A recent podcast interview posted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of author Cory Doctorow. Talks about some of these concepts in relation to the state of the Internet. Switching cost: The...
A recent podcast interview posted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of author Cory Doctorow. Talks about some of these concepts in relation to the state of the Internet.
Switching cost: The cost or barrier faced by users or customers when they want to switch from one product, platform, or service to another. It refers to the challenges, inconveniences, or losses associated with transitioning to an alternative option.
Enshittification: A term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the degradation or decline in the quality, functionality, or user experience of a product, service, or platform over time, often caused by the dominance of monopolistic companies.
Twiddling: The act of continuously and arbitrarily adjusting or changing the rules, policies, or features of a digital platform or service. It refers to the platform's ability to modify and control the parameters and conditions of use, often resulting in unpredictable and inconsistent user experiences.
Excited to read through the transcript as this is one of the phenomena that we've experienced but haven't exactly put into words before beyond talking about on message boards. I do wish Doctorow...
Excited to read through the transcript as this is one of the phenomena that we've experienced but haven't exactly put into words before beyond talking about on message boards.
I do wish Doctorow coined a better word than "enshittification"...I think the term might distract people from taking the topic seriously.
I just don't like that we had a perfectly usable word that we're ignoring for the sake of what sounds like some crude word a 14 year old would come up with. It's simply rent-seeking. The...
I just don't like that we had a perfectly usable word that we're ignoring for the sake of what sounds like some crude word a 14 year old would come up with.
It's simply rent-seeking. The definition and ideas perfectly mirror to an online service despite originally focusing on land ownership. It also has the bonus to teach and connect this idea back to housing since that is also a hot button issue as of late.
Rent seeking is the cause, enshitification is the effect. Besides, rent seeking is one of those communist adjacent terms that instantly causes way too many people who might otherwise agree with...
Rent seeking is the cause, enshitification is the effect. Besides, rent seeking is one of those communist adjacent terms that instantly causes way too many people who might otherwise agree with you to instantly dismiss what you're saying without even really putting any conscious thought into the dismissal. Cold war propaganda is a hell of a drug. Is, not was, unfortunately, because the propaganda never really stopped.
I feel rent seeking causes both. The cause is that you want more money for doing the same (or less) work. The effect is that you either simply cause price hikes directly or you lobby around to...
Rent seeking is the cause, enshitification is the effect.
I feel rent seeking causes both. The cause is that you want more money for doing the same (or less) work. The effect is that you either simply cause price hikes directly or you lobby around to make it legal for you to do something that is currently not legal. the way enshitttification is described doesn't seem to add anything:
"the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other"
Yeah, seems to work. You can easily (or make it easier) to just charge more rent, but at the same time you don't want to scare off all sellers... Now granted in these modern job markets this isn't quite as applicable but it still holds most of its sentimentt.
one of those communist adjacent terms that instantly causes way too many people who might otherwise agree with you to instantly dismiss what you're saying without even really putting any conscious thought into the dismissal.
To be frank, we're talking about modern internet platform design, not a general election (where those kinds of people tend to be older and represent more of the voter base). Are the kinds of people put off by that kind of thing really the ones we want to appeal to to begin with?
Rent seeking... causes rent seeking? I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying here. Enshitification is a description of the results of rent seeking as they apply to a certain class of...
Rent seeking... causes rent seeking?
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying here. Enshitification is a description of the results of rent seeking as they apply to a certain class of software, and maybe more broadly to a few other things. Nothing you've said there really contradicts that aside from the initial dismissal.
As for the kinds of people put off by that terminology, yes. Those are exactly the people who need to be won over, and they're more receptive to it than you think. They've been propagandized into having kneejerk reactions to certain terminology, but those reactions are very surface level ones to the words themselves, not really to the concepts they represent, and their actual positions are often closer to yours than you'd think. Besides, preaching to the choir never got anything done. If you only talk to people who already agree with everything you're saying, you're never going to gain any new allies.
Who do you think needs to be won over? The old guard at the top of 20th century era media? Big wigs at corporations that just want to see more ad revenue? The current masterminds of social media...
As for the kinds of people put off by that terminology, yes. Those are exactly the people who need to be won over, and they're more receptive to it than you think.
Who do you think needs to be won over? The old guard at the top of 20th century era media? Big wigs at corporations that just want to see more ad revenue? The current masterminds of social media to try and make them less greedy?
Maybe you're thinking parallel to me, or maybe at a much grander scale. I don't necessarily care if reddit gets blasted over the news for a month or if by some twist of fat all ads pull out and they go bankrupt in 1-2 years. I personally care more about appealing to content creators and community managers who can potentially pull off a mass migration to the next potential competitor, or future platform creators of the next big internet forum, and having them be aware of the pitfalls others have fallen into. That latter group is likely not ones as prone to the propoganda of olde.
Grander scale. Reddit is just one site of many that have gone through this process. It's not the first, it won't be the last, but the more people are aware of the larger problem, and not just the...
Grander scale. Reddit is just one site of many that have gone through this process. It's not the first, it won't be the last, but the more people are aware of the larger problem, and not just the fact that some individual site they use has gotten worse, the closer we get to there being a last.
Hell, the site we're on right now was set up as a non-profit with a very specific mandate for the explicit reason of avoiding that fate. That's one result of one person seeing the problem and trying to change things for the better to the extent that he individually can.
Maybe not directly, but if the average person has heard it it would be from some fringe lefty. There's basically three possible outcomes of using a phrase like that: You're using words they don't...
