this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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I miss when people made stuff because they loved making stuff, not because they wanted to get rich.
Sort of like how girls used to post sexy photos of themselves because they wanted attention, now they do it to get rich.
They still do, but you'll never find it in the existing layout. The only stuff that bubbles to the surface is so heavily SEO engineered and hyper-monetized that it's got to be sixteen ads on the back of an infomercial in order to break even.
Very true. The old internet perfectly showed how people are happy to create and share content as enthusiasts, eg. wikipedia, reddit/forums, and lot of X rated amateur stuff.
Since then, capitalism has decided to leech on and ruin most of these. Now we have more content, but worse quality - because for the end user a genuine reddit review of a product was more useful than a targeted ad, and most ppl prefered to look at the videos of some random couple sharing it as a kink, rather than some endlessly polished fake amateur video.
There's still people who do that including the dnd group I'm in, but it's hidden behind the algorithm. Gotta hunt for the people doing it for fun.