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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]

#241

Post by carapace »

pmoriarty wrote: post #175
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…

"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 did: the Internet itself, eh?

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

#242

Post by sanderjd »

dynamorando wrote: post #226
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…

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?

If wikipedia were government run, they would have a much harder time legally, with their moderation approach.

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

#243

Post by saghm »

rsynnott wrote: post #162
FullstakBlogger wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The smart thing to do isn't to remove it; They should charge for adversarial features. Pay your fee, you get not only an attention boost, but the ability to un-boost blues. If the net result is 0, the Nash Equilibrium is that everybody pays. Look how many people "#BlockTheBlue" on twitter right now. Just charge them to make it easy. The real value in someone who's willing to pay to be seen isn't in their 8$ subscript…

I mean, if they want to turn Twitter into SomethingAwful, that would be a good route. Honestly at this point it's in such a bad state that it would be worth considering; a gamified war might be better than just every high-traffic tweet having hundreds of nonsense bluetick comments before you get to the real comments. It'd at least be more interesting; the bluetick content is usually just very dull, and tends to bring…

> I mean, if they want to turn Twitter into SomethingAwful, that would be a good route.

I can't say I know that this is their goal right now, but it's impossible for me to distinguish their actions from those of someone with that goal.

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

#244

Post by gausswho »

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…

I have been considering for years to make something similar. A site that offers a company search and it will tell you how many PE tendrils are wrapped up in it. The data is out there. Anyone else want to join in? Is there an API we should be considering?

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

#245

Post by HappySweeney »

Chris2048 wrote: post #141
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets see, for $8 a month I can subscribe to a real Journal, like Which. They hire proffesional writers, fact check their content, buy actual consimer products and test them. And they are a charity to boot. Or I can pay Elon for delivering tweets that he got some rando to write for free. The latest content is a right - wing conspiracy that nuclear weapons do not exist, and thay video footage of nuclear ezplosions is s…

> Or I can pay Elon for delivering tweets that he got some rando to write for free I thought the $8 for Elon was for publishers, not consumers?

That is incorrect. Individuals pay $8 per month, government is free, everyone else is $1000 annually.

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

#246

Post by ryandrake »

sbarre wrote: post #239
beepbooptheory wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prio…

We need a renaissance where voters wake up and remember that companies exist at the behest of the people. A business has no god-given or natural right to exist. They apply to their state with incorporation documents, and the state (in other words, the people) decides whether or not they should exist by granting them a business charter / license.

Companies are allowed to exist because they provide some common good, in exchange for us allowing them to profit and have limited liability. I think companies have forgotten this bargain, and feel they simply have the right to exist and that their only duty is to provide profit to shareholders.

The people should hold companies to a high standard, and demand that they also serve the public good in addition to serving their shareholders. And we should revoke companies' existence when they fail to uphold their side of the bargain. When was the last time that happened to a major company--that their business charter was revoked by the government for wrongdoing? We've gotten so used to simping for companies and not holding them accountable that they now strongly believe their only obligation is to their shareholders and financial markets.

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

#247

Post by jononomo »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #211
jononomo wrote: post #147

Airline travel has certainly become a lot shittier since I first began flying in the 1970s. In fact, it used to be comfortable, cool, fun, and glamorous, and the stewardesses used to be beautiful and polite.

Flying used to be expensive and rarely done by most people. Now around 50% of Americans fly every year. It went from an elite product to a commodity. Anyway first class is still pretty comfortable IMO. And airports are much nicer than before.

Airports are not much nicer than they were before -- at least not in the US. Also, the fact that friends and family cannot go through security basically outweighs any number of luxury goods stores dotting the terminals.

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

#248

Post by SantalBlush »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #191
SantalBlush wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is the argument for that in general again? Free-market types used to have some assumptions about how free markets are expected to work, then they would derive the result that a free market yields a net benefit to society from those assumptions. Now it is glaringly obvious that a free market can cause a net loss to society, but they still need to believe free markets are good. So they ignore the evidence, and in…

Isn’t the whole argument in this thread that the government meddled in the economy by printing tons of money that then was used for questionable investments? How is that “free market”? IME 80% of criticisms of “free market” is actually a criticism of government policy (and then the same critics think that more of those policies are called for!)

Government regulation and the Fed will continue to exist in some form, at least to some small degree, so you will always be able to claim markets weren't "free" enough to properly implement a free market system. But if that's true, then it's moot; if a free-market system requires absolute purity from government to perform as intended, then it's worthless, because that will never happen. In other words, its proponents admit it's a fantasy that will only exist in their heads. As such, I have no reason to care about it or about how great some people think it is.

Fortunately, most economists already agree that market failures exist, and that free-market economics is bunk.

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

#249

Post by [deleted] »

FullstakBlogger wrote: post #159
rsynnott wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still amazed they went with the $8-for-attention model. Everyone _already knows_ this doesn't work well; the dating site industry has been trying to make it work for literally decades. It's also kind of a Pandora's box; even if they removed the attention boost, the taint is already there, and people will be suspicious of bluetick replies forever.

The smart thing to do isn't to remove it; They should charge for adversarial features. Pay your fee, you get not only an attention boost, but the ability to un-boost blues. If the net result is 0, the Nash Equilibrium is that everybody pays. Look how many people "#BlockTheBlue" on twitter right now. Just charge them to make it easy. The real value in someone who's willing to pay to be seen isn't in their 8$ subscript…

[deleted]

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

#250

Post by l3mure »

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.

It's just a corny rebrand of commons enclosure. I guess it's good if it gets more people to look into that concept though.
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