess its because join-stock companies were able
| to raise more capital faster?
| ssklash wrote:
| A guy named Karl came to the exact same conclusions, in
| 1867.
| sbarre wrote:
| I mean, you say "companies" but really you mean "people"
| because people run companies. You can't, or shouldn't,
| abstract away the people ultimately making decisions if
| you're trying to reason about this stuff.
|
| And people _can_ make decisions, even the ones who run
| companies, to balance profits with contributing to a
| greater good. But they choose not to.
|
| So the _people_ who are running these companies are
| choosing to prioritize profits at all costs. Some of this
| is because the _people_ who operate the financial markets
| tell them they will be punished if they don 't, but
| obviously there's also some agency on the part of the
| company leadership as well.
| ryandrake wrote:
| We need a renaissance where voters wake up and remember
| that companies exist at the behest of the people. A
| business has no god-given or natural right to exist. They
| apply to their state with incorporation documents, and
| the state (in other words, the people) decides whether or
| not they should exist by granting them a business charter
| / license.
|
| Companies are allowed to exist because they provide some
| common good, in exchange for _us allowing them_ to profit
| and have limited liability. I think companies have
| forgotten this bargain, and feel they simply have the
| right to exist and that their only duty is to provide
| profit to shareholders.
|
| The people should hold companies to a high standard, and
| demand that they also serve the public good in addition
| to serving their shareholders. And we should revoke
| companies' existence when they fail to uphold their side
| of the bargain. When was the last time that happened to a
| major company--that their business charter was revoked by
| the government for wrongdoing? We've gotten so used to
| simping for companies and not holding them accountable
| that they now strongly believe their only obligation is
| to their shareholders and financial markets.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| >What is the argument for that in general again?
|
| Free-market types used to have some assumptions about how
| free markets are expected to work, then they would derive
| the result that a free market yields a net benefit to
| society from those assumptions.
|
| Now it is glaringly obvious that a free market can cause a
| net loss to society, but they still need to believe free
| markets are good. So they ignore the evidence, and instead
| of deriving the result from assumptions, they treat it as
| an axiom instead.
| Jgrubb wrote:
| Or, blame meddlesome government regulation as the
| problem, blocking a free market and instead having
| winners and losers chosen by the state. It's an effective
| argument because it's got some truth to it.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Isn't the whole argument in this thread that the
| government meddled in the economy by printing tons of
| money that then was used for questionable investments?
| How is that "free market"?
|
| IME 80% of criticisms of "free market" is actually a
| criticism of government policy (and then the same critics
| think that more of those policies are called for!)
| SantalBlush wrote:
| Government regulation and the Fed will continue to exist
| in some form, at least to some small degree, so you will
| always be able to claim markets weren't "free" enough to
| properly implement a free market system. But if that's
| true, then it's moot; if a free-market system requires
| absolute purity from government to perform as intended,
| then it's worthless, because that will never happen. In
| other words, its proponents admit it's a fantasy that
| will only exist in their heads. As such, I have no reason
| to care about it or about how great some people think it
| is.
|
| Fortunately, most economists already agree that market
| failures exist, and that free-market economics is bunk.
| freedomben wrote:
| Books have been written on the subject, so an HN comment
| isn't going to do it. But if you consider that anyone
| making a mutually consentual transaction is doing it
| because they value the traded good _more_ than what they
| 're trading, it's not hard to see how a free market can
| provide good things for people and society in general as
| resources flow to where they are most valued. Of course
| there's nuance here (such as assuming purely rational
| actors, addressing realites around information asymmetry,
| and that macroeconomics is different than micro) but that's
| part of the low-level foundation.
|
| I'm not a big fan of capitalism as it can be an utterly
| cruel mistress, but given the unfortunate realities of
| human nature I can't think of a system that is on the whole
| better. As long as there is scarcity, there will be
| _something_ used as a basis for rationing (who gets what,
| and why). If it 's not who is willing to pay the most, then
| it's who has the most powerful friends or the biggest army,
| or something else. There are problems with under-checked
| capitalism, and there are problems with over-checked
| capitalism. We'll never get it just right because humans
| aren't smart enough to, but perhaps we'll achieve post-
| scarcity at some point. One can hope.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I remain infuriated that we had the confluence of:
|
| - huge amount of very cheap money
|
| - widespread availability of highly educated technologists
|
| - knowledge of the climate model
|
| .. and instead "collectively" ended up funding giveaway
| services to users and inflating the SF housing market rather
| than doing the climate Manhattan project.
|
| (High interest rates are bad for renewables, because buying a
| solar panel is effectively buying 20-30 years of electricity
| upfront, and therefore hugely dependent on cost of capital
| and discount rates)
| coldpie wrote:
| Yeah. Climate change would be dirt cheap to solve if we
| actually bothered to do it. The famously expensive Georgia
| nuclear plant cost less than 75% of what Twitter did.
| Juicero flushed $120M straight down the toilet.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| We would expect electricity prices to also go up faster
| with higher interest rates so it should roughly cancel out.
| pharmakom wrote:
| also the company that stays small will get clobbered by the vc
| backed competitor. they will build more features, have more
| marketing and lower cost during the growth phase.
| lmm wrote:
| IMO: Consumers will adapt to the reality, as humans always do.
| Once people adjust to the fact that popular brands are
| generally strip-mined for profit, brand loyalty will drop and
| keep dropping, consumers will become warier of lock-in, and the
| enshittification playbook will be less and less effective.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| Build consumer trust and profit from it by deceptive
| betrayal. People no longer trust brands like they used to.
