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

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

#231

Post by smolder »

high_5 wrote: post #86
smoldesu wrote: post #20

I felt like I wasn't going to write this comment again, but here we go: I don't like the word enshittification. People glom onto it because they like shaking sticks more than solving problems, and Corey Doctorow is excellent at exploiting that desire. It's annoying how he enables that sense of defeatism when he's obviously aware of resilient and game-changing alternative software (like FOSS) that has revolutionized t…

I agree with "enshittification" being a poor choice. I would go with plain simple "milking the product", not for the benefit of the user, of course.

I think it's a good term in that it describes what's happening from the users perspective instead of from the businesses perspective, so more people can identify with it. It's the outsiders view of what happens to a business that sees itself as "milking the product".

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

#232

Post by yomlica8 »

sarchertech wrote: post #160
gadders wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 years ago I bought a ride-on lawn mower that gave me 12 years of service, but was getting a bit long in the tooth. I decided to buy the next model up from the same company, not knowing in the mean time it had been bought by a PE company and the quality had gone to shit. The mower is bigger, but the engine is smaller and they are notorious for blowing a head gasket any time the mowing blades stall out. I was thinki…

Which company is this? I’ve heard this referred to as “reputation mining”. You buy a company with a good reputation, cut quality drastically, and profit for the decade or so it takes until everyone realizes the brand sucks now.

It is all over the place. The worst part is when you realize reputation is always a trailing indicator the only rational action seems to be to buy the cheapest one and use the saved money for the replacement. Basically, optimize your life around rapid disposal and replacement which makes extra trash and takes extra time versus just having a good quality item you can rely on.

My mower recently started to rust out and I dread buying a replacement. Aside from cheaply replacing poorly designed wheels fairly often I was 100% with this mower. But I can't buy it again because the march forward with redesigns means it is no longer made. Is the new one better? General life experience says, probably not.

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

#233

Post by watt »

gadders wrote: post #130
_eypq wrote: post #44

I've been thinking about how enshittification, venture capital, shareholders and the life cycle of a company are in some ways related. Any company that has external investors is bound to go through this cycle of - building a great product - taking in external funding money - growing and then either being acquired or going public (or more commonly shutting down) - then all the head scratching decision making starts It…

15 years ago I bought a ride-on lawn mower that gave me 12 years of service, but was getting a bit long in the tooth. I decided to buy the next model up from the same company, not knowing in the mean time it had been bought by a PE company and the quality had gone to shit. The mower is bigger, but the engine is smaller and they are notorious for blowing a head gasket any time the mowing blades stall out. I was thinki…

it's interesting how your reluctance in naming names in this instance actually ensures PE folks win.

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

#234

Post by Pannoniae »

WA wrote: post #215
Pannoniae wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Am I on the same internet? If social media taught people one thing, it is to rock the boat as hard as possible, because only this gives them attention. Twitter is called the hellsite for a reason. What is it that you want? Intelligent discussion, but not too strange, but interesting, not too toxic, but you wanna say what you think and you feel like you can't say what you think, because then "the others" come with the…

The flamewars on social media are fundamentally outraging and shocking, but I don't find them any strange. Maybe my usage of "rocking the boat" was a bit inappropriate, I apologise. I definitely didn't want to say I don't want "too strange" stuff.

It's just that the topics people talk about are very narrow, and even on the most heated twitter thread it's mostly the same stuff. There is nothing novel in there.:(

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

#235

Post by criddell »

everdrive wrote: post #113
fsckboy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

$8 a month might feel like a waste if you don’t get anything out of it.

What I thought was stupid was removing the blue check from people who are worth far more than that per month to Twitter. I thinking about people like Stephen King and large news outlets.

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

#236

Post by freedomben »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #138
sharperguy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue could be rooted in recent monetary policy rather than an inhrenent feature of the market itself. Artificially low interest rate environments lead to a lot of money in the hands of investors, which due to inflation slowly loses purchasing power over time. However, with large reserves, they can easily afford to prop up a business model which persistantly spends more money on bringing "free" features t…

Just don't understand how one could be convinced these days of the fundamental conceit that even a properly profitable company is necessarily going to provide good things for people downstream, or for society in general. What is the argument for that in general again? Because to me, if your not Twitter, your Wal Mart or Raytheon or BoA. If your not shittifying a platform you are pushing out small businesses from ever…

Books have been written on the subject, so an HN comment isn't going to do it. But if you consider that anyone making a mutually consentual transaction is doing it because they value the traded good more than what they're trading, it's not hard to see how a free market can provide good things for people and society in general as resources flow to where they are most valued. Of course there's nuance here (such as assuming purely rational actors, addressing realites around information asymmetry, and that macroeconomics is different than micro) but that's part of the low-level foundation.

I'm not a big fan of capitalism as it can be an utterly cruel mistress, but given the unfortunate realities of human nature I can't think of a system that is on the whole better. As long as there is scarcity, there will be something used as a basis for rationing (who gets what, and why). If it's not who is willing to pay the most, then it's who has the most powerful friends or the biggest army, or something else. There are problems with under-checked capitalism, and there are problems with over-checked capitalism. We'll never get it just right because humans aren't smart enough to, but perhaps we'll achieve post-scarcity at some point. One can hope.

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

#237

Post by criddell »

troupo wrote: post #149
yarg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the goals of the customers and the goals of the company are at odds, things will never work out long term. But I disagree that the continuous growth model is the cause, although I certainly believe that it frequently adds fuel to the fire (growing a company when it's making a loss on a per customer basis frequently leads to accelerating death spirals as well as all manner of desperate measures).

> But I disagree that the continuous growth model is the cause, When is the last time you've heard a company evaluated on profits (the actual measure of a successful business) and not on growth (of random metrics)?

Public benefit corporations (like Bluesky) can be run like that.

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

#238

Post by ehnto »

nottorp wrote: post #139
fsckboy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> a couple of coffees is $10 and that's a day. Please cut that. Everyone wants 'a couple of coffees' and it adds up even for SV techbros.

Different location, different economy and different currency, but yeah buying coffee out is crazy and I can't believe I was stupid enough to do it for so long.

I convinced myself I "needed the time out of the office" yeah cool, go for a walk you dork and make coffee in the kitchen like the person with bills that you are (is what I now tell myself)

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

#239

Post by sbarre »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #138
sharperguy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue could be rooted in recent monetary policy rather than an inhrenent feature of the market itself. Artificially low interest rate environments lead to a lot of money in the hands of investors, which due to inflation slowly loses purchasing power over time. However, with large reserves, they can easily afford to prop up a business model which persistantly spends more money on bringing "free" features t…

Just don't understand how one could be convinced these days of the fundamental conceit that even a properly profitable company is necessarily going to provide good things for people downstream, or for society in general. What is the argument for that in general again? Because to me, if your not Twitter, your Wal Mart or Raytheon or BoA. If your not shittifying a platform you are pushing out small businesses from ever…

I mean, you say "companies" but really you mean "people" because people run companies. You can't, or shouldn't, abstract away the people ultimately making decisions if you're trying to reason about this stuff.

And people can make decisions, even the ones who run companies, to balance profits with contributing to a greater good. But they choose not to.

So the people who are running these companies are choosing to prioritize profits at all costs. Some of this is because the people who operate the financial markets tell them they will be punished if they don't, but obviously there's also some agency on the part of the company leadership as well.

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

#240

Post by MSFT_Edging »

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…

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