Maybe not directly, but if the average person has heard it it would be from some fringe lefty. There's basically three possible outcomes of using a phrase like that: You're using words they don't know at all and losing them that way, they know the term because they're already on your side and you're wasting your time preaching to the choir, or they know the term and it instantly turns them off.
Basically, the best tactic is to save the lefty jargon for talking shop with other lefties, not for public outreach.
I guess that just does not seem to line up with my experiences at all. When someone brings up rent-seeking in a conversation, in my experience it's usually academic rather than 'grrr...
I guess that just does not seem to line up with my experiences at all.
When someone brings up rent-seeking in a conversation, in my experience it's usually academic rather than 'grrr rent-seeking'. If a stranger were to bring it up to me, I'd probably get more minored in economics wonk vibes than a left one. Unless by left you just mean any university graduate with a passing interest in economics?
I'll take your word for it, but I'm still confused. Rent-seeking behavior seems like something you'd highlight as a proponent of market and monopoly regulation. I think it's a somewhat shallow...
I'll take your word for it, but I'm still confused. Rent-seeking behavior seems like something you'd highlight as a proponent of market and monopoly regulation. I think it's a somewhat shallow criticism of capitalism as a whole though, I'd have thought Marxists would have bigger fish to fry. Now you could probably get a Georgist to talk in-depth about rent-seeking, but Georgists and Marxists are a bit like oil and water.
The problem from a Marxist perspective is it's a core feature of capitalism. You really can't regulate it out. Things like enshittificiation from that perspective are just natural results of...
The problem from a Marxist perspective is it's a core feature of capitalism. You really can't regulate it out. Things like enshittificiation from that perspective are just natural results of capitalism and capitalistic incentives, and not some perversion or excess of extreme unregulated capitalism. It's just the natural result of the fundamentally extractive nature of the system.
I did almost bring up Georgists, though, because you're right that they're different in that rent seeking is their biggest bugbear. It's kind of a general thing you'll see brought up in economic far left spaces of any persuasion. Left anarchists talk about it too, for example.
It was a good read, thank you. But I think I'm having enshittification fatigue. Everything is going even worse and there is no way for me to stop it. As someone who depends on Instagram both...
It was a good read, thank you. But I think I'm having enshittification fatigue. Everything is going even worse and there is no way for me to stop it. As someone who depends on Instagram both professionally and socially (I'm serious, there is no way out of it for me), all of this leaves me helpless and frustrated.
socially, you simply have to keep other channels of contact. If only because one day Meta can remove your account with no explanation whatsoever. Inevitably some, maybe many, friends will phase...
socially, you simply have to keep other channels of contact. If only because one day Meta can remove your account with no explanation whatsoever. Inevitably some, maybe many, friends will phase out as you phase out of their convinent part of life but the most important ones will keep in touch.
Professionally I understnad you have to be where the audience is. I'd just make sure to treat a professional account as simply that.
I've been there before. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter in 2018, many contacts were lost. It took 3 years for me to reconnect with many people. And that reconnection occured on Instagram. It's...
I've been there before. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter in 2018, many contacts were lost. It took 3 years for me to reconnect with many people. And that reconnection occured on Instagram. It's not just friends, professional contacts, etc. You can't move thousands of followers somewhere else, they are all locked in. It took me years to accumulate that many people; they are important because they amplify my work. I also did copywriting with a focus on digital marketing for a decade in another life, so I'm not a stranger to all of this.
This is kind of my annoyance with how the Fediverse has evolved. They focused too much on replicating the interaction paradigms of Twitter and Reddit and such, but they missed what’s fundamentally...
This is kind of my annoyance with how the Fediverse has evolved. They focused too much on replicating the interaction paradigms of Twitter and Reddit and such, but they missed what’s fundamentally valuable about it, which is the social graph. The applications are just a front end that, I would argue, are largely matters of taste that people are indifferent to differentiating between.
What actually needs to get built out is the core of what ActivityPub does, which is a protocol for keeping track of who all follows you and publishing your stuff to them in whatever form. Services like Mastodon and Lemmy attempt to replicate the design and interaction paradigms of closed, monopolistic, ad platforms because they’re stuck thinking in terms of features and not the actual personal itch those features are meant to scratch.
ActivityPub needs to bill itself as basically open Active Directory or personal Rolodex. The Fediverse needs to bill itself as the universe of applications that you can link the social graph in that directory with and stop trying to say stuff like “this is Instagram but Federated.” No BS about instances or who runs what. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about implementation details.
Me too. It's times like this when I'm surrounded by ugliness and filth that I need to take a step back an re-balance out my perspective and diet. A tiny story: (From St Paisios of Mt Athos) You...
Me too. It's times like this when I'm surrounded by ugliness and filth that I need to take a step back an re-balance out my perspective and diet. A tiny story:
Some people tell me that they are scandalized because they see many things wrong in the [news and the internet]. I tell them that if you ask a fly, “Are there any flowers in this area?” it will say, “I don’t know about flowers, but over there in that heap of rubbish you can find all the filth you want.” And it will go on to list all the unclean things it has been to.
Now, if you ask a honeybee, “Have you seen any unclean things in this area?” it will reply, “Unclean things? No, I have not seen any; the place here is full of the most fragrant flowers.” And it will go on to name all the flowers of the garden or the meadow.
You see, the fly only knows where the unclean things are, while the honeybee knows where the beautiful iris or hyacinth is.