| Instead people rely on reviews, but trust in that system is
| eroding due to betrayal as well.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > consumers will become warier of lock-in
|
| i hope you are right, but i'm reminded of the saying "there's
| a sucker born every minute"
| trabant00 wrote:
| There's always going to be room for an un/poorly regulated
| gold rush somewhere somehow. If we drop the loyalty to major
| brands they will open small proxy ones and flood the market.
| Just an example.
|
| I think there's a cultural problem. Companies are made of
| people not papers. It's people that are pushing for profits
| no matter what. And as lots of money with no value get made,
| the value of the money drops, so you need more of it. So
| people start thinking in terms like "I have a family to raise
| so fuck principles", "If I don't do it someone else will" and
| so on.
|
| I'm not talking about major figures, people always focus on
| those. I'm talking about regular people who have no problem
| working for an online casino for example when they know a
| significant portion of their customers are underage.
|
| So we are adapting, but in a downward spiral. That's how I
| see it.
| lmm wrote:
| > If we drop the loyalty to major brands they will open
| small proxy ones and flood the market. Just an example.
|
| The point is those small brands won't be trusted. People
| will make more effort to check reviews, or demand stricter
| warranty laws, or the like.
| trabant00 wrote:
| The reviews are already useless. We had plenty of
| discussion here about that, won't go into details. Again,
| it was just an example, don't get stuck on it, there are
| a million ways to fool the public because:
|
| 1. There is just too much information to obtain to make
| an informed decision. There is not enough time for a
| regular customer to dig into all that. We know these
| things because we are insiders. That's why you need
| regulation bodies made of experts to pass legislation to
| protect the customer.
|
| 2. The information gatekeepers are the same who are
| pushing the enshittification. Where are you going to
| search for better service? On Google's search engine. Who
| processes the reviews and decides which to show, which to
| flag? Again, Google, Amazon, etc. You can not rely on
| their tools to help you inform about their service. This
| is why we need regulations about search results.
|
| In conclusion we can not simply rely on customers
| adapting.
| xigency wrote:
| I've also pondered over this recently. Many social media
| companies have incentives that are unaligned with their
| platform users' best interests. For example, creating more
| engagement through polarizing or negative content, trying to
| maximize the time people are glued to screens to eke out ad
| money, the turning around to sell or exploit personal data.
|
| Frustratingly, they almost have a legal fiduciary duty to
| behave this way as currently structured, as their only mandate
| is to increase value for shareholders. Negative externalities
| on users, employees, or society at large are not relevant to
| decision making at all.
|
| The conclusion I found is that the only ethical solution would
| be to create a cooperative public benefit corporation. With
| that structure, the company has a mandate to do right by their
| customers, their employees, and society as a whole in
| measurable ways.
| dynamorando wrote:
| I have somewhat blogged about this, though I realize the idea
| may be incomplete.
|
| https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/
|
| I welcome any tactful feedback. Also I have no idea how to
| initiate such an idea.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I felt like I wasn't going to write this comment again, but here
| we go:
|
| I don't like the word enshittification. People glom onto it
| because they like shaking sticks more than solving problems, and
| Corey Doctorow is excellent at exploiting that desire. It's
| annoying how he enables that sense of defeatism when he's
| obviously aware of resilient and game-changing alternative
| software (like FOSS) that has revolutionized the world in his
| lifetime. Putting pearls before swine makes for nice fiction, but
| it's a bad tool for explaining real life phenomena like this.
|
| "Enshittification" is a very fun and usable thesis. It also
| obfuscates the problem and fetishizes it's own victimhood instead
| of enabling users to resist lock-in.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Given that he actively promotes said alternatives that "he is
| aware of", I find your claim of him enabling defeatism more
| than a little disingenous.
|
| For example, he's the reason I'm supporting the devs of pidgin
| despite not even directly using that software myself, because
| he wrote a thread on how nobody donates to it even though it
| apparently is important enough for bad actors to post bounties
| for sharing zero day bugs that lets them break into it.
|
| More importantly, the term "enshittification" does the exact
| opposite of _" obfuscating the problem"_. It comes with a very
| concrete description of a pattern of how things are made worse
| that most people have felt but had no word for until now. It
| can also seen to be played out over and over again. It even has
| predictive powers.
|
| Which means people can now describe a problem without having to
| write five paragraphs explaining the issue. Or needing the
| skill to write it in the first place. _That 's what words are
| for. That's what sharing ideas is for._ Are you going to blame
| people for relying on a doctor's diagnosis instead of studying
| medicine themselves too?
|
| And by finally being able to quickly identify an issue, people
| can start taking active steps against it. Which is the exact
| opposite of what you are claiming.
|
| But hey, how dare people speak up about issues that affect them
| them without immediately knowing how to solve/having the means
| to solve a large systemic problem that other people with more
| power and money inflict upon them, I guess.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Unfortunately most people that become popular by whipping up
| outrage only really know how to continue doing that to stay
| visible. It's much easier to identify open problems than to
| solve them; this is why they remain open problems. Stallman is
| actually a very prominent exception to this. Not only did he
| whip up outrage but he then created a principled movement
| behind his outrage and push forward progress in his ideas.
| While I do think he lost the plot a bit recently, most don't
| even get half as far.
|
| (I always found that a bit ironic about Doctorow. He identifies
| problems with social media but uses its preferred form of
| virality to spread his own message.)
| high_5 wrote:
| I agree with "enshittification" being a poor choice. I would go
| with plain simple "milking the product", not for the benefit of
| the user, of course.
