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

221–230 of 280 posts

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

#221

Post by pyrale »

Proven wrote: post #88
wunderland wrote: post #65

A perfect example with the recent changes at Twitter: > Most Twitter users barely tweet and don't care about followers - a "heavy user" tweets on average less than three times a week. So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good. > It is exactl…

Garbage "analysis". Heavy users I follow tweet more than 3 times a day. > The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good. No, it was a biased algo that's still being removed (as recently as 2-3 weeks ago they discovered another throttle which was impacting many users, including Elon). The main problem is that all centralized platforms have to deal with government-mandated censorsh…

> they're relatively more impacted than social networks that focus on art and have no political content.

Most art is political, you probably just can't take a hint.

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

#222

Post by passwordoops »

throw0101c wrote: post #181
passwordoops wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>advertising and marketing industry Which today is primarily Google, Amazon, Meta, and yes, even Apple (0) (0) https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-privacy-analytics-class-act...

> […] and yes, even Apple I was under the impression that Apple makes most of its money from margins on hardware sales, with services a growing percentage (Apple TV, App Store). The "advertising and marketing" that is involved with Apple is them spending money on it so people know about what they sell, and not so much Apple taking in advertising and marketing money (which Google and Meta do).

Nope, they have an extensive ad network that conveniently continues to track users, even when they opt out of the tracking that Meta and Google fought so hard against:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/10/19/apples-...

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-is-an-ad-company-now

https://9to5mac.com/2022/08/03/apple-ads-expansion/

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

#223

Post by nologic01 »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #205
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dumbifying and polarizing the debate, pro-business or anti-business (no matter what the "business" is up to), pro-government or anti-government (ditto) is the pattern of our times. Its part of the enshittification process and ultimately a tool for control.

Informed people who understand the nuance, tradeoffs and choices involved are, in a sense, the enemy.

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

#224

Post by eimrine »

pjc50 wrote: post #107
Proven wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Garbage "analysis". Heavy users I follow tweet more than 3 times a day. > The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good. No, it was a biased algo that's still being removed (as recently as 2-3 weeks ago they discovered another throttle which was impacting many users, including Elon). The main problem is that all centralized platforms have to deal with government-mandated censorsh…

I'm interested to know what your examples of content would be that is (a) good and (b) banned by "government-mandated censorship in large markets such as the EU". > relatively more impacted than social networks that focus on art and have no political content Funnily enough a lot of artists also want uncensored platforms so they can post NSFW art, but this is completely orthogonal to the political questions.

> I'm interested to know what your examples of content would be that is (a) good and (b) banned by "government-mandated censorship in large markets such as the EU".

War videos and pirated books.

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

#225

Post by dynamorando »

sanderjd wrote: post #218
indigochill wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the questions I don't see answered here (and is, IMO, the greatest obstacle, and the reason I've backed out of discussions to set up a similar geographically-oriented node) is who moderates, say, your city's ActivityPub node? If a corporation, we're right back to corporations moderating public speech. But even having governments moderating speech in a public forum feels weird to me since it provides an easy le…

This gets at why I think this is fundamentally a terrible idea. I think it would be a legal and social minefield the likes of which I'm not sure the world has ever seen. You know how community meetings and town halls are awful and fruitless because they're filled to the brim with the noisiest cranks and they can't be kicked out because they're still members of the public after all, and nobody else participates becaus…

I want to acknowledge that feedback, because it’s useful.

As a follow question: is this a solvable problem between host moderation and user self moderation?

In other words: Let’s pretend NPR hosts a Reddit-like site whose primary objective is to facilitate discussion on topics shared by NPR.

NPR doesn’t outright ban everything unless it violates some terrible things.

Could user moderation NPR Reddit also expand on this? So long as they fall under the same guidelines?

I ask this question because it seems to me that there does exist some useful moderation: there are well moderated Reddits and for the most part Wikipedia is also pretty well moderated.