(From St Paisios of Mt Athos)
You and I are more complex than the bee or the fly: we can appreciate the Iris and in the next breath sit on a pile of filth. So, sometimes when I feel overwhelmed by the grossness, I have to step back and choose to be the bee.
For example, in Mark Rober's recent video about drones, there's some super good things an engineer and doctors are doing for humanity over in Rwanda: not for shopping but delivering blood and life saving supplies quickly.
Tildes exists because Deimos built it as a non-profit.
My local food bank is run by volunteering retirees.
This morning I learned about some books on raising better boys and girls and I'm looking forward to reading.....
So, I understand how you feel, that a wildfire is sweeping across the land and there's just desolation in every direction. But we still have each other, and others who are still doing good things need our attention and support.
I'm a photographer. Everyone is on it: other photographers, photo editors, curators, gallery owners, collectors... I do have emails of most people but also many magazines and newspapers still make...
I'm a photographer. Everyone is on it: other photographers, photo editors, curators, gallery owners, collectors... I do have emails of most people but also many magazines and newspapers still make initial contact on it. It's basically the inbox of my industry.
Switching cost, I think, has really amplified over time when it comes to web services. As more and more of our lives got put online it's gotten just ever more painful to move away from services....
Switching cost, I think, has really amplified over time when it comes to web services. As more and more of our lives got put online it's gotten just ever more painful to move away from services. Like, alright, you'd like to stop using Gmail. Well, you'll have to change your email address on about 20 years of accounts and correspondence and official records. I don't think I could possibly pull that off. And I basically locked myself into it before I was even an adult. Email might be the worst case of it, but it's definitely a big thing for any online service - hard to just quit Instagram if you're the socialable type and every friend you have uses it to keep in touch, and so on.
I made one failed attempt in 2018. Then re-attempted in 2022 and this time it was a success. I have a Proton Mail inbox with a custom domain and also started using SimpleLogin last year. I use...
Like, alright, you'd like to stop using Gmail. Well, you'll have to change your email address on about 20 years of accounts and correspondence and official records. I don't think I could possibly pull that off.
I made one failed attempt in 2018. Then re-attempted in 2022 and this time it was a success. I have a Proton Mail inbox with a custom domain and also started using SimpleLogin last year. I use Bitwarden so I started gradually changing my email address everywhere each time I logged in to a website or service where I haven't done that yet. I imported my whole Gmail data into Proton, it worked surprisingly well. I set up message forwarding from Gmail to Proton for anything else that still hits my old inbox. I had Gmail for 12 years or so. You can do it! :)
More than anything, isp monopolies have held back gigabyte speeds and infrastructure. Remember when you could have a tiny home server and host your own website. I thought https would fix that? But...
More than anything, isp monopolies have held back gigabyte speeds and infrastructure. Remember when you could have a tiny home server and host your own website. I thought https would fix that? But obviously I have no idea what I'm talking about. I imagine hyper aware browser malware detection keeps most of any idea of a home server null and void.
You can certainly get a valid https certificate and self host your own website and that will be enough to satisfy web browsers, though it has its own challenges. Bandwidth, securing the site,...
You can certainly get a valid https certificate and self host your own website and that will be enough to satisfy web browsers, though it has its own challenges. Bandwidth, securing the site, maintaining enough hardware capability to handle load, all might be problems you run into. Just depends on your technical skills, the resources you have available, and your goals. A lot of people have turned to using cloud hosting services, which mitigate a lot of those issues for you - which of course comes with its own risks, that the platform shuts down, raises prices, or changes their business in a way that makes using it untenable.
Now email, that's a case where it's become increasingly difficult to self host. Major email providers like Gmail and 365 have started to filter out self hosted email servers, in the name of security and spam prevention, so it's not unlikely your self-hosted emails get relegated to the void. It comes off more anticompetitive than security based to me, because the majority of spam I get comes from Gmail addresses, so doesn't seem like they're paying that much attention...
Doctorow is one of those people that end up looking increasingly prescient as time goes on, and who I really wish more people in charge had listened to
Doctorow is one of those people that end up looking increasingly prescient as time goes on, and who I really wish more people in charge had listened to
Have you looked at boingboing, though? He is shoving products down your throat left and right. He has personally made his site a capitalistic sore, yet decries the horrible internet of today. His...
Have you looked at boingboing, though?
He is shoving products down your throat left and right. He has personally made his site a capitalistic sore, yet decries the horrible internet of today.
His stuff is the realized concept of “enshitification” that he talks about.
Should be noted that he left boingboing over three years ago. I'm not familiar with the site in general, so I can't speak to how it was during his tenure in comparison to now.
Should be noted that he left boingboing over three years ago. I'm not familiar with the site in general, so I can't speak to how it was during his tenure in comparison to now.
It started as an awesome, quirky collection of sites and links in a blog format. I did not know he left, however, that site has been garbage for waaayyy longer than 3 years now. Yeah, I am kinda...
It started as an awesome, quirky collection of sites and links in a blog format.
I did not know he left, however, that site has been garbage for waaayyy longer than 3 years now.
Yeah, I am kinda miffed, because I really liked the stance he took at the beginning, and boingboing was my "goto" site for a loooong time.
I think that's what the other guy meant. That he left because the site was getting enshitified and his name was attached to it but he wasn't in full enough control of it to stop it.
I think that's what the other guy meant. That he left because the site was getting enshitified and his name was attached to it but he wasn't in full enough control of it to stop it.
