The article ends with:
it is only going to get shittier
(in reference to a comment that Musk had said to advertisers to go ‘fuck themselves’, so meaning i.e. X, not necessarily overall, i.e. Fediverse)
Article about an article. Hey, at least the site isn't filled with ads. Oh wait.
While 99% of the news media at this point is clickbait, this one at least adds new information: "Enshittification... has been named 2023's Digital Word of the Year." The original article did not say that:-).
Also, yes there are ads, but also it's not blocked by a paywall so... checks and balances. Whereas X is basically just fully trash at this point, now that Musk has cancelled Twitter:-P.
The original "article" isn't an article, it's just an announcement.
https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/
As for this article, it's a blog post attached to a book store, expanding on Doctorow and their book. There's a lot more context being added in this blog post than in that announcement. There's ads but they're just ads for the books available in this store. I.e. relevant to people who are visiting a book store's website.
Not saying shitty sites don't lazily re-write articles all the time to harvest views, but this isn't a good example of that.
It's a publisher, not a book store FWIW.
I believe there is a balance between viable online businesses and bad products due to overloading of ads.
I bought The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow since Amazon refused to publish it. Talks about how big tech is out of control. Nothing new but still a good book.
Looks like it’s on Amazon though?
Yeah it's there now actually. Interesting...
Not really. It wouldn't sell well enough before so why host ammo to the enemy?
Now it has pull tho, and capitalists will sell us the rope we hang them with
Ah, looked it up and apparently it’s the audiobook that isn’t listed.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation
2022's word was the suffix -ussy. We're in for an linguistically amusing decade.
I'm glad that Debussy finally got some recognition with the younger generations.
Start with Debussy, end on Deback?
Sounds kinda sussy to me.
That sounds like a word that's only used by people who are really into Linux.
How about enshitussy?
Edit: this is more cursed than I intended
If you haven't, and you enjoy scifi/cyberpunk fiction, you should read Cory's book "Radicalized". Four short stories, all of them damn relevant to today.
The first story, "Unauthorized bread", is my fav. Hackers versus the coldness of corpos and shitty landlords.
I haven't read Unauthorized bread but you've just reminded me of Stallman's "Right to Read" very short story, which is about a future where, God forbid, you might read someone else's book without paying a licensing fee. Not the most amazing story, but it perfectly presaged things like scientific journals being paywalled today.
American Dialect Society
Whom?
You son of a bitch... You're baiting me.
(Sorry, couldn't resist.). :)
Then, they die
I think he got this part wrong.
He was actually being too optimistic, how depressing
We want a web where users are in control. That means a web where we freely choose our online services from a wide menu and stay with them because we like them, not because we can’t afford to leave. We want a web where you get the things you ask for, not the things that corporate shareholders would prefer that you’d asked for. We want a web where willing listeners and willing speakers, willing sellers and willing buyers, willing makers, and willing audiences are all able to transact and communicate without worrying about their relationships being held hostage or disrupted to cram “sponsored posts” into their eyeballs.
I feel this deeply, but I worry we're long past it. A platform has to facilitate these things. which means you have to surrender to the way the platform works to participate. And the truth is, no matter if it's volunteers or a corporation, there is going to be an interfering element that you have to trust not to fuck with you.
The fediverse feels like it's part of the solution, but not all of it. There are still gatekeepers here who are capable of abusing that position to "disrupt", maybe not for "sponsored posts", but for other reasons.
Craigslist can do it, it can be done.
Craigslist is the Achilles heel to the big tech bros, proof that they're wrong, and Craig flag out refuses to change the site. It is what it is. And that's it. I fucking love Craigslist, besides the various niche forums, all self hosted from their website -fuck reddit, it is hands down my favorite part of the internet.
Everything else is advertising, trackers and opportunists. The whole Internet feels like walking down a seedy alley full of grabby sex offenders in Mumbai.
That's where I place advertisers in the social hierarchy, as peers to sex offenders, pedo's and rapists, and I know I am not the only one with such designations. Maybe think twice about that marketing major, just saying.
Bill Hicks would have approved.
The problem with fedi is that you need some kind of lowest common denominator gatekeeper. So that a client can tell the server: I don’t want to see x,y,z and it works reliably.
In order to have that functionality, someone has to class that content first. You can’t trust the author implicitly, so you have to trust either the server or a moderation group.
How you define the mod group, be it random community member based on comment and post karma, or a trusted ring of insiders with votes, or some other method, data still needs a place to be stored.
isn't that just subscribing to different communities though? and relying on the voting system, but that's much more ostensibly democratic than just An Algorithm
Vote counting is an algorithm. I think a lot of people want a unicorn and are apalled when someone offers them a magical horse with a horn because it's not what they wanted.
I'm not sure about Doctorow's conclusion that enshittified services die. They will go worse but then rise to the minimum level of shit people can stomach and also use all their capital and influence and power to maintain their position. Including things like lobbying for more regulations that they can afford but newcomers can't.
The obvious answer is the fediverse where accounts are not owned by one service. But it still has a long way to go and could fail, could be sabotaged, could splinter, could be regulated into oblivion, or could just fail to get enough people on board.
Closely followed by EEE - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. While not a single word, it dovetails nicely with enshittification.
Enshitified services don't die, they are too big to fail unfortunately.
"Too big to fail" truly the dream of any capitalist.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
