cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn’t have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to “five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four” (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don’t have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!
The internet will always have many niche places, but overall it can’t escape late stage capitalism.
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Big tech has really ruined what we all thought the internet would be
I remember when the Internet first came out in the '90s, you would occasionally read someone talking about how when radio and TV first started they were pretty cool and wide-open as well, but they gradually got taken over by large corporate interests and played/showed a lot of trash filled with advertisements.
The ideal internet was open and free if you could pay hosting and bandwidth costs - generally those who were associated with universities could
If you wanna fix this, there needs to be more incentive for people to develop open source software. It doesn’t have to be created by individuals either. Organizations and nonprofits can be used to make basic services for the Internet, like utilities. Or this could be a government agency. There is already talks of classifying Internet access as a utility instead of leaving it to private ISPs. This would be a step beyond that but could be done first.
Monetary donations help a ton. Even a few bucks. I always pay for FOSS projects I enjoy and use.
Antitrust and privacy regulations are all nice and good, but I think the core problems of the Internet is a technical one: We don’t have peer to peer connectivity on the Internet anymore.
The whole reason for the Internet to exists in the first place was to connect computers, but for whatever reason, that feature of the net never made it down to the average user. Dynamic IP addresses means you can’t find anybody and firewalls/NAT means you can’t connect to them even if you do. Even trivial tasks like copying a file from one computer to another have no standard solution on the Internet. This means everybody is forced to services like GoogleDrive or Dropbox as an intermediate. Same is true for chat, video calls and so on. Everything has to go through another service to be usable. The majority of those services don’t even use standard protocols, lock the user in, which in turn empowers them to use enshittification.
Until peer to peer connectivity is solved I have little hope for the Internet to get better.
If someone wants to host something, NAT won’t stop them. IMO the bigger problem is that most folks have neither time, skill, nor interest to make p2p a reality. I’m a pretty savvy admin, host a lot of services for myself and family, but I don’t pretend to be good enough or vigilant enough to run anything public, i.e. mail server, lemmy server, etc, without major security concerns.
It’d be stupid easy for assholes to hack or swat you if that was implemented though.
Part of it is the war between security and privacy vs open architecture. The moment you leave your car unlocked some creep will rob you.
Anybody got a TLDW;? Or did all of you just comment on the title and the snippet?
Reposting from PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com in Technology@beehaw.org
Here’s an AI outline because this was actually a good talk:
How Platforms Die The speaker introduces the concept of platform decay or “enshittification” and how it leads to the death of internet platforms. He defines platforms as firms like Uber, Amazon, and Facebook that connect users and business customers. He outlines a 3-stage process called enshittification where platforms: Are initially good to users Abuse users to benefit business customers Eventually abuse business customers to only benefit shareholders This results in the platform becoming a “pile of shit” that dies. Facebook Case Study He uses Facebook as a case study of enshittification’s 3 stages: Initially attracted users by promising privacy protections and custom feeds Then broke promises and sold user data to advertisers and flooded feeds with publisher content Finally, reduced value to users and fees for publishers to extract all value for shareholders This led to an angry user base and brittle equilibrium Causes of Enshittification Lack of Competition Weak antitrust enforcement has allowed consolidation across industries Companies can use predatory pricing to undercut competitors Mergers eliminate competition Example: Google relying on acquisitions rather than in-house innovation Unrestricted “Backend Tweaking” Tech platforms control the algorithms and systems behind their products They can arbitrarily change these to alter user experiences e.g. Facebook reducing visibility of publisher content in feeds Done without transparency, oversight or accountability Bans on Reverse Engineering Laws like DMCA 1201 and CFAA criminalize circumventing DRM and terms of service Makes it illegal to reverse engineer platforms to enable interoperability Tech companies use IP laws to prevent modding and adversarial interoperability e.g. Apple using IP laws to prevent iOS modding Solutions Strengthen Antitrust Enforcement Block anti-competitive mergers Break up existing tech giants Pass Privacy, Labor and Consumer Protection Laws Comprehensive federal privacy laws with private right of action End worker misclassification through gig economy Apply consumer protection standards to platforms Allow Adversarial Interoperability Roll back laws criminalizing modding, reverse engineering Use government procurement to incentivize open ecosystems Appoint special masters to oversee platform legal threats Keep Interoperators in Check Bind interoperators to the same privacy, fair trading and labor laws Determined through democratic process vs corporate policy Conclusion We need to prepare and spread these policy ideas to capitalize on the next crisis Efforts are underway to enable a better internet through this approachThe steps to fix this might as well say have Jesus come to life and fix it all… It’s depressing, but there is zero chance of any of that happening… Nevermind all of it.