He actually still owns part of it. From wikipedia: “ Cory Doctorow left Boing Boing in January 2020, and soon started a solo blogging project titled Pluralistic.24 The circumstances surrounding...
He actually still owns part of it.
From wikipedia:
“ Cory Doctorow left Boing Boing in January 2020, and soon started a solo blogging project titled Pluralistic.24 The circumstances surrounding Doctorow’s exit from the website were unclear at the time, although Doctorow acknowledged that he remained a co-owner of Boing Boing.2425 MetaFilter described the end of the 19-year association between Doctorow and Boing Boing as “the equivalent of the Beatles breaking up” for the blog world.25 Doctorow’s exit was not acknowledged by Boing Boing, with his name being quietly removed from the list of editors on 29 January 2020.26”
Okay, now that's some hypocrisy. He's now exactly one of the shareholders with a purely financial stake that cause the whole thing he's always railing about.
Okay, now that's some hypocrisy. He's now exactly one of the shareholders with a purely financial stake that cause the whole thing he's always railing about.
Now, I was mistaken in that I thought he was the founder (it was Frauenfdelder), but he was such a popular figure on the site... oh well The hypocrisy is why I am so miffed.
Now, I was mistaken in that I thought he was the founder (it was Frauenfdelder), but he was such a popular figure on the site... oh well
Cory Doctorow is no longer associated with BoingBoing, and hasn't been for years. He's blogging at Pluralistic.net, with those pieces being shared as well to his Fediverse profile...
Cory Doctorow is no longer associated with BoingBoing, and hasn't been for years.
I just want to point out that enshittification is not exclusive to web platforms. Consumer goods are trending shittier too. Shrinkflation, non-functional slack fill, cheaper reformulations, etc....
I just want to point out that enshittification is not exclusive to web platforms. Consumer goods are trending shittier too. Shrinkflation, non-functional slack fill, cheaper reformulations, etc. have been slowly dialing up the awfulness of once-great products. There’s not a lot of hard data that I’ve seen on this… the r/shrinkflation subreddit was a good resource. But anecdotally speaking, a ton of brands I used to love as a kid have been gradually devolving into cheap facsimiles of themselves.
I won't say I've been on the Internet forever, but I've been on it a loooooooong time. And I feel like they missed an VERY important one, even though it's an ugly one. First, let me just say that...
I won't say I've been on the Internet forever, but I've been on it a loooooooong time. And I feel like they missed an VERY important one, even though it's an ugly one.
First, let me just say that Switching Cost is probably one of the biggest factors compared to the others... but I really do think that Tragedy of the Commons is a major factor in the Internet's decline.
Arguably this falls into Gatekeeping territory, but I swear there's been a study about how when more and more people get together, the overall intelligence level drops. It's also been remarked that "It was once thought that once people had access to all available information, they would also become better. Well, the Internet has come and given us information, but it appears that access to information may not have been the problem we though it was." Mind you, this does ignore information manipulation.
To go back to my rather unfortunate gatekeeping observation, there IS something I've witnessed firsthand. My early days on the Internet, besides AIM, were dominated by forum usage- and these forums were dedicated to small, niche topics. But it was VERY high quality. As things changed, people moved on, and I went from smaller platforms to larger platforms... I found the quality of content decreasing. We can even see it right now- Reddit is practically in its death throes, whereas Tildes- a smaller platform than Reddit- seems to be doing quite well. Now, I do realize that there are other factors involved, and especially in Reddit's case. I also understand that the more people on a particular website, the more it costs to upgrade and maintain servers, and that's where commercialization often becomes a factor. I actually wonder if it should be more looked at "causation is NOT correlation", but it does feel like the more users on a particular site, the lower the quality is.
I agree with your sentiment. But I think instead of "intelligence" it's better to frame it as "care". Let's take the metaphor to a park. You have a few families in a park, they come a few times a...
I agree with your sentiment. But I think instead of "intelligence" it's better to frame it as "care".
Let's take the metaphor to a park. You have a few families in a park, they come a few times a week, the kids play, the parents clean up their picnics and make sure the kids aren't hurt, and everything works perfectly fine. Maybe a few family disputes, but things overall are pretty civil.
This is very different to when Spring break comes and a bunch of students throw litter everywhere. That's unfortunately a big part of park ranger duties. It's not like these students are dumb, they just don't care; the park isn't some core part of their habit, it's a temporary retreat and they won't really see the ramifications of their actions when they leave. Or worse, they think "somebody will clean it up" and work off that assumption that the trash fairy will make things better.
I'm guessing you see the analouges to internet forums. You've been around for decades, but many redditors may just be on metaphorical or literal break and just want to scroll a few pictures, make a few oh so witty XD responses on posts, maybe even make a post themselves. But they won't be around long. Heck, the community even called this phenemon Summer reddit, their localized version of (not)-Eternal September.
Everyone has their own cares in life, so it can be really hard to make a person care about a facet of your life you care about. Especially if they aren't invested to begin with. That lack of care is root to many endemic issues in society.
I think what you are trying to articulate partially falls under the eternal september issue and also the fluff principle Source: Article by Paul Graham, one of the people that made reddit possible...
but it does feel like the more users on a particular site, the lower the quality is.
I think what you are trying to articulate partially falls under the eternal september issue and also the fluff principle
"The Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it."
What this means is basically the following, say you have two submissions:
An article - takes a few minutes to judge.
An image - takes a few seconds to judge.
