#resist enshittification

[lilithsaintcrow]

"…we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since and developing even better things as we go forward."

[pvp-enabled]

The next product or service that demands that I download their single use app before I can get the thing I paid for is getting a robust low-tech intervention delivered directly to their CEO

[songoftrillium]

Just remembered Netflix cancelling Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is the reason I cancelled my subscription, and now I'm mad at them all over again

[mostlysignssomeportents]

You should be using an RSS reader

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, GEORGIA, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

No matter how hard we all wish it were otherwise, the sad fact is that there aren't really individual solutions to systemic problems. For example: your personal diligence in recycling will have no meaningful impact on the climate emergency.

I get it. People write to me all the time, they say, "What can I change about my life to fight enshittification, or, at the very least, to reduce the amount of enshittification that I, personally, experience?"

It's frustrating, but my general answer is, "Join a movement. Get involved with a union, with EFF, with the FSF. Tell your Congressional candidate to defend Lina Khan from billionaire Dem donors who want her fired. Do something systemic."

There's very little you can do as a consumer. You're not going to shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. Now that Amazon has destroyed most of the brick-and-mortar and digital stores out of business, boycotting Amazon often just means doing without. The collective action problem of leaving Twitter or Facebook is so insurmountable that you end up stuck there, with a bunch of people you love and rely on, who all love each other, all hate the platform, but can't agree on a day and time to leave or a destination to leave for and so end up stuck there.

I've been experiencing some challenging stuff in my personal life lately and yesterday, I just found myself unable to deal with my usual podcast fare so I tuned into the videos from the very last XOXO, in search of uplifting fare:

https://www.youtube.com/@xoxofest

I found it. Talks by Dan Olson, Cabel Sasser, Ed Yong and many others, especially Molly White:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTaeVVAvk-c

Molly's talk was so, so good, but when I got to her call to action, I found myself pulling a bit of a face:

But the platforms do not exist without the people, and there are a lot more of us than there are of them. The platforms have installed themselves in a position of power, but they are also vulnerable…

Are the platforms really that vulnerable? The collective action problem is so hard, the switching costs are so high – maybe the fact that "there's a lot more of us than there are of them" is a bug, not a feature. The more of us there are, the thornier our collective action problem and the higher the switching costs, after all.

And then I had a realization: the conduit through which I experience Molly's excellent work is totally enshittification-proof, and the more I use it, the easier it is for everyone to be less enshittified.

This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power.

It's RSS.

RSS (one of those ancient internet acronyms with multiple definitions, including, but not limited to, "Really Simple Syndication") is an invisible, automatic way for internet-connected systems to public "feeds." For example, rather than reloading the Wired homepage every day and trying to figure out which stories are new (their layout makes this very hard to do!), you can just sign up for Wired's RSS feed, and use an RSS reader to monitor the site and preview new stories the moment they're published. Wired pushes about 600 words from each article into that feed, stripped of the usual stuff that makes Wired nearly impossible to read: no 20-second delay subscription pop-up, text in a font and size of your choosing. You can follow Wired's feed without any cookies, and Wired gets no information about which of its stories you read. Wired doesn't even get to know that you're monitoring its feed.

I don't mean to pick on Wired here. This goes for every news source I follow – from CNN to the New York Times. But RSS isn't just good for the news! It's good for everything. Your friends' blogs? Every blogging platform emits an RSS feed by default. You can follow every one of them in your reader.

Not just blogs. Do you follow a bunch of substackers or other newsletters? They've all got RSS feeds. You can read those newsletters without ever registering in the analytics of the platforms that host them. The text shows up in black and white (not the sadistic, 8-point, 80% grey-on-white type these things all default to). It is always delivered, without any risk of your email provider misclassifying an update as spam:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

Did you know that, by default, your email sends information to mailing list platforms about your reading activity? The platform gets to know if you opened the message, and often how far along you've read in it. On top of that, they get all the private information your browser or app leaks about you, including your location. This is unbelievably gross, and you get to bypass all of it, just by reading in RSS.

