Activity tagged "enshittification"

Posted:

Great piece on BlueSky and enshittification by Cory Doctorow . “I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.” I also really appreciate his point that it’s not the blockchain venture capital that leads to enshittification, it’s the venture capital.

Cory is a fellow POSSE-er (and major inspiration to me when I adopted the practice), and has opted not to use Bluesky. Personally, I’ve gone the route of using the platforms that interest me, even the enshittification-prone ones like Bluesky and Threads, but hedging my bets by plugging them into my POSSE system where they can just as easily be unplugged if need be.

I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.
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The open web is still there. It's still being built, and thanks to the good services, it's still growing, and it's still accessible and it's still cool. If we can realign these search engines, or maybe there is a future Google competitor (it is not SearchGPT), I think that, I don't know, we could find it again. I think that there could be if these companies were realigned so that they could actually, I don't know, index the Internet. There is plenty of original, human-created content out there. It's just that Google and Being and all of these sites have kind of defaulted on that position of showing us it and we have to search for it through social networks. It's why as an independent journalist it's tough to build a following because all of the algorithms people are built to rely on are broken now.
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The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun. Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades. It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.
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This was one of the best podcast episodes I’ve listened to in a long time. Put it on if you’re feeling despair about the state of the internet and tech industry.

In the third live-to-tape episode of Better Offlive, Ed Zitron is joined in-studio in Los Angeles by Cory Doctorow and Brian Merchant to talk about the forces that have turned the tech industry away from innovation - and how we might turn the tide against them.
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There’s people who are really angry about a lot of tech stuff who disagree with each other about everything, including whether or not they really even have a problem. But all of their problems start with the fact that there’s a lot of commercial surveillance. So these people might disagree about everything else, but they will agree that their problem could be solved if we could do something about commercial surveillance.
So if you think Mark Zuckerberg made grampy into a QAnon, or if you think Insta made your teenager anorexic, or if you think that TikTok is convincing millennials to quote Osama bin Laden, right? Or if you think that it’s ugly that red state attorneys general are following teenagers into out-of-state abortion clinics, or that Google reverse warrants reveal the identity of everyone in a black lives matter demonstration or for that matter, the January 6th riots, or if you are worried about deep fake porn, or if you’re worried that people of color are having the surveillance data captured about them mobilized to discriminate against them in employment and financial products, right? All of these different things all start with cutting off the supply of surveillance data.
– Cory Doctorow
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You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app the prices are different again. You ring the restaurant directly and it says the number is no longer in service.
Posted:

This post about Substack's possibly precarious financial position was a good read, but one thing really stuck out to me:

To fix that and get their financials on a steadier path, Substack needs to make it harder for you to leave. They need to lock you in.

I hate how this has become the dominant perception of how tech platforms should do business. Rather than making a product people love to use, adjusting their pricing to something more sustainable, or knocking off the bullshit that makes people want to leave or hesitant to join, Substack should... force people to stay?

In all fairness to Powell here, I think he's describing what Substack thinks they need to do (rather than what he thinks Substack should do), but it's frustrating that this is the default remedy.

Substack is in trouble, and their recent feature releases are evidence of that.