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

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251–260 of 280 posts

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

#251
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

> buying coffee out is crazy

That too, but that wasn't the point :)

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

#252
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…

[flagged]

Here’s an example of a Nazi poll that went mega-viral yesterday: https://twitter.com/rightwingcope/status/1676980329905528832

(screenshot because @christgnosis went private after outing themselves as full-Nazi)

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

#253

Isn't this just a function of a lot of these business models don't actually work? Ie a lot of these are the equivalent of giving away free ( investor funded ) banana fritters, getting decent uptake and using it to declare that the market in banana fritters is huge, but when you start to charge for them it turns our the market is quite small. Another way the business models don't work is the companies start off assumi…

It's basically just "if it's too good to be true than it ain't". Which was obvious for me from the begging for free video streaming, lower cost higher quality taxi, lower cost higher quality hotel rooms, zero cost but quality banking and so on. Oh, wait, it's not just that. It's also greed. Greedy customers wanting things without paying what they're worth, greedy entrepreneurs not wanting to grow a business steady, h…

Can we really say the customers are the greedy ones? I take some offense to that. Most people are just trying to survive with the options they're offered. If someone comes along promising a free solution to something i previously had to pay for, or even better, offering something for free which was never previously offered even at cost. By taking that offer I'm being greedy? What if it actually works, and it's free? I'm suddenly greedy for trying to save up to survive the housing market? Or student loans, or a million other things?

What expectation of knowledge make the average person taking a deal, greedy? And how many people taking that deal meet that expectation of knowledge?

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

#254

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…

Give me the ability to set sliders to filter accounts and replies based on metrics like the number of their followers vs the number of people who have blocked them, and the number of their posts vs the number of their upvotes -- things that help me find the good stuff, and make it possible for me to access the "wisdom of the crowd" -- and I'd pay $20/mo.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For a Twitter Verified Organization, which you don't need as a consumer?

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Yes, there are private entities with good moderation. A public entity (in the US) with those same moderation policies would have a very hard time avoiding infringement of the first amendment.

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Here’s an example of a Nazi poll that went mega-viral yesterday: https://twitter.com/rightwingcope/status/1676980329905528832 (screenshot because @christgnosis went private after outing themselves as full-Nazi)

That was the poll in reference but I've also been seeing a ton more lately.

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically just "if it's too good to be true than it ain't". Which was obvious for me from the begging for free video streaming, lower cost higher quality taxi, lower cost higher quality hotel rooms, zero cost but quality banking and so on. Oh, wait, it's not just that. It's also greed. Greedy customers wanting things without paying what they're worth, greedy entrepreneurs not wanting to grow a business steady, h…

Can we really say the customers are the greedy ones? I take some offense to that. Most people are just trying to survive with the options they're offered. If someone comes along promising a free solution to something i previously had to pay for, or even better, offering something for free which was never previously offered even at cost. By taking that offer I'm being greedy? What if it actually works, and it's free?…

Yea “greedy” customers is probably unfair but I get that it was for effect.

To flesh out the point I assume they were making is that customers unfairly adjust their expectations around an unsustainable, too-good-to-be-true edge case, rather than recognizing it for what it is. And consequently scoff at anything that doesn’t now align with what they’ve unfairly shifted their expectations to.

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

#259
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…

> government-mandated censorship in large markets such as the EU Twitter censors nudity and pornography, and import American neo-puritanism to the rest of the world. No-one in EU mandates this. But american brain is incapable of putting two and two together, they have it wired into their brain that opression cannot be private, only government. If modern right-wingers existed in 1500, they would be defending the rirht…

Pretty much what really happened.

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

#260
post #221
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…

> 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.

That's not really the art in question though.

There's a lot of 'art' on twitter which is, for a lack of a better term, porn.

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