Are your friends too pithy for a newsletter, preferring to quip on social media? Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to get an RSS feed from Insta/FB/Twitter, but all those new ones that have popped up? They all have feeds. You can follow any Mastodon account (which means you can follow any Threads account) via RSS. Same for Bluesky. That also goes for older platforms, like Tumblr and Medium. There's RSS for Hacker News, and there's a sub-feed for the comments on every story. You can get RSS feeds for the Fedex, UPS and USPS parcels you're awaiting, too.

Your local politician's website probably has an RSS feed. Ditto your state and national reps. There's an RSS feed for each federal agency (the FCC has a great blog!).

Your RSS reader lets you put all these feeds into folders if you want. You can even create automatic folders, based on keywords, or even things like "infrequently updated sites" (I follow a bunch of people via RSS who only update a couple times per year – cough, Danny O'Brien, cough – and never miss a post).

Your RSS reader doesn't (necessarily) have an algorithm. By default, you'll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.

Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

Now, you sign up to so many feeds that you're feeling overwhelmed and you want an algorithm to prioritize posts – or recommend content. Lots of RSS readers have some kind of algorithm and recommendation system (I use News, which offers both, though I don't use them – I like the glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of the undifferentiated firehose feed).

But you control the algorithm, you control the recommendations. And if a new RSS reader pops up with an algorithm you're dying to try, you can export all the feeds you follow with a single click, which will generate an OPML file. Then, with one click, you can import that OPML file into any other RSS reader in existence and all your feeds will be seamlessly migrated there. You can delete your old account, or you can even use different readers for different purposes.

You can access RSS in a browser or in an app on your phone (most RSS readers have an app), and they'll sync up, so a story you mark to read later on your phone will be waiting for you the next time you load up your reader in a browser tab, and you won't see the same stories twice (unless you want to, in which case you can mark them as unread).

RSS basically works like social media should work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

And here's the best part: every time you use RSS, you bring that world closer into being! The collective action problem that the publishers and friends and politicians and businesses you care about is caused by the fact that everyone they want to reach is on a platform, so if they leave the platform, they'll lose that community. But the more people who use RSS to follow them, the less they'll depend on the platform.

Unlike those largely useless, performative boycotts of widely used platforms, switching to RSS doesn't require that you give anything up. Not only does switching to RSS let you continue to follow all the newsletters, webpages and social media accounts you're following now, it makes doing so better: more private, more accessible, and less enshittified.

Switching to RSS lets you experience just the good parts of the enshitternet, but that experience is delivered in manner that the new, good internet we're all dying for.

My own newsletter is delivered in fulltext via RSS. If you're reading this as a Mastodon or Twitter thread, on Tumblr or on Medium, or via email, you can get it by RSS instead:

https://pluralistic.net/feed/

Don't worry about which RSS reader you start with. It literally doesn't matter. Remember, you can switch readers with two clicks and take all the feeds you've subscribed to with you! If you want a recommendation, I have nothing but praise for Newsblur, which I've been paying $2/month for since 2011 (!):

https://newsblur.com/

Subscribing to feeds is super-easy, too: the links for RSS feeds are invisibly embedded in web-pages. Just paste the URL of a web-page into your RSS reader's "add feed" box and it'll automagically figure out where the feed lives and add it to your subscriptions.

It's still true that the new, good internet will require a movement to overcome the collective action problems and the legal barriers to disenshittifying things. Almost nothing you do as an individual is going to make a difference.

But using RSS will! Using RSS to follow the stuff that matters to you will have an immediate, profoundly beneficial impact on your own digital life – and it will appreciably, irreversibly nudge the whole internet towards a better state.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

[autolenaphilia]

Why enshittification happens and how to stop it.

The enshittification of the internet and increasingly the software we use to access it is driven by profit. It happens because corporations are machines for making profits from end users, the users and customers are only seen as sources of profits. Their interests are only considered if it can help the bottom line. It's capitalism.

