#enshittification of socials or whatever

[what-even-is-sleep]

DAMMIT what’s the line between:

‘bad publicity is still publicity’ and posting screenshots abt the tumblr shop tab moving to our blog spots

VS

I don’t want to stay silent on this topic and I know that just one formal complaint won’t do much if we aren’t all angry at the Instagram/Tik-Tok-ification that’s happening rn

[mortalityplays]

Forgive me if I'm mistaking you for another person, but I remember you speaking at multiple points on the unsustainability of free social media services (I think especially in response to the cohost collapse?), and I'm curious on what your thoughts on bluesky are so far. I'm not an expert on the subject, but from what I've read previously it seemed like they were on track to be financially sustainable, but I don't know if the recent floods of users has thrown those projections off. Sorry if I'm mixing you up with someone else on my timeline, in that case just ignore me.

bluesky will almost certainly follow the same trajectory of monetisation => bloat => enshittification => decline as every other major platform built on venture capital and user hoarding. it's a terrible model that only works in the short term as a mirage for attracting funding and making founders look good for a year or two before they sell.

you can see the same effect in the decline of all the subscription box services that came into vogue just before covid: they feel great to use for as long as the initial injection of venture funding lasts, because the purpose of that funding at that stage is to attract users and impress the next round of funders with how pleasant/intuitive/efficient/ethical/good value the service is. that's the stage where they're handing out freebies and bowling over influencers, and every ingredient in the box is fresh and high quality and locally sourced. wow what a good deal, what a great system!!! why hasn't anyone done this before? the answer is because it's unsustainable by design. they rack up good reviews, sign on a billion new users, attract new funding from a bunch of much more credulous investors, and then gut all of the expensive parts. portions get smaller, ingredients get worse, packaging gets flimsier, prices go up, freebies turn into "5% off your first 9 boxes when you invite 3 friends", and customer service vanishes.

with social media (and platforms like discord) the logic is the same, it's just a little less glaringly obvious to the end user because they're not coming home to leaking packages of rancid chicken on the doorstep. bluesky has an advantage over tiny operations like cohost because it was founded by a billionaire making a point for the sake of his own image. it got a really significant chunk of startup funding, and the owner had existing connections and rep in the space to attract more. That's why it has survived the goldrush period, why it still feels good to use, and why users who have been burned so many times before are finally accepting it as a stable, reliable option. It's still in its venture capital honeymoon phase where the only thing worth spending money on is making the service attractive to users.

What I expect we will see next, with another mass influx of users from twitter and new funding from a rogue's gallery of tech venture sickos led by Blockchain Capital is a strong ramp up into monetising that userbase. They've already been pretty forthright about how they plan to do this, and I think it's a solid roadmap of how Bluesky will bloat and decay over the next few years:

this is a huge lol. don't worry, we're not going to hyperfinancialize the social experience through NFTs. the thing even crypto freaks started feigning amnesia about a year ago. real "our health conscious sodas are 100% arsenic free" messaging here. They know perfectly well that rubes users are suspicious of their typical 5 dimensional tech finance chess games and are patting our hands about last week's bogeymen so nobody worries too hard about whatever 'decentralised developer ecosystem' just happens to be helmed by a bunch of crypto guys. this definitely means something good and based and not a google-like single sign on user data harvesting operation.

This is the same shit that's currently rotting the floorboards of discord. Bluntly, there is no way to run a platform on this scale without gating functionality behind paid services. Discord has been squeezing free-tier file uploads and call quality etc. down steadily and cranking up subscription costs over the last year or two, throwing in chaff like animated avatar frames to try and justify the user cost. They're also doing the same misdirection thing again here, pointing to Thing We All Hate to deflect from thing we might not like very much when they do it. Booo elon booo we all hate elon!!! wait how do we feel about subscription models again,

watch out for this to kill porn on bsky like it has killed porn on every other social platform 👍 boooo we hate elon boooo stupid idiot and his 'everything app' booooo wait why do you need my tax information, what's that about mastercard,

Look, we are all aware social media is a money pit. Let's not forget dorsey was looking to sell twitter in the first place, long before elon's very public plunge into total online derangement. Subscription services are not going to plug the hole, so we are gradually going to see more and more spaghetti thrown at the wall while early funders shuffle cards and do their pyramid scheme bit bringing in stupider and stupider investments. this is the window in which bluesky will be temporarily worth using for us, for the idiot public, the poorly rendered crowd jpegs in the background of their venture capital MOBA. it's in their interests to slow and pad the decline as much as possible, because that is how they get maximally paid.

