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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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It all begins with a compromise.
I'm old, old enough to remember YouTube before it had ads. Hell, old enough to remember it before Google bought it out.
The first compromise was banner ads, they were the first and they were the norm.
Banner ads got too invasive, so we blocked them. YouTube came a-crying.
We compromised, we allowed an advert on the first video we watched. It was skippable of course.
We compromised again, we allowed more ads to creep in, all skippable.
Again, with unskippable ads we compromised and allowed short 5 or 10 seconds ones.
And here we are, "pay premium or deal with an unwatchable ad infested mess". We block the ads because they are enshittification - they denigrate the service we signed up for, and if Google didn't have the power to keep altering the deal, they'd have voided their contract with us years ago.
So no, I'm not going to pay you for wonders made by dedicated people - you harvested and sold my data years ago, and my Hotmail inbox's unending wall of spam is testament to your unrelenting greed.
I did my time, got shafted in the deal, no more compromises.