It’s the new rise of CEOs and millionaires seeking to milk the internet to the last fractional dime. Leave morals and critical thinking at the door. Every major company is doing this now, shutting out everything even remotely capable of being scraped into a LLM and paywalling what used to be free to satisfy post-covid shareholders. Accessibility be damned, line must go up.
Beyond that we have Google crippling the Android and Chromium open source code, Youtube blocking user accounts using adblock, Twitch banning sponsor spots who sidestep their pockets, and of course all of them are doubling down on AI with massive amounts of corporate sponsored IP theft and data laundering on an incompressible scale, suffocating any human content (see the Amazon book crisis).
I’m convinced the next era of the internet is going to become decentralized. We’re badically hitting the phase of enshitification of everything that was good on the internet. Water flows into and forms into the shape of a cup. The internet is not a place to be beholden into the shape of whatever corporations think they can control. Water will flow where it wants to go to. The fediverse is what happens when water is diverted and cannot be contained in the tiny tank they try to build to contain the ocean that the internet is. Be the water.
The pandemic really did accelerate the enshittification of everything after it pushed everyone into online ecosystems. Shareholders want to keep that market and turn all that captured data into profit, especially in the face of the uprising of LLMs.
Unfortunately one major PR problem with the dismantling of those entrenched ecosystems is explaining that the Fediverse is fundamentally NOT the scam infested Web3 envisioned by absolutionist techbros. Even the word ‘decentralised’ has negative connotations now. We need a coordinated marketing/narrative push (compare it to email servers for the boomer managers) and offer pre-built Docker images for companies to host. That could really change the tide of things when LTS builds exist with little to no barrier to entry. Sell the prospect of corporate PR departments controlling their own first party news published direct to reader’s feeds with no loss in moderation control on either side. It would be a huge boon for everyone.
TLDR: Federated services very much could be the next era but we still need much more people, including companies, on board to reach critical mass.
I think we are seeing the initial stages of the next dotcom bubble pop. It’s no longer seen as a good idea to pour endless piles of money into platforms that have rarely if ever been profitable. It’s time to get into the black or the funds will dry up. Elon’s antics may have just sped it along, otherwise you can thank this perpetually-approaching “recession” for it.
Probably referring to Amazon being absolutely inundated with junk books written by ai. It’s flooded with them. An avalanche of garbage. Like good luck ever writing something and it organically gaining any sort of following without a sponsor to spread awareness or to boost sales to get you to a spot on the list with some visibility.
Yup. The top spots are absolutely flooded with AI garbage and it is nigh impossible to have any meaningful visibility. In a related issue, there are writers getting scammed by ‘artists’ submitting AI artwork for their commissioned covers which subsequently fucks the copyrights with severe cost to reprint all of the books. Shit is fucked for anyone in any creative field right now.
I still can’t understand how spez saw what Twitter was doing and thought it looked like a good idea
It’s the new rise of CEOs and millionaires seeking to milk the internet to the last fractional dime. Leave morals and critical thinking at the door. Every major company is doing this now, shutting out everything even remotely capable of being scraped into a LLM and paywalling what used to be free to satisfy post-covid shareholders. Accessibility be damned, line must go up.
Beyond that we have Google crippling the Android and Chromium open source code, Youtube blocking user accounts using adblock, Twitch banning sponsor spots who sidestep their pockets, and of course all of them are doubling down on AI with massive amounts of corporate sponsored IP theft and data laundering on an incompressible scale, suffocating any human content (see the Amazon book crisis).
I’m convinced the next era of the internet is going to become decentralized. We’re badically hitting the phase of enshitification of everything that was good on the internet. Water flows into and forms into the shape of a cup. The internet is not a place to be beholden into the shape of whatever corporations think they can control. Water will flow where it wants to go to. The fediverse is what happens when water is diverted and cannot be contained in the tiny tank they try to build to contain the ocean that the internet is. Be the water.
The pandemic really did accelerate the enshittification of everything after it pushed everyone into online ecosystems. Shareholders want to keep that market and turn all that captured data into profit, especially in the face of the uprising of LLMs.
Unfortunately one major PR problem with the dismantling of those entrenched ecosystems is explaining that the Fediverse is fundamentally NOT the scam infested Web3 envisioned by absolutionist techbros. Even the word ‘decentralised’ has negative connotations now. We need a coordinated marketing/narrative push (compare it to email servers for the boomer managers) and offer pre-built Docker images for companies to host. That could really change the tide of things when LTS builds exist with little to no barrier to entry. Sell the prospect of corporate PR departments controlling their own first party news published direct to reader’s feeds with no loss in moderation control on either side. It would be a huge boon for everyone.
TLDR: Federated services very much could be the next era but we still need much more people, including companies, on board to reach critical mass.
CEOs are realising they can be openly disdainful to their users because their users are addicted to the product.
I think we are seeing the initial stages of the next dotcom bubble pop. It’s no longer seen as a good idea to pour endless piles of money into platforms that have rarely if ever been profitable. It’s time to get into the black or the funds will dry up. Elon’s antics may have just sped it along, otherwise you can thank this perpetually-approaching “recession” for it.
I might know it as something else, but what is the Amazon book crisis?
Probably referring to Amazon being absolutely inundated with junk books written by ai. It’s flooded with them. An avalanche of garbage. Like good luck ever writing something and it organically gaining any sort of following without a sponsor to spread awareness or to boost sales to get you to a spot on the list with some visibility.
Yup. The top spots are absolutely flooded with AI garbage and it is nigh impossible to have any meaningful visibility. In a related issue, there are writers getting scammed by ‘artists’ submitting AI artwork for their commissioned covers which subsequently fucks the copyrights with severe cost to reprint all of the books. Shit is fucked for anyone in any creative field right now.
https://media.tenor.com/Ci3v4tmUid0AAAAM/egold-egld.gif
They are both being forced by the same pressures. It shouldn’t be surprising that their responses are similar.
Those pressures being narcissism and idiocy?
There are no pressures forcing them to destroy these sites.
There are paths to profitability that don’t include the drastic and hostile changes that they’re making.