Given the scale of the money involved, and dorsey's weird ego investment, I think bluesky will probably manage a controlled drift for a good few years before it gets really bloated and painful. and by then we will all be so used to the *checks notes* decentralised developer ecosystem that we'll just be posting through it, watching another generation of columnists call another collapsing platform 'their beloved hellsite' and passing around that meme about not getting out of our chairs no sir until idk we all get on a fediverse neurolink alternative to stick it to the elongated muskrat and our brains pop peacefully in our sleep. which I guess is the closest thing to viability any social media platform can achieve.

anyway diogenes the cynic is also on bluesky

[dragon-in-a-fez]

you know one of the worst impacts of this whole streaming media enshittification era is that normal people never seem to talk about TV shows anymore. like in 2012 you couldn't go a week at my office without someone starting Game of Thrones discourse over their coffee break. in the 2000s people were always talking about their American Idol faves. when I was a kid in the 90s you had to be allowed to stay up late on Thursdays to watch Friends because everyone in 7th grade was talking about it the next morning.

but now? the most watched show of 2023 was Ted Lasso, a show that existed for three years before I even found out Ted Lasso was the name of a show and not just a guy. I still have no fucking idea what it's about. is Lasso a surname or an occupation? is Ted a cowboy? who the fuck knows. people who have Netflix, I guess? but not people who have Disney+, who probably all watched WandaVision but only talked about it on the internet.

I have a friend who's the biggest Star Trek fan I've ever met but I can't talk Lower Decks with her because she doesn't have whatever the fuck streaming service it's on and she doesn't pirate things for some reason.

our engagement with media used to be a casual part of the day-to-day social fabric and it's just like...not anymore.

[emeryleewho]

If you're worried about the enshittification of the internet completely killing your access to work by your favorite creatives (I've already seen a lot of artists I love state they'll be leaving Tumblr thanks to all the AI training), I want to introduce you to a handful of ways to circumvent the social media hellscape to stay connected to your favorite creators.

RSS Feeds

I'd argue that this is the best option. It essentially allows you to create your own social media "dashboard" by saving websites and getting updates when they post new content. Most websites already have these, and if social media goes down (or just continues to degrade), the best way you can access your favorite creators will be with direct connection to their personal websites. I'm still learning how to use these, but if you want to learn more, this article does a great job.

2. Newsletters

I know newsletters are a pain and it's annoying to have your inbox cluttered, but if there are creators you know you'd be remiss to lose access to, I recommend subscribing to their newsletters. I'd honestly skip the ones that share frequent content you don't need, but for example, my newsletter is updates only so I only send it out maybe every few months when something big happens. It's an easy way to stay up to date on info that social media buries. Of course, if your faves are writing up blog posts & insights that you want to read in newsletter form, consider subscribing to those as well, and don't feel like you have to subscribe to *every* newsletter to make it worthwhile. You just want to make sure you can still be reached by the creators whose work you really don't want to miss.

3. Ko-Fi/Patreon

I don't think a lot of people realize you can follow people on these platforms for free, but because they have paid options, they offer more direct access than social media sites whose algorithms will just erase people you love from your feed altogether. This one isn't the best alternate since a lot of content may be behind a paywall, but if you just want an easy way to be sure you'll still have access to updates from people you want to support, this is a usable way to compile creators in one place and most creators will post updates for free so you should still get those.

So yeah, these are my suggestions. If you're just on social media casually and you just like the easy access to content but don't particularly care about individual creators or specific projects or anything like that then you probably don't need any of this and that's fine. If social media is continuing to work for you then feel free to continue enjoying it without worrying about alternatives. I just want people to have a fail safe if you, like me, are realizing that this shit is getting completely out of hand and everything you once wanted social media for is quickly becoming inaccessible.

Anyway, I highly recommend tuning in to people's personal websites, but I doubt most people have the energy to check each individual website so RSS Feeds are great alternative. Whatever you choose to do, just try to diversify enough that no one company can completely kill your access to your faves on a whim and remember that the closer to direct communication you can get to with creatives the better.

[azspot]

Whatever you think of capitalism, the evidence is overwhelming: Social networks with a single proprietor have trouble with long-term survival, and those do survive have trouble with user-experience quality: see Enshittification.

Tim Bray

[m0r1bund]

hello! I was catching up on reading NAKAQUOI! and the essay from the most recent entry was such an inspiring method of storytelling. enough so to make me reach out and ask about your website in general (if you're comfortable answering!). what is it like running a lore/gallery site for your work? how and why did you get started? and lastly, what about it keeps you going?

thank you, cheers! -Winn

😭 Thank you so much for the kind words, this means a lot to me. I really enjoyed writing that little essay.

This is going to be a weird and vulnerable sidebar, but I promise I’m going somewhere with it. Honestly, it blows my mind that anyone reads them. I think it’s because I’m still operating on the assumption that this form of storytelling is for n=1 (yours truly) and other people are merely tolerating it, LOL. I used to be way more sensitive about sharing my characters / stories / worlds, because the forms of storytelling that came naturally to me were often received as incomprehensible, dense, and unintuitive by other people. At a certain point I decided that I just had to accept this and become my own hype man. People could enjoy the pretty pictures out of context, and they could be a vehicle for me to journal about the pretend people who live in my head. Good compromise 👍

for someone who talks big about making weird art and finding the 6 people in the audience who truly get it, I don’t think I realized that this could include my deranged essays about things that aren’t real. And yet. AND YET!!!! I think this desire to present my work in a way that’s “more” than just pretty pictures with text attached to them has been simmering for a long time, even though I dismissed it and was kind of embarrassed about it. Which is wild. Because I grew up on bestiaries and warrior cats lore compendiums and video game wikis and morrowind. There was clearly a precedent. And Yet.