For social media it's users are mainly seen by the companies that run the sites as a way for getting advertisers to pay money that can profit the shareholders. And social media is in a bit of death spiral right now, since they have seldom or never been profitable and investor money is drying up as they realize this.

So the social media companies. are getting more and more desperate for money. That's why they are getting more aggressive with getting you to watch ads or pay for the privilege of not watching ads. It won't work and tumblr and all the other sites will die eventually.

But it's not just social media companies, it's everything tech-related. It gets worse the more monopolistic a tech giant is. Google is abusing its chrome-based near monopoly over the web, nerfing adblockers, trying to drm the web, you name it. And Microsoft is famously a terrible company, spying on Windows users and selling their data. Again, there is so much money being poured into advertising, at least 493 billion globally, the tech giants want a slice of that massive pie. It's all about making profits for shareholders, people be damned.

And the only insurance against this death spiral is not being run by a corporation. If the software is being developed by a non-profit entity, and it's open source, there is no incentive for the developers to fuck over the users for the sake of profits for shareholders, because there aren't any profits, and no shareholders.

Free and Open source software is an important part of why such software development can stay non-corporate. It allows for volunteers to contribute to the code and makes it harder for users to be secretly be fucked over by hidden code.

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are good examples of this. There is a Mozilla corporation, but it exists only for legal reasons and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla foundation. There are no shareholders. That means the Mozilla corporation is not really a corporation in the sense that Google is, and as an organization has entirely different incentives. If someone tells you that Mozilla is just another corporation, (which people have said in the notes of posts about firefox on this very site) they are spreading misinformation.

That's why Firefox has resisted the enshittification of the internet so well, it's not profit driven. And people who develop useful plugins that deshitify the web like Ublock origin and Xkit are as a rule not profit-driven corporations.

And you can go on with other examples of non-profit software like Libreoffice and VLC media player, both of which you should use.

And you can go further, use Linux as your computer's operating system.. It's the only way to resist the enshitification that the corporate duopoly of Microsoft and Apple has brought to their operating system. The plethora of community-run non-profit Linux distributions like Debian, Mint and Arch are the way to counteract that, and they will stay resistant to the same forces (creating profit for shareholders) that drove Microsoft to create Windows 11.

Of course not all Linux distributions are non-profits. There are corporate created distros like Red Hat's various distros, Canonical's Ubuntu and Suse's Opensuse, and they prove the point I'm making. There has some degree of enshittification going on with those, red hat going closed source and Canonical with the snap store for example. Mint is by now a succesful community-driven response to deshitify Ubuntu by removing snaps for example, and even they have a back-up plan to use Debian as a base in case Canonical makes Ubuntu unuseable.

As for social media, which I started with, I'm going to stay on tumblr for now, but it will definitely die. The closest thing to a community run non-profit replacement I can see is Mastodon, which I'm on as @autolenaphilia@chaosfem.tw.

You don't have to keep using corporate software, and have it inevitably decline because the corporations that develop it cares more about its profits than you as an end user.

The process of enshittification proves that corporations being profit-driven don't mean they will create a better product, and in fact may cause them to do the opposite. And the existence of great free and open source software, created entirely without the motivation of corporate profits, proves that people don't need to profit in order to help their fellow human beings. It kinda makes you question capitalism.

[thefugitivesaint]

Sasha Weiss, in a recent piece in the New York Times Magazine, offers an account of Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about Prince and how unexpected conflicts with the controlling interests of the Prince estate (who switched executors well into the process of making the documentary and those new executors took issue with the project) might mean that said documentary might never reach a viewing audience. Weiss' overview of the project inspired in me a strong desire to give it a watch. She writes that Edelman's work, "...offers one answer to a question that has agonized the culture at large for the last decade. How should we think about artists whose moral failings are exposed? Edelman manages to present a deeply flawed person while still granting him his greatness — and his dignity."