| smolder wrote:
| I think it's a good term in that it describes what's
| happening from the users perspective instead of from the
| businesses perspective, so more people can identify with it.
| It's the outsiders view of what happens to a business that
| sees itself as "milking the product".
| camdenlock wrote:
| [flagged]
| smoldesu wrote:
| Corey is just an anomaly. Sometimes those "twee neologisms"
| like the GNU Public License do their job, and bring platforms
| to their knees. When applied well, great thinkers can use the
| system to their advantage and come out on top. Doctorow is a
| good-natured person who just loves to languish in his own
| helplessness, and it feels like none of us are the better for
| it.
| tremorscript wrote:
| Naming things is not easy. Naming things is hard. I am glad
| that we have this word now and it is catching on. Because all
| of us know and see and understand what the problem with
| platforms are. I don't think it obfuscates the problem. Step 1
| to fixing a difficult problem. Give it a good name. The
| Traveling Salesman problem could well have been called "The NP-
| hard problem" but TSP is a good name.
| [deleted]
| christophilus wrote:
| Aside: Someone recently complained about the use of the term
| "enshittification". It first appeared on HN 6 months ago[0],
| coined by Cory Doctorow and has since shown up in over 400
| comments.
|
| No point to this comment, other than that I find it interesting
| how these things spread.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34449504
| sturadnidge wrote:
| Any chance we could get the link pointed to the source[1] rather
| than this podcast aggregator?
|
| 1.
| https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/co...
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Really, isn't this just all corporations? Walmart has long
| "Enshittification" of small towns.
|
| It is Moloch again, driving to lowest common denominator, what is
| the worst thing we can do (cheapest), that people will still buy.
|
| Twitter was never a bastion of democratic free speech, and was
| never going to be, they were always a corporation selling
| advertising.
|
| For a brief time when Trump was on twitter, a lot of people got
| riled up and though it was supposed to be a free 'town square' of
| discourse. But, it's just advertising and eye-balls. I think Musk
| got caught up in this 'free speech and democracy' hype and
| thought Twitter was more than it was.
| astrange wrote:
| [flagged]
| LegitShady wrote:
| But it's funny to say.
| tremorscript wrote:
| hehe. Im sure the xkcd guy is happy to have your approval,
| random internet person.
| lencastre wrote:
| Would you explain why the XKCD was like this as well? Or
| provide some examples please?
| astrange wrote:
| Back in the day it was a comic about a guy wearing a fedora
| who made overly smart quips about everything, and there were
| some rather embarrassing comics where the author pined over a
| woman named Megan in a way that made it seem like he was
| either an incel or not over his ex.
| margalabargala wrote:
| I think OP is probably miscategorizing him. Randall Munroe
| (xkcd) is still in his 30s and is a millenial, while Cory
| Doctorow is in his 50s.
|
| Are there some xkcd comics that were somewhat fringe or
| haven't aged as well as one would hope? Sure. But if OP is
| complaining about grown men in their 30s acting like they're
| trying to impress college friends, well, Randall _was_ in
| college when he started writing xkcd.
|
| At any rate, Cory Doctorow is a professional spokesperson and
| spends his life doing ideological marketing. Coining a more
| memorable term like "enshittification" that clearly gets more
| mindspace and traction than something like "regression" is
| just an example of him doing his job properly.
| [deleted]
| UberFly wrote:
| I'm wondering what's the word for what you're doing edgy
| internet guy.
| astrange wrote:
| Expert advice. This is very important information to know if
| you run an Internet forum, social media site, gaming
| convention, etc, anything where a lot of guys show up who
| call women "females" in conversation.
| omnicognate wrote:
| If you turn that judgemental eye on your own post I'm sure
| you'll be able to see which internet stereotypes you're
| conforming to and why it's being downvoted into oblivion.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > "Enshittification" is not a needed word because we already
| have "degradation" or "regression".
|
| Given the quick spread of the term, I suspect there's more
| nuance to the linguistic story.
| Animats wrote:
| It's reached Wikitionary.[1]
|
| We do need a word for reduction in quality for the purpose of
| increasing profits. For liquids and foodstuffs, the terms are
| "denatured" or "adulterated", and for solid materials
| "ersatz". None of those are applicable to services.
|
| "Enshittification" captures the concept of reducing quality
| to increase profits not by reducing product cost, but by
| degrading the user experience to make the product more
| profitable. It's not the same as "quality fade", where the
| product keeps getting worse and the seller hopes no one will
| notice for a while.
|
| [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
| haunter wrote:
| > I suspect there's more nuance to the linguistic story
|
| Yes people spend too much time online and they pickup the
| current buzzword quickly
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification
|
| I never even seen used it outside HN by normal people.
| esafak wrote:
| It was only coined in March!
| drpixie wrote:
| I like the term "enshittification" - it implies a deliberate
| intention that is missing from degradation. Regression merely
| implies reversion towards a previous state.
|
| Enshittification is a deliberate process: provide a (typically
| cheap/free) service, dominate the field, lock users into it,
| and exploit to the maximum possible in the short term,
| ultimately destroying the service.
| typon wrote:
| Justin Roiland, Dan Harmon
| giantbanana wrote:
| [dead]
| Trouble_007 wrote:
| Users, Advertisers - We are all trapped in the 'Enshittification'
| of the Internet (2023-03-11):
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-...
|
| "Enshittification" - Wiktionary :
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
|
| Cory Doctorow - Enshittification :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#Enshittification
|
| _I downloaded the podcast from here_ (mp3) : https://mediacore-
| live-production.akamaized.net/audio/01/jo/...
