this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
221 points (97.8% liked)

Technology

34788 readers
354 users here now

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.


Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.


Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn't have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four" (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don't have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!

top 11 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 18 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The solution to this is decentralized and federated platforms. Federated platforms can't monopolize a userbase like centralized ones can. Decentralized platforms enable the users themselves to control their own data and enable things like revenue sharing models where user's can vote on if the platform should have ads and how money from those ads should be spent (perhaps on users who create content or on medical research or whatever they want).

[–] JGrffn@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Let's not forget that email is technically a defederated platform and it was monopolized by Google anyway. It can and will be done if allowed to be done by complacency.

[–] HoloPengin@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don't know if I'd call it monopolized exactly. It's not like we can't get alternative email accounts from other companies to corporate to encrypted to private server, etc.

Google absolutely has the most say in what's correct about the protocol/security because they're the de-facto standard for individual user accounts, but literally nothing is stopping you from running your own server.

[–] JGrffn@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

but literally nothing is stopping you from running your own server.

Nothing except gmail's very strict and hard to follow guidelines for spam filtering. Whether it's a byproduct of spam filtering or whether it's the intended result, the fact that Google essentially controls email traffic means you're not gonna have a good time communicating with others using your self-hosted email. This issue has been raised by self-hosters getting blacklisted, all the way to companies getting rate limited. If your intended use is to communicate with your everyday person, and considering the everyday person probably uses Gmail, you're in for a bad time at some point down the line.

[–] PuppyOSAndCoffee@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

why is youtube the vehicle for this message?

[–] tias@discuss.tchncs.de 22 points 1 year ago

The message needs to reach as many people as possible, especially non-techies. The question is why aren't more platforms used as vehicles?

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] nix@merv.news 5 points 1 year ago

The defcon link exists for people who don’t want to use YouTube. I like the message reaching more people so I like that YouTube is also used.

[–] akwd169@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 year ago

I know right, it has its uses but for me at least the written word is so much more efficient... I almost never watch YouTube videos but I consume hundreds of articles every week

[–] steal_your_face@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

AI summary from Kagi:

Cory Doctorow gives a talk about how platforms like Facebook start out benefiting users but eventually abuse them to extract more value for shareholders. He calls this process "insidification" and outlines the 3 stages platforms go through. Doctorow advocates for policies that promote adversarial interoperability between services to limit consolidation and give users more choice. He argues this can help build a new, better internet by decentralizing control away from giant companies. Doctorow is optimistic that recent antitrust actions may help reverse the trend of insidification. However, more remains to be done to establish strong constraints on companies that prevent them from abusing their users and customers.