It's an engaging read and whether you're a fan of Prince or not. How do you explore the life of a man who resisted being known and who spent much of his life crafting a public persona that was always shifting and changing? Does exposing the flaws of an artist diminish that artist or does it help humanize them, giving them a deeper context, and, perhaps, allowing the public a better understanding of their art in the process? "As Edelman completed his interviews — more than 70 of them — he realized there wasn’t some big secret that people were hiding. Instead, what he found were the defining traumas of Prince’s childhood and his constant recapitulating of them. The story unfolds slowly, hauntingly, over the course of the film." ............. As a quick aside (and possibly unnecessary digression): buried in the piece is a brief discussion about the erosion of quality in the content being produced by Netflix, particularly in the field of documentaries, "Netflix, which is still the biggest platform for documentaries, has, in recent years, moved away from the kind of prestigious, provocative films that helped make the company’s reputation, toward content that is inexpensive to make and appeals to a global audience. Many people pointed to the platform’s increased appetite for gauzy, entertaining celebrity documentaries — of, for example, Beyoncé, David Beckham, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez, all of whom were intimately involved in their creation." Of course, this "move away" from "prestigious, provocative films" for more superficially pleasing documentaries is about money. Whenever you see something getting worse, no matter what it is, usually the foundation for that degradation is avarice, greed, the chasing after profit above all things. It's the fundamental problem with the media (and the billionaires who own it), with the economy, it's the engine of the housing crisis, it's why the internet sucks (see Cory Doctorow's 'Enshittification' for an exploration on this particular topic). The list is potentially endless. The new executors of the Prince estate, so speculation goes, are resistant to the films release because they think that it will hurt the public image of Prince, get him "cancelled" posthumously, and "devalue the estate’s bottom line" (i.e. make them less money).

[recurring-polynya]

I mentioned the other week that I'd been thinking about doing this, but I've decided to lock down some of my fanfics to ao3 users only. For now, I'm just going to do the smutty ones. I wanted to give people fair warning, so I'll do it a week from today. Download 'em if you want 'em or perhaps consider actually getting an ao3 login? (There's a queue, so you put in your email address and in a few days you get an email with instructions. It's not that hard). It's free and their bookmarking and collection features are really powerful ways to keep track of your favorite fanfics and recommend them to others. We're getting wave after wave of bots scraping fic for 3rd-party profiteering or just leaving nasty spam comments. Lots of authors resist locking their fics down out of love for their lurkers and Guest commenters, and I think that making an account is a way of telling your favorite authors, "hey, I respect your right to put the tiniest possible amount of protection between the work that you do for free and the current enshittification of the internet."

We'll see how it goes, but in the future, I will probably end up doing something where when I write a new fic, I'll make it public, but then lock it down after a week or two. Thanks in advance for your understanding, and I'm sorry we can't have nice things, but that's how it is these days.

[sigridstumb]

The world got so wide

I am pondering, like many people more knowledgeable than me, the enshittification of the internet.

In my lifetime the world grew in ways that had hitherto been the provenance of science fiction. In my lifetime I could find information, people, connection, and conversation around the world at any moment. In my lifetime I could find products and services that I would never previously have heard of, could find organizations and social clubs that I never, ever would have imagined seeking out.

The world grew so very, very wide. I felt, for about fifteen years, that some part of me was always touching something live, powerful, and full of human promise.

That's changing. That's changed.

The wide, wide world of information is being poisoned. It is not accurate, reliable, or dependably real.

I am pondering how we all did this Before. How did we find things Before? How did we find people? How did we find groups? How did we find businesses? How did we learn, review, assess, and judge the information we were receiving about the world and the things in it?

We used to have Authoritative Tomes. The Encyclopedia. World Books. The Phone Book.

All of those things still exist, yes, but they mostly exist online where they can be poisoned. And the ones that resist the poison have been or are being killed - bought, strip-mined, and their corpse replaced on the internet full of poison.

I am turning slowly back to word of mouth.

My world is getting smaller, smaller again, in many ways. And I forsee it continuing on that trajectory. I ask friends and family what ad-blocker they are using. I ask friends for product recommendations. I ask the neighborhood list (which is NOT poisoned and is heavily monitored to keep ads and such out) for service and repair recommendations. I can't really go look at reviews, not any more. (I mean, I COULD, yes, but that's hours of my life trying to figure out whether something is even real, let alone whether it works as I want it to.)