Anyway, this desire started rubbing shoulders with the technical limitations of blogs and gallery websites, and also a general disillusionment with social media during the enshittification of the internet. Like, yeah it sucked that my whole body of work could vanish overnight. But mostly I had worldbuilding neuroses that made me want to scratch at the walls, and I knew just enough html + css to be dangerous. In 2018, I had also finished some longer works that made me more confident in my ability to deliver a cohesive Moribund, and these works weren’t intuitive to share on social media… So… I guess that gave me the impetus to stop flirting with the idea of getting my own website and start actually working on it.

M0R1BUND.com used to be a pure html + css + js website hosted on Neocities. It was ideal and I miss it in a lot of ways, because yeah, that IS the most unadulterated control you can have over your webspace. Had a blast with it, experimented a lot, learned a lot, hosted galleries and twines and webfiction and digital collages and ARPG stuff and interactive maps and a webcomic. And it was mine as much as it was the work of kind people sharing sample code on stackexchange, LOL.

Eventually, I felt the growing pains of managing this by hand. Updating ate hours out of my day. There are definitely more intuitive ways to build and maintain a pure html + css + js website, but I was working with what I knew. I started learning wordpress for basedt.net with the hopes of automating certain operations, like posting art to a gallery or pages to a webcomic. It felt intuitive enough that I later rebuilt M0R1BUND.com in wordpress.

It took a long time and a lot of work, like almost a year? And I still haven’t mirrored everything. Wordpress has made things easier to maintain, but I learned the hard way that it doesn't avoid the pitfalls of simpler website-builders… which is to say… whatever it does to make life easier will also make life incredibly difficult if you decide you want to do something manually. And it’s never the stuff you expect.

These days there’s also the baggage of Automattic’s nonsense. Wordpress is open source, so I don’t think it will go anywhere, but it’s still the corporate clownery that I wanted to escape by making my own website. Blech.

Really though, I love running M0R1BUND and it’s the closest thing I have to an ideal “home” for my work. Going to a dedicated website is unintuitive and out of the way for a lot of people, but (indicates generally) what have we just learned about me. This one’s for n=1 and the, like, 6 people who pop in and say hello. You are my people...

Looking forward, things cook at the rate of 2937728839 irons in the fire, and they are all getting done, but they are all getting done sooooo slowly… I’m having fun. Besides having a general compulsion to make art and tell stories and be Understood, I think that’s what carries me thru this. I want to have fun. and I want to trick people into caring about my characters and also the Sonoran Desert. And as Bjork says, I have to get the wiggles out or else the dark times will come.

It���s getting late and I don’t have a denouement for this. Thank you for your kind words! Thank you for asking! hope this answers? hope this helps (???) take the best and leave the rest.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

You’re a psychology professor, right? Do you mind if I ask what exactly your research expertise/discipline is? Whatever it is always seems so fascinating to me whenever bits of it come up here. At the risk of doxxing yourself, would you be willing to talk about your research?

So if you don't mind, I'm going to answer this a little to the left of the ask. Less because I'm worried about Tumblrers doxxing, more because I'm terrified of my students or coworkers stumbling upon this blog.

My top six essays and articles that explain what I research, none of which are authored by me:

Empathy or Division? On the Science and Politics of Storytelling by Claire Corbett opens up with the lines "Writers can’t always be trusted when they talk about the power and importance of story. We have a vested interest and can get sentimental, promoting the immense power of story, of narrative, as inherently benign" — and it only gets better from there. Storytelling is a tool, one that can harm as much as help; anyone who says differently is selling something.

The Enshittification of TikTok by Cory Doctorow (yes, that Cory Doctorow) does an excellent job of explaining how the forces of individual psychology interacting with the forces of economics and society lead to the enshittification (exactly what it sounds like) of mass resources like social media platforms.

Superhero Comics as Moral Pornography by David Pizarro and Roy Baumeister. Although undeniably negative toward aspects of Western superhero stories, this essay also has a pretty forgiving definition of pornography. Like Corbett's, it takes a refreshingly cynical view of the power of storytelling.

The Mythology of Karen by Helen Lewis explains how a meme (in the sense of a sticky, culturally specific idea) can be sexist and antiracist, empowering and ageist, and trying to force it into molds of "good" or "bad" will never work.

What Do We Know When We Know a Person? by Dan McAdams. I've seen this article on many lists of best-written psychological theory reviews, and I fully agree. The science has come a long way since 1995, but this remains one of the best introductions to the psychology of personal narrative.

The Folk Psychology of Souls by Jesse Bering. "When it comes to death, human cognition apparently is not well equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating the recent nonexistence of any one of them." It's a little outside my main research area, but I built an entire special-topics class around this one article because it's one of the truest I've ever read.