| jeffchien wrote:
| Transcript generated by Whisper (medium.en) with timestamps:
| https://pastebin.com/59mABz3L
|
| Without timestamps: https://pastebin.com/F1NVMeQq
| bobmaxup wrote:
| https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/enshitific...
| jononomo wrote:
| Airline travel has certainly become a lot shittier since I first
| began flying in the 1970s. In fact, it used to be comfortable,
| cool, fun, and glamorous, and the stewardesses used to be
| beautiful and polite.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Flying used to be expensive and rarely done by most people. Now
| around 50% of Americans fly every year. It went from an elite
| product to a commodity.
|
| Anyway first class is still pretty comfortable IMO. And
| airports are much nicer than before.
| jononomo wrote:
| Airports are not much nicer than they were before -- at least
| not in the US. Also, the fact that friends and family cannot
| go through security basically outweighs any number of luxury
| goods stores dotting the terminals.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Adjusted for inflation - flights are 15% cheaper today.
|
| The largest input in a flight is fuel - and that's 3x more
| expensive today, adjusted for inflation.
|
| Also, the taxes on flights are much higher today.
|
| It's not a surprise you could offer a much better product for
| 15% more money, significantly less taxes, and ~45% of your cost
| being 3x cheaper.
| resuresu wrote:
| The internet is so lame and boring now days, its become so
| predictable and routine. I remember the internet back in the 90s
| and 00s, it was a completely different place, it felt massive and
| mysterious like each door you opened led to a another universe
| with all kinds of stuff going on, discussions on any topic you
| could fathom were taking place 24/7 all the time. Now we have
| discord servers with hundreds of users but no one speaks.. the
| cool myspace culture that promoted individualism and self
| expression has been replaced by the souless uniformed facebook
| experience. Rather than being able to speak your mind you have to
| walk on egg shells everywhere you go now as to not upset the
| corporations or status quo mentality.
|
| The internet was the mysterious wild west, Now its just a boring
| corporate meeting room.
| WA wrote:
| This comes up frequently on HN and it isn't true. The internet
| has many more users than back then. You can still find your
| weird niche on the internet today.
|
| Just posted today, private blogs of HN users: https://dm.hn/
|
| A weird search engine which skips a lot of corporate crap:
| https://search.marginalia.nu/
|
| Or skip the first million search results:
| https://millionshort.com/
|
| Then there's neocities, weird subreddits, 4chan, niche forums
| still running on phpBB discussing all kinds of stuff.
|
| You seem to expect that niche communities should've scaled with
| the rest of the internet. Like, back then, there were a few
| million people online. Now it's billions, but the few millions
| still online in their niches aren't interesting enough for you.
| Why?
| Pannoniae wrote:
| I have also noticed this is as well. The discussion online has
| been double-stratified - it's either really low quality or
| really bland.
|
| Most people are afraid to say anything interesting or different
| from the popular things/status quo, because social media
| conditions people to not rock the boat too much because they'll
| get downvoted/banned. Niche or interesting things just die.
|
| The remainder of places have become incredibly toxic due to the
| remaining people's frustrations with everything as well.
| WA wrote:
| Am I on the same internet? If social media taught people one
| thing, it is to rock the boat as hard as possible, because
| only this gives them attention. Twitter is called the
| hellsite for a reason.
|
| What is it that you want? Intelligent discussion, but not too
| strange, but interesting, not too toxic, but you wanna say
| what you think and you feel like you can't say what you
| think, because then "the others" come with their toxic
| bullshit?!
| Pannoniae wrote:
| The flamewars on social media are fundamentally outraging
| and shocking, but I don't find them any strange. Maybe my
| usage of "rocking the boat" was a bit inappropriate, I
| apologise. I definitely didn't want to say I don't want
| "too strange" stuff.
|
| It's just that the topics people talk about are very
| narrow, and even on the most heated twitter thread it's
| mostly the same stuff. There is nothing novel in there.:(
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| HN is an example of that as well unfortunately
| [deleted]
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Let me guess-you were a teenager/YA in that magical time? It's
| just the way things work as you get older, it has nothing to do
| with the internet.
| javajosh wrote:
| Enshittification is a (very good) name for when you start off
| with naturally non-scarce information resource, and later impose
| artificial scarcity on it in order to make the moneys. It's like
| building a theme park, and only later adding walls and a
| turnstyle that checks for tickets. _Of course_ people are going
| to hate you for doing that.
| djmips wrote:
| That's a really nice metaphor.
| l3mure wrote:
| It's just a corny rebrand of commons enclosure. I guess it's
| good if it gets more people to look into that concept though.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| The analogy is good but I don't think the name is very apt. It
| seems that we are just increasing the price of something not
| making the quality worse. Often that leads to higher quality--
| why do people prefer Disneyland to cheaper parks?
| javajosh wrote:
| In my view, every software product has two parts: the
| product, and the artificial scarcity. Rarely is the later
| simply a paywall anymore, as in the metaphor. Instead,
| business school graduates are tasked with finding every angle
| to make a profit, from injecting ads, to building a
| marketplace, to selling surveillance data for profit, and a
| thousand other schemes. In reality there is a combinatorial
| explosion of profit schemes, since they sometimes are only
| viable in brittle combinations. (As engineers we often see
| this on the front end when an iframe loads a script which
| pulls a script from somewhere which rewrites the page, and so
| on. This is where the rubber meets the road, and the tech
| reflects the complexity of the deals.) The net result for the
| user may not be a paywall, but a slower, less responsive,
| more brittle product. For the eng team, it feels like coding
| in molasses.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Institutional isomorphisms (to use a more technical term) are far
| older than current platform capitalism and are often a reaction
| to uncertainty. I'd see the current phenomena as a natural
| extension of the original concept.
