The word "enshittification" seems to be a Maxwell's Daemon designed to concentrate all the stray negative thoughts into (this) one huge snipe session.
(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.)
Informed people who understand the nuance, tradeoffs and choices involved are, in a sense, the enemy.
In any case, it's not meant as a slur but a compliment, in my case.
> 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 $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good.
> It is exactly that content that Twitter's new model relies on promoting - and those newly-minted blue ticks are quickly learning that there is no magic behind the checkmarks. New followers are not magically heading their way. The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good.
> That means lots of blue ticks stop paying - but everyone else is forced to read the low-quality content that the remaining blue ticks produce. This is what is powering the enshittification of Twitter.
(From: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitt...)
It's also kind of a Pandora's box; even if they removed the attention boost, the taint is already there, and people will be suspicious of bluetick replies forever.
Pay your fee, you get not only an attention boost, but the ability to un-boost blues. If the net result is 0, the Nash Equilibrium is that everybody pays.
Look how many people "#BlockTheBlue" on twitter right now. Just charge them to make it easy. The real value in someone who's willing to pay to be seen isn't in their 8$ subscription, it's in the 100 other people they incentivize to pay you to shut them up.
But I think you have to be quite naive to believe that a New Blue Tick™ will game that.
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.
$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.
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.
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.
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.
Please cut that. Everyone wants 'a couple of coffees' and it adds up even for SV techbros.
(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.)
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.
And the value of a blue check is less than that.
Wow.
The truth of the matter is these platforms always invent wacky schemes to sedate people into a false narrative that they can go viral, or even that they can be recognized for their talent or wisdom, but undercover the platform does nothing to promote individuals, and often does a lot to DEMOTE individual posters on them.
If one truly understands how things work, these platforms often have millions of people as a potential audience for content. They only show posts to an ever shrinking fraction of 1 percent of that multi-million user audience initially (in between all the paid ads), often they barely do that and give users less than 300 views by an audience they know is not a good demographic fit for their post (e.g showing a post about penguin migration to a rapper promoting his music in LA, rather than showing the content to a known animal scientist who would be much more likely to click on "like") .
As a result of frustration with low views and limited validation/affirmation of their work and time, many users pay for ad boosting, which still now usually does not work in their favor, because the audience is never properly aligned with the content for viewing there again. Even an audience of 20k people on a platform of millions is measley. The platform has no interest in making users more popular, because they will log in less, spend less on ads, and possibly relocate their activities to another platform if they grew in popularity.
If you take an honest look at the type of content that trends, it's often not funny, not creative, not the best, but now it's there because it had healthy funding for ads behind it, to get it to the right audience that liked it (if it's not boosted by nefarious -bots= etc...).
The truth is, that if each content poster was exposed/promoted to a much wider audience, they'd find their niche, SIMILAR to how original Twitter was, this is why no one is getting followers any more,because the audiences who can view posts have become too small out of shear manipulation for ad profit. It's not about post quality, that's simply a lie that coddles wealthy and celebrity posters and maintains the status quo of limiting upward mobility on social media sites.
Paying for visibility on a social media service is far too manipulative, there should be a simple flat fee for access in my opinion because paying for visibility creates an inherent inequality. Deceptively promoting a service as free with tiers also deceives people into signing up for a service that is deceptively handicapped/neutered until they figure out they need to pay monthly for only slightly a less handicapped tier (still far below wealthy individuals and celebrities on each platform).
It's a self defeating cycle that only social platforms profit from. It would be better if content creators truly recognized that and saw through the others with tons of cash and the sponsored (undercover social media company employees) all faking their success to make these casino companies look legit.
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.
> 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.
Most art is political, you probably just can't take a hint.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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/...
Without timestamps: https://pastebin.com/F1NVMeQq
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.
* 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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
The internet was the mysterious wild west, Now its just a boring corporate meeting room.
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.
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.
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.
No point to this comment, other than that I find it interesting how these things spread.
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.
1. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/co...
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.
Anyway first class is still pretty comfortable IMO. And airports are much nicer than before.
None of this should come as a surprise though and we can merely see it as one mode of capitalism working as intended. The problem wouldn't be nearly as bad if the companies were family owned rather than by venture capitalists and investors.
Classic literature: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095101
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.
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.
What expectation of knowledge make the average person taking a deal, greedy? And how many people taking that deal meet that expectation of knowledge?
It depends on how you define "work". They may not work in the way that the users were led to believe, but often enough someone got rich, and in that sense they do work.
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.
Which today is primarily Google, Amazon, Meta, and yes, even Apple (0)
(0) https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-privacy-analytics-class-act...
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.
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.
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%.
- 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)
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.
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.
> consumers will become warier of lock-in
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 ...
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.
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.
https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/
I welcome any tactful feedback. Also I have no idea how to initiate such an idea.
