And the scorpion vowed "I'm not going to sting you" to the frog.
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 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's worse than that - the scorpion might stick to its promise but hops off half-way across to be replaced by a far less amiable scorpion.
I like this analogy. And... yeah, it's true - even if the current owners might vow to not enshittify their platform, they'll likely cash out in the future, and the next owners will do it for them.
How did we end up in a world where people forgot about lying?
If Mark Zuckerberg can say that Facebook’s ad targeting is not surveillance capitalism, Graber can say that whatever Bluesky ends up doing is not enshittification.
Of course she's gonna say that, it's the easiest way to get new users right now. And, of course, Bluesky will be enshitified. It's inevitable for every service trying to make money.
Honestly disagree. I think it's important to distinguish between companies who make a product or offer a service and charge appropriately for that transaction. Commerce isn't an inherent evil.
Enshittification is inevitable when the customers are no longer the primary method to make money for the executives. That's the perverse incentive that results in actively sabotaging your own business for greater short term profits because you've created a system that doesn't punish you for doing so (typically by running every 'real' competitor into the ground first).
If they are more concerned about stock price, or advertisers or selling data, those are the avenues to enshittification. But selling a service to end users for profit is just normal business.