|
| Classic literature: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095101
| brezelgoring wrote:
| I espouse a belief that apps have two cycles, one of growth,
| another of exploitation.
|
| In the first, cash is burnt/used to give free goodies and provide
| good quality services. Rents are a byproduct and not a goal
| during this phase of the operation, the goal here is to build
| goodwill and market share through measures that the competition
| can't match. All in all, it is a good experience to use the
| service during this stage.
|
| The second stage of the operation is all about rent-seeking.
| Portions get smaller, ads are deployed in full force, all of the
| bridges in and out are lifted so value can stay inside the
| ecosystem. Prices in general go up and it is time to cash out all
| of that goodwill and market share for money. Owners and founders
| generally sell during or before this stage, as the business will
| lose consumer confidence and competitors will gnaw at its heels
| until it becomes just another bad app/store in a very saturated
| market.
|
| I remember reading a multiwork series on The Office (US) and it
| used terms like 'psychopaths' and 'sucker' to describe how
| organizations grow and die when the 'psychopaths' at the top
| decide to cash out, I'd point to their exit as the turning point
| in my text.
|
| I can't back up what I feel with books or research, just what
| I've seen by looking at the progression of big businesses in my
| country. Apps, burger boutiques, consulting firms, even the
| furniture builder guy that lives around the block, all of them
| went through this cycle.
| jackgolding wrote:
| Great comment, I can fill in some of your references.
|
| The Essay you were referring to is the brilliant "The Gervais
| Principle"
|
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
|
| Reforge talks about your cycle - I can't find the exact artcile
| but you can see it with marketplaces a lot - i.e. Facebook
| creates APIs for events, 3rd parties build platforms on these
| APIs, Facebook kills the API access. This is the closest
| article I could find related to "tactics"
| https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-loops
| brezelgoring wrote:
| I think the article you refer to is this one:
| https://www.reforge.com/blog/balancing-user-vs-business
|
| It looks like an interesting read about what this decision
| looks like from the other side.
|
| Thank you for introducing me to reforge, I know what I'll be
| doing with tomorrow's downtime now.
| gmd63 wrote:
| This isn't inevitable. It's the nature of the voluntary
| business models at play.
| cdf wrote:
| You have rediscovered
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix
| Joeri wrote:
| I've been burned by this often enough that the more investment
| a new product takes on the less likely I am to use it. Take
| notion, 300 million in funding at a 10 billion valuation. At an
| average $10 a month they need a billion user months to make
| back that valuation. Let's say they have a time horizon of ten
| years to do that, that means they need at least 10 million
| paying users, but that is ignoring operating costs, acquisition
| costs. So in reality it is more like 20 million users paying
| for a decade. How do you get that many paying users? Lure them
| with a "free forever" product then force them to pay once their
| data is locked into the product. That's how evernote got my
| wife to pay up, as all her recipes are in there. That's why I
| will never use notion, no matter how nice it is.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I don't think it's realistic to expect to get useful stuff
| for free. However you're right that having all your data
| locked in with a provider that can arbitrarily raise prices
| is unappealing. Still, many people do find Notion valuable so
| they probably think it's worth the risk. In the end it's
| still possible to migrate elsewhere even if it's annoying.
|
| Your calculation is roughly correct but a p/e of 10 is kinda
| low so probably you can halve the numbers at least.
| verve_rat wrote:
| The 4 Xs in 4X games seems to map pretty well to app life
| cycles.
|
| Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate.
| fsckboy wrote:
| the YCombinator powers-that-be preach that a positive outlook is
| a key asset to propel you and your projects forward.
|
| The word "enshittification" seems to be a Maxwell's Daemon
| designed to concentrate all the stray negative thoughts into
| (this) one huge snipe session.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Unlikely, the word comes from Doctorow -- a person with anti-
| capitalist opinions and hardly a Silly Valley shill -- not from
| hackernews or YComb.
|
| (Anyways, as annoyed as I am by plenty of other commenters
| here, there's also plenty of people who contribute here who
| don't fit your stereotype.)
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Is he really anti capitalism? I always thought he's just
| against "big" everything (tech, corporations, government) and
| pro individual freedom.
| nologic01 wrote:
| Dumbifying and polarizing the debate, pro-business or anti-
| business (no matter what the "business" is up to), pro-
| government or anti-government (ditto) is the pattern of our
| times. Its part of the enshittification process and
| ultimately a tool for control.
|
| Informed people who understand the nuance, tradeoffs and
| choices involved are, in a sense, the enemy.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I said "with anti-capitalist opinions" not "is an anti-
| capitalist" or "anti-business" -- maybe I should have
| made it clearer: has _some_ anti-capitalist opinions?
|
| In any case, it's not meant as a slur but a compliment,
| in my case.
| wunderland wrote:
| A perfect example with the recent changes at Twitter:
|
| > Most Twitter users barely tweet and don't care about followers
| - a "heavy user" tweets on average less than three times a week.
| So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8
| a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable
| following organically, this is a very strong signal that the
| posts they are producing are no good.
|
| > It is exactly that content that Twitter's new model relies on
| promoting - and those newly-minted blue ticks are quickly
| learning that there is no magic behind the checkmarks. New
| followers are not magically heading their way. The problem wasn't
| a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good.
|
| > That means lots of blue ticks stop paying - but everyone else
| is forced to read the low-quality content that the remaining blue
| ticks produce. This is what is powering the enshittification of
| Twitter.
|
| (From: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-
| twitt...)