[msfbgraves]

Is it me or is the enshittification machine working very fast these days? You used to get years out of a service before they fucked it up too much to be of use to anyone but the shareholders. Now, they barely can build alternative services fast enough before big money comes in and renders any service or product functionally unusable. I'm feeling myself move further and further away from mainstream anything purely because I'm a snob that likes things to be, well, not utter crap. And increasingly, that means you have to make and own everything yourself again, or at least be part of the avant garde of whatever interests you, before the mainstream invariably fucks it up. I had not the slighest interest in learning how to program a computer but I'll have to know, now, to get all the crapware off my pc. I pirate because my smart tv will no longer update. I lament my non existent fine motor skills more and more each day because I cannot fix terribly made clothes. I ditch subscriptions because they only get more expensive and worse over time. I pay for upgrades on public transport because the economy version has become functionally unusable with my level of disability - and I have not declined as hard as their level of service.

I went to an amusement park I've been to since I was a toddler and got sensory overload, not because any of the rides - they were virtually unchanged - because on every corner, some stall was blaring at me to buy an overpriced trinket. Again, the things in there built to provide you with amusement had not increased. There were no more places to catch your breath.

I mean, I am "voting with my feet", I already am refusing to pay for bad quality but there are no socially approved alternatives.

And sure, that leads to some original experiences. But most of the time it has meant going backwards, using older things that were made to last, or simply refusing to opt in to new technology and I feel that this is the best way of going completely out of touch. The only thing that consoles me about that is that people who work in cybersecurity are completely offline in their own homes. So here I am using pirating and paywall hacks and cooking from scratch and making my own bath oil and taking my nieces to the beach without music because I can't stand the noise and thrift shopping and reviving ten year old machines and finding trials for Spotify to get out of the frickin price hikes and paying for organic food because that is the only way to get some actual nutrition out of supermarket food and somehow failing to see this all as progress.

And now we even have to keep the Republicans out of Ao3. All the while knowing I fed that AI beast.

I'm not even outraged, just annoyed. It's so much effort that somehow wasn't in 2012. I can't think of a single thing that we have now and didn't have then that I couldn't do without gladly - except some music and movies, and using your creditcard to get into the bus.

[lady-azarashe]

I miss the old Internet.

Back when I was younger I frequently visited dozens of different websites. There were countless forums and websites worth spending your time on, and clickbait wasn't a thing as much as it is nowadays. A decade ago my browsing habits were much more varied: Cracked, Gaia, Youtube, ICanHazCheezburger, TGWTG, Instructables, at least four different forums, game/animation portals, etc. I only hit F5 whenever I was waiting for someone's forum reply or for something to be uploaded.

Nowadays stuff is so centralized (and so much stuff from back in the day has either disappeared or gone bad) that my Internet browsing habits are a loop of Tumblr-> Youtube (mostly for music) -> Reddit -> Reddit again -> Tumblr-> Youtube -> Reddit. Doesn't help that most social media seems to be composed of screenshots of the other social media sites. Back then I felt like a digital adventurer, discovering new places by following leads found in random places and that felt genuine. I remember discovering Neopets when I was a kid and I was over the moon because I had discovered something so amazing to me. Or small forums where, after posting for a while, everyone was like family. Now I feel like a disinterested tourist, accompanied by a mass of thousands of users indistinguishable from myself, who is carted around by whatever shows up on the front page; and whose group arrives, mindlessly consumes the content, and leaves feeling mildly entertained yet profoundly unfulfilled.

And this isn't even counting the amount of bullshit we gotta deal with these past few years, such as

manipulative practices from our content providers and their algorithms,

insane amounts of "enshittification" that's hitting every single social media site,

megalomaniacal CEOs constantly screwing over their own users in the name of ego and shareholder profit,

active and passive privacy loss,

the whole clusterfuck of AI-generated content,

astroturfing and manipulation to pit people against one another for a myriad different reasons,

and more!

I had spent over a decade on Reddit and left after the dumpster fire of last year's API changes and subsequent blackout. I feel like Tumblr's current state of affairs will push me out as well eventually. I don't think I'm going anywhere else after this, I'm just gonna join the ranks of the offlines.

Back when I was younger I felt like I had "a home on the Internet", as well as an identity. But now that I don't belong to any online community anymore, and now that I'm slowly withdrawing unto myself and keeping only nostalgia as company, I feel more alone and adrift than ever before. Hell, I'm not sure that's 100% nostalgia there. That's just straight-up loss.

[stevensavage]

Technical Fads And Those Who Benefits

Guess which tech fad I’m talking about?  Doesn’t matter.  I’ve been in IT nearly 30 years as of this writing and not much has changed, it just goes faster while the ephemera of it all becomes more obvious.

Every industry, community, etc. has its fads. Thats normal, humans love new stuff, humans are social, and humans innovate.  A seemingly trite fad today could be the foundation of great future potential.  It could also vanish, but that’s just life.