It's a very weird thing to be living through.

I think of the people in the Jazz Age, the bright things with lives full of promise, with the future bright in front of them -- and then the Great Depression.

My world is still larger than it ever has been in some ways. But the seas we swim in are choked with poison, and I spend my time now rafting from land to land.

The world got so wide.

I miss it.

[theoutcastrogue]

by Mike Shea on 5 August 2024:

Hasbro may be hurling D&D towards a digital future but we already have everything we need to enjoy this game for the rest of our lives. Hasbro is super-excited for a digital D&D future. They're tired of selling us, as Penny Arcade perfectly describes, a single hamburger we can share with our friends every week for thirty years. Hasbro wants subscription revenue from every player every month – not just the single purchase of a book you can keep, share, and use for the rest of your life. Hasbro doesn't want to sell you D&D. They want you to pay rent. Chris Cocks, Hasbro's president and former president of Wizards of the Coast, is pushing hard for a digital future. He already said they're running experiments with artificial intelligence saying "D&D has 50 years of content that we can mine". The new head of Wizards of the Coast, the subsidiary of Hasbro in charge of D&D, is a former Blizzard executive who replaced a former Amazon and Microsoft executive. They posted a new D&D product architect job with a clear focus on digital gaming and a new "monetization designer" which is as close to "professional enshittifier" as I've heard of in a job description. So yeah, Hasbro is really excited to charge monthly fees and microtransactions for D&D and ensure you never stop paying for it. But I have good news for you. It doesn't matter. Here are four reasons why: 1. The three D&D core books are the only D&D books that really matter and they're going to be physical books. 2. With rulesets released into the Creative Commons, anyone can build digital tools, adventures, supplements, and even entire RPGs – all fully compatible with D&D. 3. We have 50 years of previous versions of D&D we can play, multiple competing and compatible 5e variants from other publishers, and hundreds of other RPGs we can enjoy. 4. We have several independent digital platforms we can use to run our games online.

[keep reading]

So Mike Shea's argument here is that no matter what Hasbro does, D&D is enshittification-proof. Personally, I agree that tabletop games (all of them, not just D&D) are to a large extent resistant to that, due to the nature of the game, but digital platforms are another matter. Then again, I have zero interest in digital platforms, so I don't know how they work. Can you incorporate non-SRD material in an independent VTT, for example? Does it matter? No idea!

For traditional D&D, I think it's always had (in its entire history, all editions!) two distinct modes of attracting people:

here is an Official Book of Rules! I should buy it (or borrow it, or pirate it) and use it, because it's an official and authoritative publication

here is a Good Rule! I should incorporate it in my D&D game because I like it, and I don't care where it came from and in what format, official book, third party, homebrew, DMs Guild, hardcover book, piece of paper, pdf, a reddit post, my own noggin.

But last year, they tried an new thing and released a set of 25 monsters for $6 only on D&D Beyond. No physical print, and no pdf. (Previously there had been digital-only releases, mostly short adventures, but in pdf form.) And although I have no way of knowing how sales went, I strongly suspect this will NEVER work. It's just a bunch of "assets", it doesn't register as an Official Publication, there's no incentive to get it as such. So we're left with "is it a good rule?", and there it competes with a million other rules published for fun and/or profit by other people. Why "buy" that one? (You're not quite buying it: if D&D Beyond goes down, poof go the monsters!)

So yeah, I think they'll try to enshittify tabletop D&D, but they'll go about it half-heartedly (to go full in, they'd have to drop the printed books, and there's NO WAY they'll do that), and simply no one will care, D&D doesn't work like that.