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| Ah yes, because a steady stream of Yoel Roth approved leftist
| propaganda was good content.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I'm still amazed they went with the $8-for-attention model.
| Everyone _already knows_ this doesn't work well; the dating
| site industry has been trying to make it work for literally
| decades.
|
| It's also kind of a Pandora's box; even if they removed the
| attention boost, the taint is already there, and people will be
| suspicious of bluetick replies forever.
| FullstakBlogger wrote:
| The smart thing to do isn't to remove it; They should charge
| for adversarial features.
|
| Pay your fee, you get not only an attention boost, but the
| ability to un-boost blues. If the net result is 0, the Nash
| Equilibrium is that everybody pays.
|
| Look how many people "#BlockTheBlue" on twitter right now.
| Just charge them to make it easy. The real value in someone
| who's willing to pay to be seen isn't in their 8$
| subscription, it's in the 100 other people they incentivize
| to pay you to shut them up.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Give me the ability to set sliders to filter accounts and
| replies based on metrics like the number of their followers
| vs the number of people who have blocked them, and the
| number of their posts vs the number of their upvotes --
| things that help me find the good stuff, and make it
| possible for me to access the "wisdom of the crowd" -- and
| I'd pay $20/mo.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, if they want to turn Twitter into SomethingAwful,
| that would be a good route.
|
| Honestly at this point it's in such a bad state that it
| would be worth considering; a gamified war might be better
| than just every high-traffic tweet having hundreds of
| nonsense bluetick comments before you get to the real
| comments. It'd at least be more interesting; the bluetick
| content is usually just very dull, and tends to bring to
| mind the writing style of those wannabe-influencer posts
| you see on LinkedIn. (I think a lot of people paying for it
| are doing so because they want to be... a Twitter
| influencer? Are there even Twitter influencers, beyond
| dril?)
|
| Probably not a _great_ way to build a sustainable business,
| though.
| saghm wrote:
| > I mean, if they want to turn Twitter into
| SomethingAwful, that would be a good route.
|
| I can't say I know that this is their goal right now, but
| it's impossible for me to distinguish their actions from
| those of someone with that goal.
| [deleted]
| Chris2048 wrote:
| But dating is a totally different context; and Bumble
| (dating/bff) seems to be doing OK at the moment for charging
| more than $8.
| cubefox wrote:
| They get also other features like longer tweets and editing.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Those are not benefits. Giving the blue checks the
| opportunity for a longer, even colder take that readers
| must click through to read is doing them no favors.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Far, far more than that, now. The ability to organize your
| own feed via Tweetdeck is also being limited to blue
| checks, as well as security options like MFA.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| The fact that a basic security feature is behind a
| paywall boggles the mind.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| It's only for SMS 2FA, which was phased out because of
| valid security concerns.
|
| Other forms of 2FA are still available to everyone.
| stirfish wrote:
| >as well as security options like MFA.
|
| Incredible. I had to see it for myself.
|
| https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/two-
| factor...
|
| Maybe that's only for text messages, and you can still
| use totp?
| rsynnott wrote:
| Sure, and if they'd kept it to that, maybe it could have
| been a reasonable niche feature, though it would always be
| niche. As it is, I think it likely has negative value to
| most people.
| Proven wrote:
| Garbage "analysis".
|
| Heavy users I follow tweet more than 3 times a day.
|
| > The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that
| their tweets are no good.
|
| No, it was a biased algo that's still being removed (as
| recently as 2-3 weeks ago they discovered another throttle
| which was impacting many users, including Elon).
|
| The main problem is that all centralized platforms have to deal
| with government-mandated censorship in large markets such as
| the EU, which kills content and engagement and also negatively
| impacts paying users (because despite the payment, their
| content still gets shadow-banned). That's not Twitter's fault,
| but they're relatively more impacted than social networks that
| focus on art and have no political content.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I'm interested to know what your examples of content would be
| that is (a) good and (b) banned by "government-mandated
| censorship in large markets such as the EU".
|
| > relatively more impacted than social networks that focus on
| art and have no political content
|
| Funnily enough a lot of artists also want uncensored
| platforms so they can post NSFW art, but this is _completely
| orthogonal_ to the political questions.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > uncensored platforms so they can post NSFW art, but this
| is completely orthogonal to the political questions.
|
| Its not orthogonal, the center of american politics is neo-
| puritanism. This is specifically the attitude of american
| elites, and they force it on the rest of the world. They
| deny access to banking and payment to anyone who does not
| comply.
| eimrine wrote:
| > I'm interested to know what your examples of content
| would be that is (a) good and (b) banned by "government-
| mandated censorship in large markets such as the EU".
|
| War videos and pirated books.
| pyrale wrote:
| > they're relatively more impacted than social networks that
| focus on art and have no political content.
|
| Most art is political, you probably just can't take a hint.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > government-mandated censorship in large markets such as the
| EU
|
| Twitter censors nudity and pornography, and import American
| neo-puritanism to the rest of the world. No-one in EU
| mandates this.
|
| But american brain is incapable of putting two and two
| together, they have it wired into their brain that opression
| cannot be private, only government.
|
| If modern right-wingers existed in 1500, they would be
| defending the rirht of a feudal lord to sleep with your wife
| because he isnt a government and your signed up for it when
| you were born as a peasant.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| This is a pretty good example of what is called kettle logic:
|
| 1. The analysis is wrong
|
| 2. The analysis is correct, but it _is_ the algorithms fault.
|
| 3. The analysis is correct, but actually its really state
| censorship that is culprit here!