In tech fads - hell, most fads - one of the issues is money.  Fads can make you money especially if you jump on them, create them, support them, or exploit them and tech lets you do it fast.  Tech has been wildly successful the last few decades and has lots of money, attracts money, and attracts people who want to make money.

Past a certain point, the money starts to matter so much the reason for the fad - sometimes good reasons - doesn’t matter.  At that point I find you end up with really two populations jumping on fads.

People with money:  You got money, you can make money - and when others are making money, you want to run up the score or have more power than them.  You can invest in many fads and hope one pays off.  Of course this distorts the actual value of whatever new ideas are out there as you can take over a market (leading to enshittification) or just keep it going long enough to cash out.

People looking for a quick score:  Jumping on fads in tech - and elsewhere - can be profitable or can seem to be.  Everyone’s ready to try and make a quick buck and fads promise a lot of opportunity.

So everyone jumps on a fad, someone gets rich, and the fad either fades, breaks, or actually becomes something solid.  Then the next fad starts and here we go again.

Thing is, two results tend to come out of this when there’s lots of money to be made.  First, some people make a lot of money, and some people get hosed and lose out.  That distorts the next fad when it’s involves a lot of money (like we see in tech, film, etc.)

First, the people who made a lot of money can jump on, take advantage of, or start the next fad easier.  They have money, they can now multiply it again!

Second, the people who didn’t make a quick score or didn’t get in on it get more desperate for the next fad.  Why miss out?  Why not try to make back what you lost?  Why can’t you be like the people who won last time?

So the next fad is more funded - and more desperate.

Where does this go?  Honestly I think this happens in many areas, not just tech, but it’s all so intertwined maybe that doesn’t matter much.  But one thing it’s not to judge by environmental pressures and economic issues is sustainable.  Winners win more, losers get more desperate, and more and more fads don’t make anything.

I suspect at some point you either see the fractures above rapidly shatter systems, and probably causing that or around that time, there’s one big fad everyone bets on.  For that one, few to no one wins and a lot of people lose.

Just staying that with our environmental problems, that could be geohacking (which I support to an extent).  Chew that one over.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

www.InformoTron.com

[uncloseted]

How can I live like before tiktok / influencers (like current-day ones), bizarre trends and oversharing on the internet was a thing like pre-2014. Social media was just starting out then and things were far less weird unless they were on, like, livejournal or tumblr. People openly OVERSHARE now online, film everything in public and strangers, make bizarre content for ads and their personal brands, and it's like there's no divide at all. People can act like weirdos online and no one bats an eye anymore. For the most part, social media was kind of just normal back before all this. You'd post a photo, see your friends' photos, maybe some funny tweets, and that's it (in typically NORMAL spaces at least). Is deleting my tiktok the answer? Deleting all social media and being on my phone less? I don't have FOMO, I just feel isolated because EVERYONE is always on their phones, ffs. Is there an answer to this? I just want to go back to a normal life again before all these micro-trends, bizarre content, and strange ads etc. before I get anymore immune to it. It's to the point where I watch movies now from like 2014 (I time I lived through) and go, "I miss those days." Like??? Do you also feel this way sometimes or know if it's common? I'd love any advice / help. Thank you bunches.

I do definitely feel this way, and I think a lot of other people share that feeling, as well. There's even a name for what's happened to the internet recently- it's called "enshittification".

As for what to do about it, I think instead of asking "how can I live like before social media" a better question might be "what do I wish I was doing instead?" In general, quitting things is really hard, and it's even harder to quit things when everyone around you is doing them. It's much easier to replace them with something else that's enjoyable and meaningful to you. Maybe that means joining more in-person activities, like an art class or cooking class, sports team, volunteer group, religious organization, or some other kind of club/group. For me, I joined a service that sends me on a surprise real-world activity once a month, and even that has done a lot for my feeling of being present in the real world. (If you follow my Instagram, you might have seen the one for this month- it was a pottery class I went to this morning!)

Maybe replacing social media means figuring out which hobbies you'd like to pursue on your own and putting more time into those- reading, making art or crafts, playing video games, whatever feels exciting to you. For me, writing this blog is one way that I replace mindless scrolling on social media, as is going to real-world meetups, doing interior decorating projects at my house, and doing craft projects.

Or maybe replacing social media just means installing a bunch of ad blockers and aggressively curating your social media experience so that you only see the types of content that feel like they're contributing to your life. You could even unfollow everyone except for people that you know personally. I've curated my social media this aggressively, especially on TikTok, and now most of the content I see there is academics talking about their work, people talking about interior decorating, people putting together outfits, and daily vlogs. This is hard, though, because you have to be super liberal with the "not interested" button, and you have to be able to realize when the algorithm is trying to push you down a rabbit hole of outrage.

In general, I think the more time we spend offline and the more we interact with people who aren't chronically online, the less chaotic the world feels and the easier it becomes to realize that social media isn't real life. A lot of the phenomena that seem so common when you spend a lot of time online are totally foreign to people who don't spend a lot of time online, and I think having that perspective can be really helpful.