[misanthropemom]

Okay. A substantial portion of the people using internet today just grew up with the process of enshittification that we currently suffer from. This situation is not normal. I'm sorry that you grew up in this environment and you don't understand why us old people keep complaining about what used to be. But the world in general is much much more difficult and unpleasant to live in. And we wanted it to not be that shitty. Just because you're used to it, doesn't mean it is at all good. Seriously, this is no way to live. Our entire culture it is currently made up of a large number of people economically forced into a corner. This is not anything that should be tolerated this is something that should be fought against and resisted. Or it will indeed turn into violence.

[charyou-tree]

Migrating to Tumblr

I've had my reservations about the owners of reddit for a while now, I'm pretty sure /u/spez is a fascist sympathizer, and the ongoing enshittification in the style of twitter/facebook has been the last straw.

I fully support the efforts of the subreddit blackout, but I'm not optimistic that the people running reddit will do anything about it, they've only shown intention to double down, and have no real legal obligation to do anything differently. tbh, subreddit moderators should form a genuine labor union, they do millions of dollars of UNPAID work for reddit, and that would give them actual power to negotiate, but the odds of getting anything like that done in a week or two are slim to none.

With this in mind, I'm going to be migrating to tumblr, which seems to be the most monetization-resistant social media site left, if yahoo selling them at a 99% loss is anything to go by.

Y'all are some of the best part of reddit, keep being awesome, and feel free to follow me over on tumblr too. No promises that it will be interesting or anything, I don't really know how tumblr works yet, but I'm petty enough to spend some time figuring it out to spite reddit.

[mariacallous]

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is striking against studios in pursuit of a new contract that lets writers participate more fully in the industry. The central disagreements are about economics, but the issue that has captured the most public attention is the threat posed by so-called artificial intelligence—products like ChatGPT—to the livelihood of creative professionals, including writers.

ChatGPT is a generative AI program that has been trained on a massive corpus of text to predict the word or words that should follow a text prompt or word string. It is not intelligent, though its user interface has been designed to create that illusion.

Studios perceive that generative AI is a tool they can use against writers. Some kinds of programming can be formulaic—awards shows and sitcoms, for example—which encourages writers to mimic scripts that have been successful in the past. In theory, a well-constructed generative AI could provide a first draft of such a script. But studio executives have gone one step further, imagining that products like ChatGPT will transform the writing process for everything from awards shows to feature films. Studios see this as both a potential cost savings and a way to convert script writing from copyrightable work to work for hire.

It is almost certain that they will embrace generative AI, even if it produces nothing but junk, which is what they will get. They have drunk the Kool-Aid poured by Silicon Valley’s hype merchants.

My experience working in Hollywood—as a consultant on Silicon Valley for five seasons and through involvement in documentaries like The Facebook Dilemma, The Social Dilemma, and The Great Hack—has led me to believe that if studios are smart, they will understand that their interests are aligned with those of writers, directors, and all creative people. Silicon Valley is coming for their profit margin.

CEOs believe that generative AI will reduce their labor costs. What they are missing is that Silicon Valley plans to use AI to do to Hollywood what it did to news and music. Silicon Valley’s bait-and-switch tactics follow a pattern that Cory Doctorow, writing about social media, refers to as “enshittification.” Social media platforms offer benefits to users until they are hooked, then they “enshittify” the product to appeal to advertisers. Once advertisers are on board, platforms “enshittify” their experience, as well as that of users, to extract maximum value. They perfected the game plan at Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, and TikTok and are now extending it outside of social media.

We see this in video streaming technology, the first step in a siege against Hollywood. As Big Tech always does, it baited the trap with short-term benefits, such as an increased investment in programming, which emerged in the form of a golden age of high-quality, limited run series. Streaming caused an explosion in the number of shows, but each show had many fewer episodes, which meant writers would only be employed for eight or 10 weeks at a time. In addition, streaming undercut television syndication, which had been a big source of income for writers. Streaming’s touted benefits have eroded rapidly over the past two years as studios have entered the streaming market, saturating consumer demand and forcing all involved to cut costs.

Now, generative AI is the potential kill shot, the one that could cause copyright owners to surrender their library of scripts, created over decades, in exchange for promised benefits that will never arrive.