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I've been seeing a lot more open Nazis on twitter with blue
| checks.
|
| not "oh they sound mean" Nazis, but doing polls on how great
| Nazism would be to get rid of the "wokes", with nearly 10k
| votes.
|
| Its crazy how the alternate to "biased liberal algorithm" is
| literally just fascism. And because Nazis don't argue on good
| faith, there's no beating them back. Moderation is basically
| the only thing that prevents any site from becoming a Nazi
| site.
| wunderland wrote:
| Here's an example of a Nazi poll that went mega-viral
| yesterday: https://twitter.com/rightwingcope/status/1676980
| 329905528832
|
| (screenshot because @christgnosis went private after outing
| themselves as full-Nazi)
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| That was the poll in reference but I've also been seeing
| a ton more lately.
| dcow wrote:
| I think the strong response is to your opening statement.
| Cory is a thoughtful writer. The analysis may be inaccurate
| in your opinion, but that doesn't make it garbage.
|
| I happen to agree with your actual take: biased unfair algos
| are the result of platforms being coerced (internally and/or
| externally) to ultimately serve some socio-political agenda,
| and thus their content enshittifies. No blue checkmarks
| needed.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Actually it is the algo. Twitter often doesn't bother showing
| the tweets of NPCs (with fewer than a few thousand followers)
| no matter how good they are.
|
| But I think you have to be quite naive to believe that a New
| Blue Tick(tm) will game that.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _enough to be willing to pay $8 a month_
|
| you realize $8 a month is nothing to the majority of adults who
| would be in the "knowledge worker" category? a month? a couple
| of coffees is $10 and that's a day.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Those aren't the good content people, though.
|
| (Long ago I suggested that Twitter should have allowed people
| to contribute towards premium accounts for _other people_ , a
| bit like Reddit Gold. Since a large part of the value derives
| not from your own posting but other people's.)
| Hamuko wrote:
| I could definitely afford $8 but why would I give Elon $8 per
| month in order to tell people that I took a shit that was
| _thiiiis_ big? The blue checkmark has questionable benefits
| at best, and the increased character limit for paychecks is
| ruining the essence of the service.
| raverbashing wrote:
| $8 is a very large amount of money for what's essentially a
| schmoozing certificate with very little actual benefits
| Etheryte wrote:
| In my opinion, the question is generally not whether
| something is a lot of money or not, but if it feels
| worthwhile relative to other similar things. For example,
| $8/mo is in the same ballpark as Spotify or Apple music and
| right now Twitter's blue tick doesn't come anywhere close to
| providing similar value.
| everdrive wrote:
| $8 a month might feel like a waste if you don't get anything
| out of it.
| criddell wrote:
| What I thought was stupid was removing the blue check from
| people who are worth far more than that per month to
| Twitter. I thinking about people like Stephen King and
| large news outlets.
| rsynnott wrote:
| It's not just the cost; most people would, I think, be
| _embarrassed_ to be seen to be paying for attention.
|
| I used to pay for a Twitter client, I now pay for a Mastodon
| client, I contribute to the upkeep of my local friendly
| Mastodon instance. In all it's in the ballpark of 8EUR/month.
| There's no world where I would _pay for attention on
| Twitter_, though.
|
| I am somewhat surprised they didn't just charge for client
| API access/other bits and pieces (that is, charge the user,
| not the person who makes the client), and nuke the pay-for-
| attention/pay-for-flair feature before launch as an obviously
| terrible idea. I think more people would pay for that. Not
| many people, but more people, and it would be far less
| corrosive on the user experience as a whole.
| csydas wrote:
| I don't really get what you're saying here; it's not about
| the affordability (but let's put that aside for a second),
| it's that the entire payment model is based on a theory that
| is demonstrably disproven; the GP post had some rough stats
| from an article which suggests that Twitter either grossly
| overestimates how its users use the platform, or completely
| misunderstands how people want to use Twitter.
|
| That the "heavy user" threshold is 3 posts a week is
| surprising to me, and seems like a bad threshold I'm sure
| that actual Twitter data is likely more accurate and shows
| different numbers, but it's not really about the usage I
| guess, it's about the promise of more followers and
| engagement. But demonstrably this is not the case, and many
| persons who did buy the Blue Check complained they didn't see
| the increase in activity it was advertised that the Blue
| Check would give. The signal behind what a Blue Check means
| has been quite noisy for a very long time, even before Musk's
| take over, and the decisions post-Musk on what a Blue Check
| really means/does is very confusing and unclear.
|
| Why would I pay $8 a month to maybe get some followers by
| being promoted when I could just spend a few hundred USD once
| and just buy followers from some follower farm, which is
| arguably a better signal of "hey, this person is worth
| following?" as opposed to the Blue Check? It doesn't matter
| if it's just a "couple of coffees", why pay for something
| that arguably provides 0 benefit for me?
|
| Twitter should not have tried to sell identify validation as
| a major marketable service; they already try to validate your
| identity even without it, and it doesn't seem to benefit
| anyone, not even Twitter.