Our best bet is for consumers to fight back with their wallets, but people are on average too stupid to even understand how they are being fleeced. We’re fucked.
Thanks. Here’s a slightly easier to read on mobile non-monospace paste:
How Platforms Die The speaker introduces the concept of platform decay or “enshittification” and how it leads to the death of internet platforms. He defines platforms as firms like Uber, Amazon, and Facebook that connect users and business customers. He outlines a 3-stage process called enshittification where platforms: Are initially good to users Abuse users to benefit business customers Eventually abuse business customers to only benefit shareholders This results in the platform becoming a “pile of shit” that dies.
Facebook Case Study He uses Facebook as a case study of enshittification’s 3 stages: Initially attracted users by promising privacy protections and custom feeds Then broke promises and sold user data to advertisers and flooded feeds with publisher content Finally, reduced value to users and fees for publishers to extract all value for shareholders This led to an angry user base and brittle equilibrium Causes of Enshittification Lack of Competition Weak antitrust enforcement has allowed consolidation across industries Companies can use predatory pricing to undercut competitors Mergers eliminate competition Example: Google relying on acquisitions rather than in-house innovation Unrestricted “Backend Tweaking” Tech platforms control the algorithms and systems behind their products They can arbitrarily change these to alter user experiences e.g. Facebook reducing visibility of publisher content in feeds Done without transparency, oversight or accountability Bans on Reverse Engineering Laws like DMCA 1201 and CFAA criminalize circumventing DRM and terms of service Makes it illegal to reverse engineer platforms to enable interoperability Tech companies use IP laws to prevent modding and adversarial interoperability e.g. Apple using IP laws to prevent iOS modding Solutions Strengthen Antitrust Enforcement Block anti-competitive mergers Break up existing tech giants Pass Privacy, Labor and Consumer Protection Laws Comprehensive federal privacy laws with private right of action End worker misclassification through gig economy Apply consumer protection standards to platforms Allow Adversarial Interoperability Roll back laws criminalizing modding, reverse engineering Use government procurement to incentivize open ecosystems Appoint special masters to oversee platform legal threats Keep Interoperators in Check Bind interoperators to the same privacy, fair trading and labor laws Determined through democratic process vs corporate policy Conclusion We need to prepare and spread these policy ideas to capitalize on the next crisis Efforts are underway to enable a better internet through this approach
Just listen to the video itself?
It’s a 45-minute video. That’s a big investment just to engage with a Lemmy post.
That was such a great video. I highly recommend everybody listen to it (there is no visual presentation so listening is enough). Great content, great delivery.
We need more than this.
We need a way to make sure that the internet can’t be owned, physically.
We need some kind of easy to use and fast and robust open source alternate internet that we can all use.
Something that somehow costs nothing to run, that has enough storage and bandwidth for everyone and everything.
Something that has interoperability built in. Every platform should confirm to openid or openauth or activitypub or something like that.
And you know what? we have the technology!
We all have spare devices lying around. Old PC’s, old laptops, old phones - they could all be running some kind of node in a distributed platform of some kind of open source AWS equivalent, and let anyone host anything and post anything without getting ad-raped or data stolen.
