this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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"What started the enshittification?" is a really interesting question.
According to my biases, the original sin of the web was news orgs giving their content away for free. That led to "content from any site is trustworthy", which led to the news orgs going bankrupt and the flailing attempts to return to profitability.
Along the way, disinformation became a thing, and the primary motivator on the web became advertising.
If we'd normalized paying for services, instead of monetizing user data, we would be in a better place.
(Realistically we would have a different set of problems, but 🤷)
Interesting approach, gonna think about it. So far I didn't take disinformation as a result of news companies going broke.
Why would people forget that the BBC is more trustworthy then someones uncle, just because his opinion is for free? The distrust in "old authorities" like big newspaper or governments is, in my opinion, a long-term result of the broken promisses of the hegemony they are, or seem to be, part of.
The concept "people have to have to pay for quality information" doesn't sit right with me. Relevant info should be available for everyone! And trustworthy news orgs should be funded pubicly.
I don't think it's the only reason, but it's one of the reasons.
Part of the disinformation ecosystem is randos pumping out content so they can get ad clicks. Social media rewards that (etc), but the original sin is mixing timely investigative journalism with every other kind of free content online. It cheapens journalism.
You're right. And it's somewhat deserved. But by training us that well-researched reporting should be free, those old authorities basically poisoned the well. We generally expect news to be free now. Which makes it really hard for new outfits to get started.
Journalists need to eat. In the 1980s it seemed like almost every middle class household received a newspaper. I wasn't able to find stats, but I suspect that most households found newspapers useful and could pay for them.
If we return to a model where news isn't free, but it's really cheap, I think we'd be okay.
I'm all for public funding, but NPR didn't break Watergate, nor did CBC break the SNC-Lavelin affair. Western democracies co-evolved with a relatively adversarial private press.
We need ways for a private press to continue as we move further online. Non-profit models seem to work (at least for the Guardian), as do membership models (at least for Canadaland).
Most websites started out free because the Web is very close to being "post-scarcity".
Running a simple but successful website used by tens of thousands of people can be done in your spare time for cheaper than a Spotify subscription. A hobbyist website about fishing with 10.000 monthly users can probably be hosted reliably enough for $10/mo, plus a few hours of work. Even if you value your time highly (say, $50/h), that's still a "$200/mo" website (almost all of which is time you're billing to yourself). The breakeven point is then at $0.02/monthly user (and the more users you have, the lower the cost per user, down to fractions of fractions of a cent for a really big text-based website).
In that context it's next to impossible to fairly pay for the service of running a text-based website. Payment processing costs are going to be, by far, the biggest share of the pie, which is ridiculous. So, advertisments and datamining it is (or was; datamining without explicit consent is at least illegal in the EU). Alternatively, donations (this is Twitch's core business model, with which they're even profitable in some markets, despite offering the most expensive service: realtime transcoded video).
Of course a news website also has salaries to pay. That significantly shifts the balance in favor of "pay for the service", unfortunately that runs counter to user expectations. Plus the historical context of traditional news orgs subsidizing their new websites with traditional revenue streams, then finding themselves cornered when the web turned out to be more than just a fad or a hobby.
Another problem with additional revenue is feature bloat. Look at reddit, the website originally was actually really cheap to operate and was actually profitable on Reddit Gold alone (donations being a very common business model on the internet which IMO makes the most sense in most situations given the low costs).
But they had to add an image host (sure, imgur was probably not happy to be footing the bill) as well as a video player (why?), chat service (where's the business value?!), a brand-new but completely unoptimized front-end UI, a mobile app (despite third-party devs already offering superior options FOR FREE), etc.
Reddit's enshittification was caused by an overabundance of revenue from external investors asking for continuous growth, not from any inherent shortcoming in the original business plan. Same goes for pretty much every other enshittified website.
Exactly this.
I think it was the subversion of chains of trust by the kind of social media were people are linked to friends and family.
For example, say that you're connected to a cousin of yours in Facebook, somebody you know well as an excelent and honest person. Now, say they share this post about how lots of robberies in their neighbourhood have been traced back to youths in this other neighbourhood which is mainly of people from a different etnic group.
Do you believe it? It comes from somebody who is an excellent and honest person, so you know they wouldn't lie about something like this.
At this point, anybody who actually thinks properly about the quality of information has figured out that just because somebody is honest doesn't mean they tell the truth: they might be telling you something they genuinelly believe is true when it's not because they themselves were decidved into thinking of it as true, whilst its not - in other word and simplifying it a bit, you can't trust information from an honest person if they're gullible, or even if they're just prone to "spread the word" without having tought about it first (and the way things like Facebook are designed is exactly to induce people to share in response to an emotional reaction and without thinking)
How many people do you know that really figure it out before sharing, or even worwe, did so back in the day before fake-news became a widelly talked about phenomenon?
Add to this subversion of chains of trust that the fakest stuff is usually the most shocking and thus most likelly to be shared and you have this great way to spread misinformation in such a way that it keeps getting whitewashed as ot spreads thanks to preexisting trust in friends and family.