[furbyfubar]

You know how everyone agrees that the Internet has turned to shit?

Well, at least almost everyone who was around when the web was young agrees on it. This isn't a post to just bitch about the enshittification of everything online. No, this is a post to tell you what you can do to fight it!

But first let me just quickly sum up what the problem is:

The issue is mainly that the Internet and the World Wide Web went from being this cool thing where you could find almost everything to being the place people to use the same dozen or so apps, and to use those apps increasingly shitty desktop versions if they're on their computer. And any other sites you find with Google are more and more likely to be AI-generated bullshit listicles with well-made SEO that only exist to show ads.

Don't get me wrong, there are content creators on those dozen apps/sites who are still putting out amazing things! But since they don't control the platforms they're posting to they don't really fully own their own content. This is especially true since those platforms will of course make it as difficult as they legally can to move the content off of their services. Services that can and will change their terms of service to be increasingly shittier for their users the more of a hold on the market they get.

Then when the apps get shitty enough to not gain new users and thus eventually die, all those amazing things their users have created there either dies a slow death of obscurity, or the servers shut down and the content is gone for good.

So what can you do to fight this? You can be the change you want to see! So what should you do? Two things:

1. Set up a linktree and/or mailing list

The easiest way is to set up a Linktree account to link all your social media together (without taking up too much space in your bio). That way someone who wants to stop using a specific app/site at least know where else they can find you. But this doesn't help you all that much should your main social media suddenly shut down or bad your account. The best protection then is to use some free service to set up a newsletter/mailing list that you can plug to your followers. Then the people who want to sign up for it won't have to rely on noticing that you've stopped posting to find out your account has been banned. You don't have to use this mailing list to start sending out a periodical newsletter. It's OK to say "This is a backup mailing list that will send updates should I no longer be able to post where you usually follow me."

Bonus advice to protect yourself from losing touch with content creators you like following: Make a new bookmark folder called "Linktrees" and make a habit of bookmarking the Linktree (or equivalent) pages of people you follow. If you realize that someone has stopped posting you now have a place where you can check to see if they are still posting in other places (or under other usernames).

2. Set up your own website

This is typically not entirely free, and I'm not saying it's low effort. But if enough people do it, it will make a change to how the Internet works!

How? I promise you it's still easier than you probably think! Especially if you remember that the issue you're trying to solve here is that the web is lacking personal sites where people like you post things they burn for. That means that your site doesn't have to look good. Content is still king!

Learn some basic HTML and make a web page where you can post whatever content you want. That web page can then link to the other web pages you make. Do that and, congratulations, you've now made a website!

OK, so you've made a website that can only be loaded from your own hard drive, so maybe don't celebrate just yet. The next step is to sign up for a some web hosting service that lets you post anything that's legal for them to host. There are still free web hosts that survive by adding ads to your site, but if you can afford it I would advice you to find a cheap service that doesn't do this. If you only intend to host HTML and images so you don't need database support this still isn't all that expensive given that you're not likely to hit even the lowest bandwidth limit.

Next register a domain name. Make sure you have auto-payment set up for its renewal, and set a yearly alarm in your phone to make sure you don't lose the domain name due to forgetting about checking you e-mail at the wrong time. (Domain squatting trolls who register the domains that expire to either show phishing scams OR sell back the domain name to the original owner at an obscene markup are still sadly a thing.)

What should you use you website for?

Whatever the hell you want! If you're already a content creator I'm not even saying that you should stop posting to the apps you have followers on, but this gives you a way to post the same content to a platform that you control should something happen to your app of choice. Keep posting your photos, fanfiction or whatever content you make to the services you usually do, but now also upload them you your own website!

If you're making video you can still host if from YouTube (or Vimeo or whatever) so that you don't run into bandwidth issues. YouTube isn't likely to shut down out of nowhere, but they might start showing so many unblockable ads that you no longer want to have that be the main place your videos are hosted. But if you embed those videos on your own site and (vitally) make sure that you keep the raw video files backed up, you now have a way to change where your videos are hosted!

[ailurinae]

It's a long, slow process but I swear tumblr is trying to drive me fully back to FB. Twitter is dead, reddit was always trash for social stuff (I previously maintained a minimal presence there because of certain technical communities and personal reviews), g+ is long gone, multiply is too.

Now Automattic, having first lured us into a false sense of security by actually improving some things, is ramping up the enshittification process.

Meanwhile, FB still sells all your data, but it's been a good while since they changed up the UI, and the UI was so bad in most of its recent iterations that it doesn't matter much. Bad to different bad is pretty whatever, unlike good to bad. And FB while annoying with it's algo content, is less annoying than twitter ever was on that front. You can train FB pretty well to show you pretty bland stuff, instead of something you certain to get steamed about like on twitter.

Really with everything in my life and in the world unraveling and collapsing, I just want some stability. And FB has a baseline of stable shittiness. I don't really see it getting massively worse or even just massively different anytime soon, so it starts looking better and better.

[hug-your-face]

I cannot overstate how accurate this is.