So in the time that it takes person A to read and judge he article person B, C, D, E en F already saw the image and made their judgement. So basically images will rise to the top not because they are more popular, but simply because it takes less time to vote on them so they gather votes faster.
Of course this does focus on voting heavily as it was written in the context of reddit. But it applies to content on the internet in general and even discussion. Long comments take longer to read and longer to reply to as an example.
And yes, the larger the group becomes the more difficult it becomes to keep things on a core subject and you generally tend to homogenize with a loss of quality and detail.
That effect was were apparent with how different subreddits grew in size. They either became yet another place for memes or moderators need to be very persistent in keeping the content in check,...
That effect was were apparent with how different subreddits grew in size. They either became yet another place for memes or moderators need to be very persistent in keeping the content in check, usually with having to deal with lots of protests from angry users that wanted the subreddit to be something else.
There are clearly good things with a smaller community with a common goal and where most people agree on what types of discussion they want. The downside is that it can become too uniform and an echochamber. One of the things I did get from Reddit that I usually don't get from smaller online communities, is hearing from people with a totally different perspective and background than my own.
I don't know if it's the nostalgia clouding your memory or if you found truly remarkable communities back then, but the forums I remember all had pretty low median quality - both for posts and...
My early days on the Internet, besides AIM, were dominated by forum usage- and these forums were dedicated to small, niche topics. But it was VERY high quality.
I don't know if it's the nostalgia clouding your memory or if you found truly remarkable communities back then, but the forums I remember all had pretty low median quality - both for posts and comments.
Yes, there was very high quality content, and lots of it. But in order to find it, you had to scroll past pages of users squabbling, off-topic questions in the middle of interesting discussion threads and just flat out wrong information. Posts being displayed chronologically and comment chains being linear really didn't allow any other way to organize that content.
When I joined Reddit 15 years ago, I remember being blown away by the concept of crowd-sourcing "sort by post quality" and non-linear discussion threads. It was like seeing light for the first time.
Some of that development is technological, and luckily we get to keep that. All modern link aggregators allow voting and non-linear discussions in the comments. But I think there's also a cultural component. Reddit during the first decade (and Tildes today) had/have a culture that doesn't support incessant arguments, derailing discussions and flat out wrong information. I'm curious to see if Lemmy manages to get the cultural aspect under control.
Here's the link to the podcast rss and here a direct link to the podcast file(mp3) as i downloaded it earlier to listen to. Skip first 30s to the start
Here's the link to the podcast rss and here a direct link to the podcast file(mp3) as i downloaded it earlier to listen to. Skip first 30s to the start
A recent podcast interview posted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of author Cory Doctorow. Talks about some of these concepts in relation to the state of the Internet.
Switching cost: The cost or barrier faced by users or customers when they want to switch from one product, platform, or service to another. It refers to the challenges, inconveniences, or losses associated with transitioning to an alternative option.
Enshittification: A term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the degradation or decline in the quality, functionality, or user experience of a product, service, or platform over time, often caused by the dominance of monopolistic companies.
Twiddling: The act of continuously and arbitrarily adjusting or changing the rules, policies, or features of a digital platform or service. It refers to the platform's ability to modify and control the parameters and conditions of use, often resulting in unpredictable and inconsistent user experiences.
Excited to read through the transcript as this is one of the phenomena that we've experienced but haven't exactly put into words before beyond talking about on message boards.
I do wish Doctorow coined a better word than "enshittification"...I think the term might distract people from taking the topic seriously.
It’s a refreshing term after decades of soft language. Enshittification cuts right to the marrow of what’s happening.
I just don't like that we had a perfectly usable word that we're ignoring for the sake of what sounds like some crude word a 14 year old would come up with.
It's simply rent-seeking. The definition and ideas perfectly mirror to an online service despite originally focusing on land ownership. It also has the bonus to teach and connect this idea back to housing since that is also a hot button issue as of late.
Rent seeking is the cause, enshitification is the effect. Besides, rent seeking is one of those communist adjacent terms that instantly causes way too many people who might otherwise agree with you to instantly dismiss what you're saying without even really putting any conscious thought into the dismissal. Cold war propaganda is a hell of a drug. Is, not was, unfortunately, because the propaganda never really stopped.
I feel rent seeking causes both. The cause is that you want more money for doing the same (or less) work. The effect is that you either simply cause price hikes directly or you lobby around to make it legal for you to do something that is currently not legal. the way enshitttification is described doesn't seem to add anything:
"the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other"
Yeah, seems to work. You can easily (or make it easier) to just charge more rent, but at the same time you don't want to scare off all sellers... Now granted in these modern job markets this isn't quite as applicable but it still holds most of its sentimentt.
To be frank, we're talking about modern internet platform design, not a general election (where those kinds of people tend to be older and represent more of the voter base). Are the kinds of people put off by that kind of thing really the ones we want to appeal to to begin with?
Rent seeking... causes rent seeking?
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying here. Enshitification is a description of the results of rent seeking as they apply to a certain class of software, and maybe more broadly to a few other things. Nothing you've said there really contradicts that aside from the initial dismissal.
As for the kinds of people put off by that terminology, yes. Those are exactly the people who need to be won over, and they're more receptive to it than you think. They've been propagandized into having kneejerk reactions to certain terminology, but those reactions are very surface level ones to the words themselves, not really to the concepts they represent, and their actual positions are often closer to yours than you'd think. Besides, preaching to the choir never got anything done. If you only talk to people who already agree with everything you're saying, you're never going to gain any new allies.
