Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

podtail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 280 posts

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#201

Post by zeroonetwothree »

Joeri wrote: post #55
brezelgoring wrote: post #28

I espouse a belief that apps have two cycles, one of growth, another of exploitation. In the first, cash is burnt/used to give free goodies and provide good quality services. Rents are a byproduct and not a goal during this phase of the operation, the goal here is to build goodwill and market share through measures that the competition can't match. All in all, it is a good experience to use the service during this st…

I’ve been burned by this often enough that the more investment a new product takes on the less likely I am to use it. Take notion, 300 million in funding at a 10 billion valuation. At an average $10 a month they need a billion user months to make back that valuation. Let’s say they have a time horizon of ten years to do that, that means they need at least 10 million paying users, but that is ignoring operating costs,…

I don’t think it’s realistic to expect to get useful stuff for free. However you’re right that having all your data locked in with a provider that can arbitrarily raise prices is unappealing. Still, many people do find Notion valuable so they probably think it’s worth the risk. In the end it’s still possible to migrate elsewhere even if it’s annoying.

Your calculation is roughly correct but a p/e of 10 is kinda low so probably you can halve the numbers at least.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#202

Post by sanderjd »

dynamorando wrote: post #178
pmoriarty wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is no other model that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions of active users posting their own content with mostly no restraint." The government can. These companies could be nationalized, or the government could make their own competing sites if they were interested in doing so. But they're just not. It takes more than just the means. It takes a will to do it.

I blogged about this yesterday after seeing a similar post on HN https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/ Though I am not sure the political will exists.

Government funding of generic user generated content hosting is a terrible idea, IMO.

But I do quite like your proposal for how it could be accomplished technically through federation. It at least sidesteps the problem of the government building it through their fundamentally broken technology "procurement" processes.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#203

Post by christophilus »

Aside: Someone recently complained about the use of the term "enshittification". It first appeared on HN 6 months ago[0], coined by Cory Doctorow and has since shown up in over 400 comments.

No point to this comment, other than that I find it interesting how these things spread.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34449504

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#204

Post by sanderjd »

dynamorando wrote: post #180
sanderjd wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've missed the point of the parent comment. The point is that the entire model only exists in symbiosis with what you call "enshitification enforcers". There is no mass market social media without the "evil cabal... of the advertising and marketing industry". There is no other model that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions of active users posting their own content with mostly no restrain…

I’m curious - do you see a path forward for “public” social media? I had half an idea yesterday on this from HN: https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/

Oh sorry I replied to you elsewhere. I think it's a bad idea, but I like your concept for how it could be implemented with federation.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#205

Post by zeroonetwothree »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #176
fsckboy wrote: post #115

the YCombinator powers-that-be preach that a positive outlook is a key asset to propel you and your projects forward. The word "enshittification" seems to be a Maxwell's Daemon designed to concentrate all the stray negative thoughts into (this) one huge snipe session.

Unlikely, the word comes from Doctorow -- a person with anti-capitalist opinions and hardly a Silly Valley shill -- not from hackernews or YComb. (Anyways, as annoyed as I am by plenty of other commenters here, there's also plenty of people who contribute here who don't fit your stereotype.)

Is he really anti capitalism? I always thought he’s just against “big” everything (tech, corporations, government) and pro individual freedom.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#206

Post by zeroonetwothree »

resuresu wrote: post #148

The internet is so lame and boring now days, its become so predictable and routine. I remember the internet back in the 90s and 00s, it was a completely different place, it felt massive and mysterious like each door you opened led to a another universe with all kinds of stuff going on, discussions on any topic you could fathom were taking place 24/7 all the time. Now we have discord servers with hundreds of users but…

Let me guess-you were a teenager/YA in that magical time? It’s just the way things work as you get older, it has nothing to do with the internet.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#207

Post by zeroonetwothree »

Pannoniae wrote: post #187
resuresu wrote: post #148

The internet is so lame and boring now days, its become so predictable and routine. I remember the internet back in the 90s and 00s, it was a completely different place, it felt massive and mysterious like each door you opened led to a another universe with all kinds of stuff going on, discussions on any topic you could fathom were taking place 24/7 all the time. Now we have discord servers with hundreds of users but…

I have also noticed this is as well. The discussion online has been double-stratified - it's either really low quality or really bland. Most people are afraid to say anything interesting or different from the popular things/status quo, because social media conditions people to not rock the boat too much because they'll get downvoted/banned. Niche or interesting things just die. The remainder of places have become inc…

HN is an example of that as well unfortunately

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#208

Post by the_other »

troupo wrote: post #60
yarg wrote: post #51

The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse incentives. This seems to be universally true, and when it becomes apparent that advertising doesn't work and isn't profitable, dark patterns are the best that you can hope for. Short of a company having the internal need for a generally useful distributed communications platform, as well as a willingness to release it relatively freely, I struggle to see how t…

> The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse incentives. The need to have profit is the goal of any business. The problem isn't that. The need for profit has been entirely replaced with the need for continuous unimpeded growth. Which is decidedly not the same thing, but no one cares anymore, and profit doesn't even come into equation anymore.

> The need to have profit is the goal of any business.

This isn't true. A non-profit is still a business. Charities are businesses. Cooperatives can make profit. Also (almost) no-one thinks small businesses making modest profit and riding the ups and downs alongside others in a locale is a problem.

The problems arise in companies that choose to only or mainly focus on profit. Most capital funds don't make anything themselves other than money, which they extract from businesses that do make things. You can claim that they're market-correcting forces that allow money to easily move between different areas of human interest... but ultimately their product is their own enrichment. The speed and convenience they provide might be an illusion created by their apparent success. It might be better that our markets and locales develop more slowly; if more smaller scale investors made a wider range of decisions, rather than a handful of large ones making most of them.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#209

Post by hef19898 »

sanderjd wrote: post #199
pmoriarty wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is no other model that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions of active users posting their own content with mostly no restraint." The government can. These companies could be nationalized, or the government could make their own competing sites if they were interested in doing so. But they're just not. It takes more than just the means. It takes a will to do it.

The government can afford to do this. In every single other way, this is a terrible idea.

Why? At least in the case of democratic governmwnts, there is more control and oversight than there is in case of Meta, Twitter or Google.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#210

Post by WA »

resuresu wrote: post #148

The internet is so lame and boring now days, its become so predictable and routine. I remember the internet back in the 90s and 00s, it was a completely different place, it felt massive and mysterious like each door you opened led to a another universe with all kinds of stuff going on, discussions on any topic you could fathom were taking place 24/7 all the time. Now we have discord servers with hundreds of users but…

This comes up frequently on HN and it isn't true. The internet has many more users than back then. You can still find your weird niche on the internet today.

Just posted today, private blogs of HN users: https://dm.hn/

A weird search engine which skips a lot of corporate crap: https://search.marginalia.nu/

Or skip the first million search results: https://millionshort.com/

Then there's neocities, weird subreddits, 4chan, niche forums still running on phpBB discussing all kinds of stuff.

You seem to expect that niche communities should've scaled with the rest of the internet. Like, back then, there were a few million people online. Now it's billions, but the few millions still online in their niches aren't interesting enough for you. Why?

Post reply on HN