It’s a pipe dream of mine, and I’m sure others… but with a will and a movement we could just take it all back, all at once.
and let anyone host anything
That’s how they’ll spin the legislation to ban it:
Pedophiles and terrorists use that service!
Side note – I wanted to use ‘X’ instead as a variable above, but Musk ruined that.
That’s why you need digital signatures and authorship tracking. Copyright just by itself would already put an end to every P2P alternative or at least stop it from ever gaining any mass traction. On the other side if everybody put a digital signature under their published work, others could mirror it without themselves becoming responsible and you could have take downs of objectionable material via blacklists.
So far very few of the P2P alternatives implement anything like that and even those that do just have arbitrary accounts that don’t link back to any real person.
This of course goes against the whole anonymity and privacy focus that has been predominant in this field for the last 20 years. But if we actually want a real alternative to the Web, not just some toy app with a dozen users, I think it’s the only way to go. And of course you could also have a layer of indirection in there to provide some anonymity or pseudonymity, so it’s not like those things would be impossible, just reduced.
To stop enshitification we have to kill all advertising and marketing of products online. Make the net as hostile as possible to people trying to capitalize on it.
Just get people out of the equation if you want to stop this pattern.
Seriously though, this is how every industry has developed throughout history.
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👍good👍 idea💡 bro 💪 fuck🤬 😤😤😤 emogys🫠 they ruin💩 the 😌sanctity🙏 of 🧑💻online🌍 discourse🗣️ and∧ 😩debase😈 👩👩👦👦us👥 all∀
→If➡️ I 👁️ ever see👀 another🫴 🍑emojee💯 I’m ⏰gonna🪬 💦💦💦 🍆 ⚰️ 🚾 ⚠️ ☯️🅱️ 😎😎😎
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TFW cute pictures: 😱 😠 🤬 😤
TFW sanctimonious drivel: 😌 👍 😍 🥳
I get the idea, but I also don’t want to go back to the days when BestGore and LiveLeak were around either, you know
Illegal content will still be illegal, no one is promoting criminal activities in this talk. Privacy and safety do not have to be mutually exclusive.
Hahahaha. “Go back to”?
Just because you don’t know what they are called today doesn’t mean those sites stopped existing. Shock and gore sites have been part of the Internet for a long time because they fill a human desire, same as porn and gambling and anything that makes your brain think you’re being naughty enough to hand out that sweet dopamine reward.
Slightly before the internet we had The Coliseum for our gore fetish.
Watching people die fills a desire to who?
I can’t possibly imagine the kind of person that would think watching people die is somehow on par with whacking off, and gambling? I mean did you really just compare whacking it and playing slots in Vegas to watching someone get killed?
You should do some reading on humans and violence as entertainment. It’s been a part of civilization since the beginning, homie.
Teenagers, adrenaline junkies, other thrill seekers of all sorts. People jumping out of airplanes is a popular hobby worldwide and so is controlled falling down snow-covered mountains. People get happy doing weird stuff, what can I tell you?
That’s fine, you don’t have to understand everything everyone else does.
Sick fucks that’s who, and free speech absolutistes in here defending snuff like wtf. I want federation, but I still believe in moderation
What are you talking about? The internet is full of people being mangled in Ukraine or shot in police footage . If anything there is more death online now than before.
Yes, but right now their experience is carefully tailored by Facebook, Google, or reddit so they don’t have to experience them.
Exactly. By making the internet more welcoming to advertisers, in a way we also made it more easy going. I would rather not go back to the days where just scrolling opened you up to seeing gore, goatse, or worse.
Like it’s valid to want good moderation. I think that’s all the other person was saying
Why? If people want to see stuff, they should be able to see stuff. Who cares if some guy wants to see some random gory video?
I sure agree. Don’t know how your comment managed to become so reviled.
I appreciate aggressive banning of obviously disgusting material from the communities I’m a part of. That’s why I’m part of them.