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

#226

Post by dynamorando »

indigochill wrote: post #189
dynamorando wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

One of the questions I don't see answered here (and is, IMO, the greatest obstacle, and the reason I've backed out of discussions to set up a similar geographically-oriented node) is who moderates, say, your city's ActivityPub node? If a corporation, we're right back to corporations moderating public speech. But even having governments moderating speech in a public forum feels weird to me since it provides an easy le…

Does there exist a medium between host moderators and user moderation the makes this work?

Wikipedia is self moderated and there are well moderated Reddits. The host of the ActivityPub site doesn’t have to do all the moderation, and there doesn’t seem to be a reason that users themselves couldn’t “mute” troublesome posters from their own feeds, right?

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

#227

Post by cmrdporcupine »

nologic01 wrote: post #223
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Dumbifying and polarizing the debate, pro-business or anti-business (no matter what the "business" is up to), pro-government or anti-government (ditto) is the pattern of our times. Its part of the enshittification process and ultimately a tool for control. Informed people who understand the nuance, tradeoffs and choices involved are, in a sense, the enemy.

I said "with anti-capitalist opinions" not "is an anti-capitalist" or "anti-business" -- maybe I should have made it clearer: has some anti-capitalist opinions?

In any case, it's not meant as a slur but a compliment, in my case.

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

#228

Post by yomlica8 »

fsckboy wrote: post #101
wunderland wrote: post #65

A perfect example with the recent changes at Twitter: > Most Twitter users barely tweet and don't care about followers - a "heavy user" tweets on average less than three times a week. So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good. > It is exactl…

> enough to be willing to pay $8 a month you realize $8 a month is nothing to the majority of adults who would be in the "knowledge worker" category? a month? a couple of coffees is $10 and that's a day.

Maybe, but the time and effort it takes to wade through the dark patterns when you want to cancel are expensive for everyone.

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

#229

Post by dynamorando »

DrScientist wrote: post #214
dynamorando wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious - have you used SOLID? Either as a developer or a consumer? I found myself struggling with Linked Data for quite some time now, and I have struggled with the idea that perhaps part of the problem with adoption of Linked Data is existing mental interia of RMDBS or other systems.

No not used it ( at least not knowingly ). I like the idea - kinda back to a decentralised web of peers like it was in the early days. However the complexity of the technology is certainty off-putting - I'm not enough of an expert to tell how much of that complexity is adherence to a tech stack ( like RDF, SPARQL ) and how much is simply the complexity of the underlying problem. I would say the guys behind it seem fa…

Interesting. I personally found the whole defining your schema up front to feeling like trying to construct the universe up front.

I’ve been trying to work on an alternative solution to SOLID, but I’m always double checking myself just to make sure that I’m not just simply failing to grasp the concepts.

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

#230

Post by javajosh »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #193
javajosh wrote: post #102

Enshittification is a (very good) name for when you start off with naturally non-scarce information resource, and later impose artificial scarcity on it in order to make the moneys. It's like building a theme park, and only later adding walls and a turnstyle that checks for tickets. Of course people are going to hate you for doing that.

The analogy is good but I don’t think the name is very apt. It seems that we are just increasing the price of something not making the quality worse. Often that leads to higher quality—why do people prefer Disneyland to cheaper parks?

In my view, every software product has two parts: the product, and the artificial scarcity. Rarely is the later simply a paywall anymore, as in the metaphor. Instead, business school graduates are tasked with finding every angle to make a profit, from injecting ads, to building a marketplace, to selling surveillance data for profit, and a thousand other schemes. In reality there is a combinatorial explosion of profit schemes, since they sometimes are only viable in brittle combinations. (As engineers we often see this on the front end when an iframe loads a script which pulls a script from somewhere which rewrites the page, and so on. This is where the rubber meets the road, and the tech reflects the complexity of the deals.) The net result for the user may not be a paywall, but a slower, less responsive, more brittle product. For the eng team, it feels like coding in molasses.
Post reply on HN