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How the internet became shit

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: How the internet became shit

#11

Post by xbpx »

You ever drive down a main drag of any town or city pretty much anywhere that has a fairly unregulated capitalist system? Advertising everywhere. Signage. People dressed as hotdogs paid a few bucks an hour to wave a sign shaped like a ketchup bottle.

The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different.

Enshitification isn't new, it's not even different from "making money and maximizing the bottom line". Capitalism is creative destruction driven by distributed profit seeking along the edges of relatively immobile statist and corporate oligopolistic structures.

This always involves cycles of enshitification that end in bottom feeding until extinguished by new techno-social revolutions.

GenXers were talking about the enshitification of main street with the spread of big box stores and malls in the 80s and 90s. Same system, same process, new generation.

Re: How the internet became shit

#12

Post by tempsy »

xbpx wrote: post #11

You ever drive down a main drag of any town or city pretty much anywhere that has a fairly unregulated capitalist system? Advertising everywhere. Signage. People dressed as hotdogs paid a few bucks an hour to wave a sign shaped like a ketchup bottle. The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different. Enshitification isn't new, it's not even different from "making money and ma…

Except this was all triggered with the end of ZIRP...this all happened relatively recently.

High interest rates forced corporations to actually get serious about profitability. Layoffs, price hikes, charging more for less is all related to that.

Re: How the internet became shit

#14

Post by pixl97 »

tempsy wrote: post #4

I feel like this applies to more than just the internet. New construction houses are crap quality. Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive. But yes Google is probably the best example of this...type in any shopping term and Google search basically turns into a more cluttered Amazon search result page.

>New construction houses are crap quality

This is called survivorship bias. Plenty of hold houses were total shit. They're not around any longer. There is also a second bias of the depletion of natural materials older houses were made of, massive increases in population, and massively changed consumer tastes/requirements.

>Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive.

This is a mix of things occurring, though some of this can be attributed to VC culture. I mean, I can go to some restaurants and get super high quality food. But anything that has turned into a franchize is no longer about selling a product, it's more worried about growth month over month. Then when you add things like general inflation, remember your (great?) grand parents talking about nickel burgers, things in our economy march up in price over time. Oh, then add in we're selling to global markets, where if you're old enough we were generally selling to local/national markets.

Communication and distribution has massively changed (a lot of this is thanks to the internet itself) which means the way markets operate have massively changed. We're just really starting to notice this now.

Re: How the internet became shit

#16

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

Enshittification isn't just when things turn crappy, it's a 3-step process.

Corner the market by providing good service to business users and consumers.

Abuse your users because there aren't many other choices.

Abuse your business users.

Re: How the internet became shit

#17

Post by Solvency »

person23 wrote: post #9
jjmarr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. Instead of individuals trying to optimize their content for maximum income, it would instead work like this: if the group determines that you make great content, you get a small stipend monthly. There are no other expectations or optimization requirements, merely that you continue making the content I think you invented Patreon.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: How the internet became shit

#18

Post by KingOfCoders »

I don't know, I came to the internet (IRC/News) ~1990 and the WWW ~1993, when I wrote my first "homepage". I lived through the dotcom boom ~2000 with my own startup.

Sure internet was great back then, but I find it great today too. I create my own content on the internet just like 10 or 20 years ago on my website. I talk to people who send me an email about content on my website. I meet great people on LinkedIn.

I'm not on Facebook and practically left Twitter.

I assume like in other contexts people imagine a past that never existe

Re: How the internet became shit

#19

Post by cogman10 »

keiferski wrote: post #6

When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. This is a lot different from today, where any sort of journalist/writer/artist/filmmaker is basically dependent on making content th…

Wouldn't work, because it's chasing after the dollar that has ultimately destroyed the internet.

Because the internet means income for so many people, doing whatever it takes to get your website to the top of search results matters a lot. That means that the hobbyist making a website cannot compete with the businesses who's lifeblood depend on edging those hobbyist pages off the search results.

What made the old internet so great was your search in lycos or yahoo could pull up a result from hobbyists across the internet with a good chance of being just an honest info dump by a fan. That became an issue when the ad money started entering the mix. All the sudden we got things like ask jeeves and expert sex change edging out good content for their garbage "Hey, we also searched those keywords" landing pages. Google's initial value ad was the fact that it gave you good results that avoided these tactics.

I'm afraid the old internet is simply gone forever. There will always be someone willing to break the system to get on top so they can make the money.

Re: How the internet became shit

#20

Post by xbpx »

tempsy wrote: post #12
xbpx wrote: post #11

You ever drive down a main drag of any town or city pretty much anywhere that has a fairly unregulated capitalist system? Advertising everywhere. Signage. People dressed as hotdogs paid a few bucks an hour to wave a sign shaped like a ketchup bottle. The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different. Enshitification isn't new, it's not even different from "making money and ma…

Except this was all triggered with the end of ZIRP...this all happened relatively recently. High interest rates forced corporations to actually get serious about profitability. Layoffs, price hikes, charging more for less is all related to that.

For sure. But there will always be good times and bad. Main streets in towns were likewise vital communities until interest rate hikes and massive deregulation in the 80s.

If you want to keep quaint Norwegian looking towns pristine even through harder times you need fairly heavy regulation.

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