My own disclaimer: 1. Although I actually know a little something abt how modern "AI" works, having studied neural networks in undergrad in prep for going deep in them in grad school (but decided there was no career in it apart from research bc the datasets weren't there), I'm not deep into the ChatGPT roadmap; 2. While I have made a career out of consulting to exec leadership of startup and midsize businesses and directors of global businesses, I'm not a business prognosticator.

The gamble, and the hype and social effects around the gamble, that @phantomrose96 explains are both spot on. And it's important to understand BOTH. I only understood the first in my undergrad years when I still believed people as a whole act rationally. If I'd understood the second part I might have stayed in the AI game.

To be clear:

The primary gamble is that G-AI can disrupt existing corporate cost structures to the same degree that robots and assembly lines disrupted the cost of manufacturing back in the days when most things were built by hand. And it's hard to tell yet if the tech will ever be able to do that or not. I personally don’t believe it will.

But if it DOES, then the effects on corporate profitability would be SO huge that the mere possibility creates incredible attention and interest. Investors and therefore companies simply cannot afford to ignore it.

This hype creates a secondary gamble: gambling on the hype itself. If there is enough BELIEF that G-AI can reduce costs so much, then there is money to be had in exploiting the hype. As @phantomrose96 said, companies can add in G-AI simply to get more investor cash. Companies can scare their competition by having something the competition doesn't -- whether it works or not. It's like buying stock in a company just because everyone else is buying the stock even though the company is bleeding money: if enough people believe in it, you can still buy low and sell high.

And now we get to the really worrying effect: that companies are going to do whatever they can to CONVINCE investors that they've cracked the code to near-zero operating costs when they absolutely have not. That can include laying off vast numbers of employees and, when whatever service the company delivers becomes nearly-unusable because of course it will, covering up that pesky little fact. Trying to blame customers for making "unreasonable expectations." Making the customer do the work themselves. Passing on the cost of errors to the consumer. Major enshittification, but hailed by the companies as a good thing.

This last bit is the new version of "if you can't afford to pay your workers then your business model is broken." Okay, fine, say the companies: We will just let go of our workers and charge customers more for shittier service.

Woe, doom, gloom! We're all gonna die in G-AI enshittification!

Fear not, there is something we can do. But we have to do it collectively:

We have to call out when companies are regularly failing to deliver what they supposedly say they are delivering. There needs to be counter-hype. Investors care about what the market (that's you and me) think. If a company tries to sell investors on the amazing profitability of their G-AI solution but the investors can say "yeah but people hate your stuff and are trying to not buy it," then the investor will be less likely to invest.

So we need to loudly show that the market thinks: "if you cannot afford to pay your workers -OR- you cannot delight your customers with the workers you have, then your business model is broken."

How you do it is up to you.

It can be as personal as telling this story to others when they experience enshittification. Reminding friends that "actually no, your expectations for the product or service you're buying ARE reasonable. You should look for a different provider."

It could be organizing others into calling out companies posting great profits that are doing it by delivering shit. And loudly saying how you are looking for a different provider, or finding ways to do without.

It could be in hyping up companies that DON'T do this kind of G-AI enshittification. Loudly sharing what a great product or great service you got from a company that actually has enough capable people to take care of you.

(Is there yet some site that rates companies based on how well staffed they are and how good a service they provide as a result? Someone, please make that app.)

It can be as political as raising the issue to your mayor, senator, or congresscritter. Sending stories to consumer protection agencies. Many companies would extract your blood and make you pay for the privilege if they could; it's only being required to operate within the law that makes them do otherwise.

It's gonna be hard, because when EVERYONE is riding the hype train then it's hard to find alternatives, which makes it hard to vote with your dollars.

But it's worth fighting for. Don’t settle for G-AI enshittification.

Thank you @phantomrose96 for writing and publishing what I've been gnashing my teeth about and trying to explain to my friends, family, and clients.

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

[stevensaus]