Who do you think needs to be won over? The old guard at the top of 20th century era media? Big wigs at corporations that just want to see more ad revenue? The current masterminds of social media to try and make them less greedy?
Maybe you're thinking parallel to me, or maybe at a much grander scale. I don't necessarily care if reddit gets blasted over the news for a month or if by some twist of fat all ads pull out and they go bankrupt in 1-2 years. I personally care more about appealing to content creators and community managers who can potentially pull off a mass migration to the next potential competitor, or future platform creators of the next big internet forum, and having them be aware of the pitfalls others have fallen into. That latter group is likely not ones as prone to the propoganda of olde.
Grander scale. Reddit is just one site of many that have gone through this process. It's not the first, it won't be the last, but the more people are aware of the larger problem, and not just the fact that some individual site they use has gotten worse, the closer we get to there being a last.
Hell, the site we're on right now was set up as a non-profit with a very specific mandate for the explicit reason of avoiding that fate. That's one result of one person seeing the problem and trying to change things for the better to the extent that he individually can.
Ok I'm not going to claim I have my finger on the pulse or anything but I have never heard of this. Is rent-seeking even in most peoples lexicons?
Maybe not directly, but if the average person has heard it it would be from some fringe lefty. There's basically three possible outcomes of using a phrase like that: You're using words they don't know at all and losing them that way, they know the term because they're already on your side and you're wasting your time preaching to the choir, or they know the term and it instantly turns them off.
Basically, the best tactic is to save the lefty jargon for talking shop with other lefties, not for public outreach.
I guess that just does not seem to line up with my experiences at all.
When someone brings up rent-seeking in a conversation, in my experience it's usually academic rather than 'grrr rent-seeking'. If a stranger were to bring it up to me, I'd probably get more minored in economics wonk vibes than a left one. Unless by left you just mean any university graduate with a passing interest in economics?
No, I mean actual Marxists mostly. And like, actual Marxists, not your far right drunkle's version where anyone with a degree is obviously a Marxist.
I'll take your word for it, but I'm still confused. Rent-seeking behavior seems like something you'd highlight as a proponent of market and monopoly regulation. I think it's a somewhat shallow criticism of capitalism as a whole though, I'd have thought Marxists would have bigger fish to fry. Now you could probably get a Georgist to talk in-depth about rent-seeking, but Georgists and Marxists are a bit like oil and water.
The problem from a Marxist perspective is it's a core feature of capitalism. You really can't regulate it out. Things like enshittificiation from that perspective are just natural results of capitalism and capitalistic incentives, and not some perversion or excess of extreme unregulated capitalism. It's just the natural result of the fundamentally extractive nature of the system.
I did almost bring up Georgists, though, because you're right that they're different in that rent seeking is their biggest bugbear. It's kind of a general thing you'll see brought up in economic far left spaces of any persuasion. Left anarchists talk about it too, for example.
You could call it "encoprofication" or "enfecalification". If that sounds too serious, maybe "enpoopification".
It was a good read, thank you. But I think I'm having enshittification fatigue. Everything is going even worse and there is no way for me to stop it. As someone who depends on Instagram both professionally and socially (I'm serious, there is no way out of it for me), all of this leaves me helpless and frustrated.
socially, you simply have to keep other channels of contact. If only because one day Meta can remove your account with no explanation whatsoever. Inevitably some, maybe many, friends will phase out as you phase out of their convinent part of life but the most important ones will keep in touch.
Professionally I understnad you have to be where the audience is. I'd just make sure to treat a professional account as simply that.
I've been there before. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter in 2018, many contacts were lost. It took 3 years for me to reconnect with many people. And that reconnection occured on Instagram. It's not just friends, professional contacts, etc. You can't move thousands of followers somewhere else, they are all locked in. It took me years to accumulate that many people; they are important because they amplify my work. I also did copywriting with a focus on digital marketing for a decade in another life, so I'm not a stranger to all of this.
This is kind of my annoyance with how the Fediverse has evolved. They focused too much on replicating the interaction paradigms of Twitter and Reddit and such, but they missed what’s fundamentally valuable about it, which is the social graph. The applications are just a front end that, I would argue, are largely matters of taste that people are indifferent to differentiating between.
What actually needs to get built out is the core of what ActivityPub does, which is a protocol for keeping track of who all follows you and publishing your stuff to them in whatever form. Services like Mastodon and Lemmy attempt to replicate the design and interaction paradigms of closed, monopolistic, ad platforms because they’re stuck thinking in terms of features and not the actual personal itch those features are meant to scratch.
ActivityPub needs to bill itself as basically open Active Directory or personal Rolodex. The Fediverse needs to bill itself as the universe of applications that you can link the social graph in that directory with and stop trying to say stuff like “this is Instagram but Federated.” No BS about instances or who runs what. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about implementation details.
Me too. It's times like this when I'm surrounded by ugliness and filth that I need to take a step back an re-balance out my perspective and diet. A tiny story:
(From St Paisios of Mt Athos)
You and I are more complex than the bee or the fly: we can appreciate the Iris and in the next breath sit on a pile of filth. So, sometimes when I feel overwhelmed by the grossness, I have to step back and choose to be the bee.
For example, in Mark Rober's recent video about drones, there's some super good things an engineer and doctors are doing for humanity over in Rwanda: not for shopping but delivering blood and life saving supplies quickly.
Tildes exists because Deimos built it as a non-profit.
My local food bank is run by volunteering retirees.
This morning I learned about some books on raising better boys and girls and I'm looking forward to reading.....