When it comes to generative AI and video, Silicon Valley only needs to hook one constituency— Hollywood executives. Once studios buy in, they will be at the mercy of the purveyors of that technology. It happened in journalism. It happened in music. Silicon Valley did not kill those industries, but it gained control of the audience and extracted a huge percentage of the potential profits. For studio executives, generative AI is an intelligence test.

The best path forward is for studios and writers to acknowledge four realities.

First, generative AI will eventually be a valuable tool in some creative realms, potentially including script writing, but only if the AI has been built from the ground up for that task.

Second, the flaws of today’s generative AIs make them unsuitable for serious work, especially in creative fields. General purpose AIs, like ChatGPT, are trained on whatever content the creator can steal on the internet, which means their output often consists of nonsense dressed up to appear authoritative. The best they can do is imitate their training set. These AIs will never be any good at creating draft scripts—even of the most formulaic programming—unless their training set includes a giant library of Hollywood scripts.

Third, Silicon Valley is the common enemy of studios and writers. It is an illusion that studios can partner with AI companies to squeeze writers without being harmed themselves. Silicon Valley is using a potential reduction in writer compensation as the bait in a trap where the target is studio profits.

Fourth, there is no reason Hollywood cannot create its own generative AI to compete with ChatGPT. Studios and writers control the intellectual property needed to make a great AI. A generative AI that is trained on every script contributed by a single studio or collection of studios would produce wildly better scripts than ChatGPT. Would it produce the next Casablanca? No. But it could produce an excellent first draft of an Emmy Awards show script. And it would safeguard the business model of Hollywood for the next generation.

If studios work separately or together to create AI they control, the future of Hollywood will be much brighter. Central to this fourth point is a legal strategy of copyright infringement litigation against the major players in generative AI. If copyright is to mean anything at all, Hollywood must challenge Silicon Valley’s assertion of the right to “permissionless innovation,” which has become a safe harbor for law-breaking in domains ranging from consumer safety to public health to copyright.

Some might say that Hollywood does not have the ability to “do technology.” That is ridiculous. Pixar, Weta Digital, and the CGI special effects industry demonstrate that Hollywood can not only master technology, but also innovate in it.

There are many open source architectures for generative AI. Studios and the WGA can license them cheaply and hire a handful of engineers to train their own AI. It will take many years, but copyright litigation will buy the industry the time it needs, and it may even become a giant profit center.

There are serious issues to be resolved between the writers and studios. AI is part of the negotiation, but it is substantively different from the other issues on the table. The tech industry wants to use generative AI to extract profits from film and television, just as it has done in other categories of media. The question is whether studios will repeat the mistakes of journalism and music.

[mlembug]

for every website you visit there has to be a computer on the other side you connect to and the more users the more computers are needed, and these computers run on electricity which has to paid for, which means there is no website that is truly free...

but! there is a lot of websites that could be operated as non-profit basis and therefore resistant to profit-seeking enshittification and reliable long term

love when ppl defend the aggressive monetization of the internet with "what, do you just expect it to be free and them not make a profit???" like. yeah that would be really nice actually i would love that:)! thanks for asking

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prime’s enshittified advertising

Prime's gonna add more ads. They brought in ads in January, and people didn't cancel their Prime subscriptions, so Amazon figures that they can make Prime even worse and make more money:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/amazon-prime-video-is-getting-more-ads-next-year/

The cruelty isn't the point. Money is the point. Every ad that Amazon shows you shifts value away from you – your time, your attention – to the company's shareholders.

That's the crux of enshittification. Companies don't enshittify – making their once-useful products monotonically worse – because it amuses them to erode the quality of their offerings. They enshittify them because their products are zero-sum: the things that make them valuable to you (watching videos without ads) make things less valuable to them (because they can't monetize your attention).

This isn't new. The internet has always been dominated by intermediaries – platforms – because there are lots more people who want to use the internet than are capable of building the internet. There's more people who want to write blogs than can make a blogging app. There's more people who want to play and listen to music than can host a music streaming service. There's more people who want to write and read ebooks than want to operate an ebook store or sell an ebooks reader.