As this current wave of people have been leaving the rampant fascism actively being pushed by Musk on X, many people have ended up on Bluesky. I've also seen people finally getting fed up with Meta's tampering with the main timeline and doing the same. Which, y'know, is cool. Bluesky is a hell of a lot better than X or Facebook. You can find me there at @stevensaus.com or alternately, follow my Mastodon account at @StevenSaus.faithcollapsing.com.ap.brid.gy. However, I've also seen others be wary of enshittification. If you aren't familiar with the term, take a moment and read the linked Wired article from Corey Doctorow. TL;DR: profit-seeking makes things worse as companies shift from serving the users to serving the investors. Bluesky may feel different now, but so did Twitter then. What's to prevent it from happening again? Nothing. This is the tradeoff you make when you use someone else's service that's being run with an expectation of making a profit. Whether through the consumption of ads on the site or through making purchasing ad space a requirement to reach your audience, any for-profit company is highly incentivized to... well, make a profit. That's not inherently bad; it is very possible to make a sustainable profit and not completely enshittify something. But that's not what typically happens. Instead, corporations tend to focus on maximizing profits, particularly in the short run. That combination is what really slams the gas pedal down on the enshittification process. Whether it's shrinkflation or predatory inflation or shoving ads in your face or not letting you see what grandma posted because she didn't spend money to , the net result of enshittification remains. So what are you to do? For people who are mostly just being social and consumers, I would make sure that, aside from having good blocking tools, whatever service(s) you use have the ability for you to export your data easily, and migrate servers if possible. Both Mastodon and Bluesky allow this (though "selfhosting" Bluesky doesn't mean quite the same thing it does for Mastodon). Aside from making multiple accounts, you can use RSS feeds to get user feeds from Bluesky or Mastodon natively; there are services that claim to be able to do so with Threads. The ideal solution would be something like Mastodon, but even moreso, where there are many, many, many individual instances. But that does require some degree of technical expertise, and a lot of folx either don't have the know-how or the time or energy to set something like that up. Community servers -- like wandering.shop -- are a compromise, but rely on donated funds and time (for moderation). Failing that, the next best thing would be an app (or apps) to combine the feeds of multiple services into one (or one interface). I would love a deck-style app (or even better, a TUI) where you can have a column for Mastodon, a column for Threads, a column for Bluesky, a column for Tumblr etc. It's probably feasible at this point in time, but I'm unaware of such a tool as of yet. For producers -- those of us who write blogs, create art, or otherwise share "content" in one form or another -- you cannot have your primary online identity be any social media site that you do not control. Plain and simple. Just like how this blog post is being pushed/posted to Tumblr, LinkedIn, Medium, Mastodon, FB, and Bluesky. Even if the full text is at those sites, the original can always be found at the blog itself. If someone followed me on X, they'll now find my account is fully deactivated there... but they can still find me here, always. Not only does this protect you from a service going toxic overall like X has, but it also means you're not as hurt if you get caught by an overzealous moderation bot that doesn't give you a reason for why you've had your account restricted. It's happened to me on G+, Discord, Threads, Instagram, TikTok, and Pintrest. Many of those I do not know what I supposedly did wrong and cannot

get an answer from the service; for Threads and Insta, they claim the weekly flash fiction challenge site is a spam/scam site, even though I've jumped through the hoops to verify it. It can be a pain in the rear to do it this way -- I still have to post to Bluesky manually, for example, at least for now -- but overall it's worth it. That reduces the "sunk costs" of being on any particular service for both you and your followers. https://ideatrash.net/2024/11/trying-to-escape-the-cycle-of-enshittification.html?feed_id=491&_unique_id=673bc82083f97

[stevensavage]

No Sympathy For Tech

So as you may have just seen, some insiders at big companies (Zuckerberg, etc.) sold off stock. That tells me the sign that things are slowing down in tech. Well, one of many signs:

Everyone’s all in on AI, which means that there is going to be some shakeout when it doesn’t all work out.

Plenty of sites that are a little unstable, like ol’ Kotaku’s pivot (ha!) to guides.

Whatever embarassments crypto still holds for us.

Venture Capital looking for quick profits (See Ed Zitron’s latest).

This tells me that at some point we’ve got a shakeout in tech. As in something bad - and something earlier than I expected. This isn’t a surprise - for the last six months I’ve seen people make predictions that boil down to some combination of:

A big name takes a hit.

A lot of not-as-big-names fail because of a mix of bad ideas, low ad rates, and so on.

AI doesn’t pan out like people hope.

General enshittification.

VC money moves away fast.

I’ve been trying to puzzle out what’s going to happen myself. But there’s something else I want to address - how people react. See, I think there’s going to be little sympathy, and plenty of schadenfreude when the inevitable “big fall” happens.

People regard tech different than they did ten years ago or twenty years ago. Sure there’s some interesting stuff, but it’s often pricey, questionable, or not much more beyond interesting. Beloved sites are enshittified. Nothing seems new, often because it’s not.

Gone are the days of breathless waiting that felt like there was something worth waiting for. Ads are everywhere, websites are overclogged, products might be fourth-rate knockoffs with AI generated images. New gizmos ape SF concepts while planned obsolescence takes the fun out of the new. Annoying bad features are a joke among social media users.

A friend of mine of well over two decades has noted they feel things were better back when we first met.

So when the “big fall” happens, in whatever forms (I expect a kind of cascade collapse), I think people won’t care and many will enjoy watching things burn. When they do care it’ll be more how they’re personally impacted for obvious reasons - but there’s so much less “loving tech together” these days.

That’s also going to make everything from economic recovery to new products to potential government regulations harder to predict. Watching people fall out of love with tech (and tech has done plenty to shoot itself in the foot) isn’t quite like anything I’ve seen in my life except one thing.

Watching how the reputation of smoking collapsed in my lifetime. No, it’s not exact - tech has benefits smoking’s benefits were mostly social, but still the “feel” is there.

Perhaps that’s something for me to explore later. Just writing the above was exhausting, because so much has changed over the nearly three decades I’ve been in tech. Looking back over half my lifetime feels like several.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

www.InformoTron.com