So, I understand how you feel, that a wildfire is sweeping across the land and there's just desolation in every direction. But we still have each other, and others who are still doing good things need our attention and support.
Acktchyually... many flies are pollinators! So I would say: you can choose to be a trash fly, or you can choose to be a flower fly. :o)
including the adorable bee flies :D So erh, be the uh, be the pollinator!
The enshittification will continue until morale improves.
What kind of work do you do that requires Instagram? No snark, I'm curious. I'm thinking something to do with photography or visual art? Weddings?
I'm a photographer. Everyone is on it: other photographers, photo editors, curators, gallery owners, collectors... I do have emails of most people but also many magazines and newspapers still make initial contact on it. It's basically the inbox of my industry.
Switching cost, I think, has really amplified over time when it comes to web services. As more and more of our lives got put online it's gotten just ever more painful to move away from services. Like, alright, you'd like to stop using Gmail. Well, you'll have to change your email address on about 20 years of accounts and correspondence and official records. I don't think I could possibly pull that off. And I basically locked myself into it before I was even an adult. Email might be the worst case of it, but it's definitely a big thing for any online service - hard to just quit Instagram if you're the socialable type and every friend you have uses it to keep in touch, and so on.
I made one failed attempt in 2018. Then re-attempted in 2022 and this time it was a success. I have a Proton Mail inbox with a custom domain and also started using SimpleLogin last year. I use Bitwarden so I started gradually changing my email address everywhere each time I logged in to a website or service where I haven't done that yet. I imported my whole Gmail data into Proton, it worked surprisingly well. I set up message forwarding from Gmail to Proton for anything else that still hits my old inbox. I had Gmail for 12 years or so. You can do it! :)
Maybe I'll give a shot, when I have more time in my life to fight the inertia. There's so many emails across my multitude of email accounts...
Proton has a useful guide (they have more): https://proton.me/blog/how-to-migrate-to-protonmail
More than anything, isp monopolies have held back gigabyte speeds and infrastructure. Remember when you could have a tiny home server and host your own website. I thought https would fix that? But obviously I have no idea what I'm talking about. I imagine hyper aware browser malware detection keeps most of any idea of a home server null and void.
You can certainly get a valid https certificate and self host your own website and that will be enough to satisfy web browsers, though it has its own challenges. Bandwidth, securing the site, maintaining enough hardware capability to handle load, all might be problems you run into. Just depends on your technical skills, the resources you have available, and your goals. A lot of people have turned to using cloud hosting services, which mitigate a lot of those issues for you - which of course comes with its own risks, that the platform shuts down, raises prices, or changes their business in a way that makes using it untenable.
Now email, that's a case where it's become increasingly difficult to self host. Major email providers like Gmail and 365 have started to filter out self hosted email servers, in the name of security and spam prevention, so it's not unlikely your self-hosted emails get relegated to the void. It comes off more anticompetitive than security based to me, because the majority of spam I get comes from Gmail addresses, so doesn't seem like they're paying that much attention...
Doctorow is one of those people that end up looking increasingly prescient as time goes on, and who I really wish more people in charge had listened to
Have you looked at boingboing, though?
He is shoving products down your throat left and right. He has personally made his site a capitalistic sore, yet decries the horrible internet of today.
His stuff is the realized concept of “enshitification” that he talks about.
Should be noted that he left boingboing over three years ago. I'm not familiar with the site in general, so I can't speak to how it was during his tenure in comparison to now.
It started as an awesome, quirky collection of sites and links in a blog format.
I did not know he left, however, that site has been garbage for waaayyy longer than 3 years now.
Yeah, I am kinda miffed, because I really liked the stance he took at the beginning, and boingboing was my "goto" site for a loooong time.
Then, money happened?
He is doing his own thing nowadays over on pluralistic.net, which might be worth a look.
whoop!
THIS is what boingboing was like before getting enshitificated!
Hope this lasts for a bit.
Thank you!
Sounds like he may have quit because of the enshitification of Boing Boing outside his control maybe?
As I said, that has been going on for a while (no wayback machine for me at work...) and way before he left.
Might have just gotten a good deal.
I think that's what the other guy meant. That he left because the site was getting enshitified and his name was attached to it but he wasn't in full enough control of it to stop it.
He actually still owns part of it.
From wikipedia:
“ Cory Doctorow left Boing Boing in January 2020, and soon started a solo blogging project titled Pluralistic.24 The circumstances surrounding Doctorow’s exit from the website were unclear at the time, although Doctorow acknowledged that he remained a co-owner of Boing Boing.2425 MetaFilter described the end of the 19-year association between Doctorow and Boing Boing as “the equivalent of the Beatles breaking up” for the blog world.25 Doctorow’s exit was not acknowledged by Boing Boing, with his name being quietly removed from the list of editors on 29 January 2020.26”
—> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boing_Boing
Okay, now that's some hypocrisy. He's now exactly one of the shareholders with a purely financial stake that cause the whole thing he's always railing about.
Now, I was mistaken in that I thought he was the founder (it was Frauenfdelder), but he was such a popular figure on the site... oh well
The hypocrisy is why I am so miffed.
I'm losing my mind reading these words aloud.
I meant that maybe he tried resisting enshitification of Boing Boing while he was there, but after some years of failures he decided to quit.
Oh, haha yeah I know the message is fine, just discussing the "enshitification of boing boing" sounds like goofy nonsense words
Ah, I wondered which was it, erred on the side of caution :p Could be the definition of web technobabble.