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.
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
(don't forget the Wilderness Years, Apple came close to death)
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.)
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.
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.
Rule 34 needs a twin:
Anything can be useful.
Therefore, anything can be enshittified. And will be.
Period dot period. QED. I have spoken.
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.
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.
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.
This is why anything recommended by a for-profit dentist is the opposite of what you should probably buy.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
So going for some unhealthy revenue target is the path of least resistance, since the failure still is in the future.
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?
I hate to be the bringer of bad news bud, but their isnt as many people online as you think there are.
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.
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?!
Your calculation is roughly correct but a p/e of 10 is kinda low so probably you can halve the numbers at least.
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
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.
Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate.
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.
(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.)
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.
You get a decent VPS for 8€/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.
If everyone felt entitled to charge $8 for not much in return that can add up and mean real money even to US-centric people, once they're paying it to 50 different services every month that deliver (and ask) for "nothing".
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.
War videos and pirated books.
There's a lot of 'art' on twitter which is, for a lack of a better term, porn.
I disagree with this. While this group certainly exists, there's a far larger segment of people that have a variable cost-return analysis eschewing towards rock bottom that inevitably lends itself to buying shittier products.
In other words, a lot of people are cheapskates.
You can make a stellar game app but even charging one flat $5 fee will absolutely tank your downloads because people would rather play hundreds of ad-ridden shitty lootbox gambling games for free. And what's worse, they'll even try to pirate your game for the fuck of it too.
It plagues food shelves with increasingly worse results. People don't give a shit about cage free, roaming organically grass fed whatever eggs. Sure, some do, but not most. Oh, Carton B costs 20 cents less than Carton A? Bingo. I just saved 20 cents. The eggs taste practically the same (they don't). But it gets them 90% there, and that's a compromise most people are fine with because they saved money. This trickles up to the producers, who obviously emphasize Carton A production now. Let it go on for long enough, with a little bit of poor government oversight, and you can even sell Carton A eggs as Carton B, and reap more from the suckers who think they're getting a better product. It's greed all the way around, and people fuck themselves constantly because of it. It's why we have laws and building codes and health and safety regulations. Society functions on setting the minimum bar for everything, because otherwise we devolve into chaos. And people constantly love to fucking limbo.
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.
The amount of piracy that occurs and the number of bad things that happen because consumers buy purely based on price without doing basic research shows that yes, the customers are greedy.
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.
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.:(
It only doesn’t work for outsized expectations after a decade of interest binge party.
I agree.
The Twitter tick had some cool when it was a mark of authenticity. Now it's a bit cringe.
The embarrassment factor might work better for Twitter if they offer an option similar to what LinkedIn does for paying users: Give the user the option to disable the blue tick on their account so other people don't know they are paying, while still having access to useful paid account features.
Like you I'd be more willing to pay a small amount for API access and useful features if I can do so quietly, without broadcasting the fact.
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.
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.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/undertheinfluence/the-ingenious-way...
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)
That too, but that wasn't the point :)
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).
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/10/19/apples-...
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.
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.
I also consider a few products disposable like that, but it's generally cheaper things. Non-stick pans are one of those, they work until they don't and I'm not going to baby them.
By fired, do you mean receive multimillion dollar payouts and jobs from their friends at another place where they can do it all again?
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)?
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.
But if their assessment of the badge change is correct, then it is a valid case of enshittification.
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.
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.
I thought the $8 for Elon was for publishers, not consumers?
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.
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.
If they have a different opinion that's fine too. Discussion shouldn't have a first mover advantage.
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?
Other forms of 2FA are still available to everyone.
> 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?
> 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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/dealbook/milton-...
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.
> That was his theory back in 1776, things didn't turn out that way obviously
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.
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.
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.
> pushing out small businesses from every town
Those small businesses are also run on a for profit basis and are market driven. If there is something causing them to fail despite providing a better quality of service then perhaps we are still looking at market distortions rather than a fundamental failing of capitalism.
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.
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!)
Fortunately, most economists already agree that market failures exist, and that free-market economics is bunk.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/
Though I am not sure the political will exists.
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.
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.
I had half an idea yesterday on this from HN:
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.
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.
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?
The person who set up the server doesn't, no, they can appoint moderators that lack administrative privileges. I don't recall at the moment if moderators have the ability to federate/defederate with peers, and that might be an implementation detail anyway. This is probably the way a large well-run node should work - developing a team of moderators from within the community.
> there doesn’t seem to be a reason that users themselves couldn’t “mute” troublesome posters from their own feeds, right?
This is true as far as it goes, but if a node federates with peers that dump a high volume of content onto the network the user doesn't want to see, then the user will find it a headache to manually filter just what they want to see (approximately the feeling of manually filtering out email spam). So some filtering should be done by the host.
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.
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.
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.