|
| Game companies figured out how to monetize useless things
| with cosmetics and such, and if Twitter wanted to monetize
| heavily, they should have just done that. Fancier reactions,
| more edits and stupid stuff for the changeable usernames,
| etc. The idea that they can somehow sell the user attention
| is a folly; yes, they gate and can control the feeds, but the
| users always have the option of just not following or even
| just not looking. It's a resource Twitter _never_ really had
| control over; they might as well have been selling ocean
| wranglers, offering that someone will beat the tide with
| whips for you if the ocean pisses you off for some reason;
| it's about the same effectualness, and equally useless
| service.
| appleflaxen wrote:
| You're right.
|
| And the value of a blue check is less than that.
|
| Wow.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Lets see, for $8 a month I can subscribe to a real Journal,
| like Which. They hire proffesional writers, fact check their
| content, buy actual consimer products and test them. And they
| are a charity to boot.
|
| Or I can pay Elon for delivering tweets that he got some
| rando to write for free. The latest content is a right - wing
| conspiracy that nuclear weapons do not exist, and thay video
| footage of nuclear ezplosions is staged.
|
| https://join.which.co.uk/join/subscribe
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > Or I can pay Elon for delivering tweets that he got some
| rando to write for free
|
| I thought the $8 for Elon was for publishers, not
| consumers?
| HappySweeney wrote:
| That is incorrect. Individuals pay $8 per month,
| government is free, everyone else is $1000 annually.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| For a Twitter Verified Organization, which you don't need
| as a consumer?
| mbork_pl wrote:
| > $8 a month is nothing to the majority of adults who would
| be in the "knowledge worker" category
|
| This is a very US-centric take and almost insulting for
| people living in certain other areas of the world. In my
| country (central Europe, as is easy to guess), an experienced
| teacher (definitely a "knowledge worker" in my book) may earn
| about $10k per year. Not sure how much a beginner one gets,
| but surely less. $8 per month is _a lot_ then.
| ComposedPattern wrote:
| [dead]
| yomlica8 wrote:
| Maybe, but the time and effort it takes to wade through the
| dark patterns when you want to cancel are expensive for
| everyone.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| This is true only in a handful of places, for a handful of
| people.
|
| $8 a month is pretty much the monthly cost of a cellphone
| plan across Europe. One could also get Spotify, or Netflix,
| at the same price point.
|
| Comparatively speaking, paying $8 to have unlimited access to
| generally low quality content, at the same price point where
| other platforms offer actual good content, is a waste.
| chme wrote:
| I don't get the $8/month. If you would pay for
| verification, that would be a one time payment. If the
| creators would be payed, then this might be fine, but they
| aren't. So it is only a fee to use the infrastructure.
|
| You get a decent VPS for 8EUR/month, that has more
| computing power and bandwidth and storage that one person
| can use per month compared to what they would use on their
| systems for just streaming some videos and getting some
| messages.
|
| Sure I don't calculate here the cost for development and
| maintenance, but this cost is mostly constant with numbers
| of active users.
| nottorp wrote:
| > a couple of coffees is $10 and that's a day.
|
| Please cut that. Everyone wants 'a couple of coffees' and it
| adds up even for SV techbros.
| ehnto wrote:
| Different location, different economy and different
| currency, but yeah buying coffee out is crazy and I can't
| believe I was stupid enough to do it for so long.
|
| I convinced myself I "needed the time out of the office"
| yeah cool, go for a walk you dork and make coffee in the
| kitchen like the person with bills that you are (is what I
| now tell myself)
| nottorp wrote:
| > buying coffee out is crazy
|
| That too, but that wasn't the point :)
| ftxbro wrote:
| There is a possibly more general phenomenon where a brand gets
| good reputation and then begins cutting cost and people will
| still buy at the high price. I don't know if that one has a name
| or if it's the same concept as enshittification.
| [deleted]
| weevil wrote:
| Adobe.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I'd say it is often part of the enshittification process, but
| also something that can exist outside of it.
| flir wrote:
| Value engineering is the art of making almost the same thing,
| but cheaper. That could be it. See also: muntzing.
| brezelgoring wrote:
| TIL about Muntzing.
|
| From the Wikipedia page about the practice [1]:
|
| > he reduced his costs and increased his profits at the
| expense of poorer performance [...] so the Muntz TVs were
| adequate for a very large fraction of his customers. And for
| those [...] where the Muntz TVs did not work, those could be
| returned at the customer's additional effort and expense, and
| not Muntz's. He focused less resources in the product [...]
| and focused more resources on advertising and sales
| promotions.
|
| While reading this I thought "This guy is a used car salesman
| if I've ever seen one", and he was! haha
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing
| ftxbro wrote:
| > "when he felt that one of his builders was
| overengineering a circuit, he would begin snipping out some
| of the electronics components."
| fuzztester wrote:
| >Value engineering
|
| There was a book with that name, years back. Saw a relative
| reading it and browsed it briefly myself. Probably are more
| books by now.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Economies of scale?
| jamil7 wrote:
| Is this a product of the way modern MBAs are taught? Seems to
| be a standard playbook of building reputation, scaling and then
| aggressive optimisation and cost cutting.
| selcuka wrote:
| That's what Doctorow literally says in the podcast:
|
| > Facebook was going to be the social media service that
| never spied on you back in 2006. And once people were locked
| in, it, you know, did the Darth Vader MBA thing.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I've used Facebook practically since it launched and I
| don't recall "not spying" ever being something that was a
| part of it. If anything the opposite--everyone thought it
| was creepy the level of personal details it revealed to
| others (but used it anyway).
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Surely people realized profits can be increased by cutting
| expenses before "modern MBA" education came around.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Sure, MBA just provides a plan on how to get the most out
| of the process. It's like automation, it's cutting expenses
| at scale.
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