Cory Doctorow is no longer associated with BoingBoing, and hasn't been for years.
He's blogging at Pluralistic.net, with those pieces being shared as well to his Fediverse profile (
@pluralistic@mamot.fr).He's also podcasting at Craphound: https://craphound.com/podcast/
I just want to point out that enshittification is not exclusive to web platforms. Consumer goods are trending shittier too. Shrinkflation, non-functional slack fill, cheaper reformulations, etc. have been slowly dialing up the awfulness of once-great products. There’s not a lot of hard data that I’ve seen on this… the r/shrinkflation subreddit was a good resource. But anecdotally speaking, a ton of brands I used to love as a kid have been gradually devolving into cheap facsimiles of themselves.
I won't say I've been on the Internet forever, but I've been on it a loooooooong time. And I feel like they missed an VERY important one, even though it's an ugly one.
First, let me just say that Switching Cost is probably one of the biggest factors compared to the others... but I really do think that Tragedy of the Commons is a major factor in the Internet's decline.
Arguably this falls into Gatekeeping territory, but I swear there's been a study about how when more and more people get together, the overall intelligence level drops. It's also been remarked that "It was once thought that once people had access to all available information, they would also become better. Well, the Internet has come and given us information, but it appears that access to information may not have been the problem we though it was." Mind you, this does ignore information manipulation.
To go back to my rather unfortunate gatekeeping observation, there IS something I've witnessed firsthand. My early days on the Internet, besides AIM, were dominated by forum usage- and these forums were dedicated to small, niche topics. But it was VERY high quality. As things changed, people moved on, and I went from smaller platforms to larger platforms... I found the quality of content decreasing. We can even see it right now- Reddit is practically in its death throes, whereas Tildes- a smaller platform than Reddit- seems to be doing quite well. Now, I do realize that there are other factors involved, and especially in Reddit's case. I also understand that the more people on a particular website, the more it costs to upgrade and maintain servers, and that's where commercialization often becomes a factor. I actually wonder if it should be more looked at "causation is NOT correlation", but it does feel like the more users on a particular site, the lower the quality is.
I agree with your sentiment. But I think instead of "intelligence" it's better to frame it as "care".
Let's take the metaphor to a park. You have a few families in a park, they come a few times a week, the kids play, the parents clean up their picnics and make sure the kids aren't hurt, and everything works perfectly fine. Maybe a few family disputes, but things overall are pretty civil.
This is very different to when Spring break comes and a bunch of students throw litter everywhere. That's unfortunately a big part of park ranger duties. It's not like these students are dumb, they just don't care; the park isn't some core part of their habit, it's a temporary retreat and they won't really see the ramifications of their actions when they leave. Or worse, they think "somebody will clean it up" and work off that assumption that the trash fairy will make things better.
I'm guessing you see the analouges to internet forums. You've been around for decades, but many redditors may just be on metaphorical or literal break and just want to scroll a few pictures, make a few oh so witty XD responses on posts, maybe even make a post themselves. But they won't be around long. Heck, the community even called this phenemon Summer reddit, their localized version of (not)-Eternal September.
Everyone has their own cares in life, so it can be really hard to make a person care about a facet of your life you care about. Especially if they aren't invested to begin with. That lack of care is root to many endemic issues in society.
I think what you are trying to articulate partially falls under the eternal september issue and also the fluff principle
Source: Article by Paul Graham, one of the people that made reddit possible
What this means is basically the following, say you have two submissions:
So in the time that it takes person A to read and judge he article person B, C, D, E en F already saw the image and made their judgement. So basically images will rise to the top not because they are more popular, but simply because it takes less time to vote on them so they gather votes faster.
Of course this does focus on voting heavily as it was written in the context of reddit. But it applies to content on the internet in general and even discussion. Long comments take longer to read and longer to reply to as an example.
And yes, the larger the group becomes the more difficult it becomes to keep things on a core subject and you generally tend to homogenize with a loss of quality and detail.
That effect was were apparent with how different subreddits grew in size. They either became yet another place for memes or moderators need to be very persistent in keeping the content in check, usually with having to deal with lots of protests from angry users that wanted the subreddit to be something else.
There are clearly good things with a smaller community with a common goal and where most people agree on what types of discussion they want. The downside is that it can become too uniform and an echochamber. One of the things I did get from Reddit that I usually don't get from smaller online communities, is hearing from people with a totally different perspective and background than my own.
I don't know if it's the nostalgia clouding your memory or if you found truly remarkable communities back then, but the forums I remember all had pretty low median quality - both for posts and comments.
Yes, there was very high quality content, and lots of it. But in order to find it, you had to scroll past pages of users squabbling, off-topic questions in the middle of interesting discussion threads and just flat out wrong information. Posts being displayed chronologically and comment chains being linear really didn't allow any other way to organize that content.
When I joined Reddit 15 years ago, I remember being blown away by the concept of crowd-sourcing "sort by post quality" and non-linear discussion threads. It was like seeing light for the first time.
Some of that development is technological, and luckily we get to keep that. All modern link aggregators allow voting and non-linear discussions in the comments. But I think there's also a cultural component. Reddit during the first decade (and Tildes today) had/have a culture that doesn't support incessant arguments, derailing discussions and flat out wrong information. I'm curious to see if Lemmy manages to get the cultural aspect under control.
Here's the link to the podcast rss and here a direct link to the podcast file(mp3) as i downloaded it earlier to listen to. Skip first 30s to the start