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Users, advertisers – we are all trapped in the enshittification of the internet | John Naughton
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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I hate it, and I have no idea of what realistic steps could be taken to roll it back, as noted in the article:
Outlawing purposely crippling interoperability -This would be lobbied against so hard
Passing laws to prevent the system of advertising/entrapping users -Again the giant tech companies would lobby law makers who don't know anything about why this is bad, and those laws would never pass
It's extra painful for me having first getting access to the internet in 1996ish, and watching it go from this wild wild west of freedom and openness, to controlled under an iron grip of just a handful of giant tech companies. Maybe "Data" taxes that have been discussed before would help over all. If the huge tech companies had to pay money proportional to how much data they were hording on each user, then they'd at least stop the laser focused advertising portion of this perfect shit storm.
Maybe consolidation was bound to happen but it sucks and its current form was 100% preventable.