Despite all the early internet rhetoric about the glories of disintermediation, intermediaries are good, actually:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/

The problem isn't with intermediaries per se. The problem arises when intermediaries grow so powerful that they usurp the relationship between the parties they connect. The problem with Uber isn't the use of mobile phones to tell taxis that you're standing on a street somewhere and would like a cab, please. The problem is rampant worker misclassification, regulatory arbitrage, starvation wages, and price-gouging:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

There's no problem with publishers, distributors, retailers, printers, and all the other parts of the bookselling ecosystem. While there are a few, rare authors who are capable of performing all of these functions – basically gnawing their books out of whole logs with their teeth – most writers can't, and even the ones who can, don't want to:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

When early internet boosters spoke of disintermediation, what they mostly meant was that it would be harder for intermediaries to capture those relationships – between sellers and buyers, creators and audiences, workers and customers. As Rebecca Giblin and I wrote in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism, intermediaries in every sector rely on chokepoints, narrows where they can erect tollbooths:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

When chokepoints exist, they multiply up and down the supply chain. In the golden age of physical, recorded music, you had several chokepoints that reinforced one another. Limited radio airwaves gave radio stations power over record labels, who had to secretly, illegally bid for prime airspace ("payola"). Retail consolidation – the growth of big record chains – drove consolidation in the distributors who sold to the chains, and the more concentrated distributors became, the more they could squeeze retailers, which drove even more consolidation in record stores. The bigger a label was, the more power it had to shove back against the muscle of the stores and the distributors (and the pressing plants, etc). Consolidation in labels also drove consolidation in talent agencies, whose large client rosters gave them power to resist the squeeze from the labels. Consolidation in venues drives consolidation in ticketing and promotion – and vice-versa.

But there's two parties to this supply chain who can't consolidate: musicians and their fans. With limits on "sectoral bargaining" (where unions can represent workers against all the companies in a sector), musicians' unions were limited in their power against key parts of the supply chain, so the creative workers who made the music were easy pickings for labels, talent reps, promoters, ticketers, venues, retailers, etc. Music fans are diffused and dispersed, and organized fan clubs were usually run by the labels, who weren't about to allow those clubs to be used against the labels.

This is a perfect case-study in the problems of powerful intermediaries, who move from facilitator to parasite, paying workers less while degrading their products, and then charge customers more for those enshittified products.

The excitement about "disintermediation" wasn't so much about eliminating intermediaries as it was about disciplining them. If there were lots of ways to market a product or service, sell it, collect payment for it, and deliver it, then the natural inclination of intermediaries to turn predator would be curbed by the difficulty of corralling their prey into chokepoints.

Now that we're a quarter century on from the Napster Wars, we can see how that worked out. Decades of failure to enforce antitrust law allowed a few companies to effectively capture the internet, buying out rivals who were willing to sell, and bankrupting those who wouldn't with illegal tactics like predatory pricing (think of Uber losing $31 billion by subsidizing $0.41 out of every dollar they charged for taxi rides for more than a decade).

The market power that platforms gained through consolidation translated into political power. When a few companies dominate a sector, they're able to come to agreement on common strategies for dealing with their regulators, and they've got plenty of excess profits to spend on those strategies. First and foremost, platforms used their power to get more power, lobbying for even less antitrust enforcement. Additionally, platforms mobilized gigantic sums to secure the right to screw customers (for example, by making binding arbitration clauses in terms of service enforceable) and workers (think of the $225m Uber and Lyft spent on California's Prop 22, which formalized their worker misclassification swindle).

So big platforms were able to insulate themselves from the risk of competition ("five giant websites, filled with screenshots of the other four" – Tom Eastman), and from regulation. They were also able to expand and mobilize IP law to prevent anyone from breaking their chokepoints or undoing the abuses that these enabled. This is a good place to get specific about how Prime Video works.

There's two ways to get Prime videos: over an app, or in your browser. Both of these streams are encrypted, and that's really important here, because of a law – Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act – which makes it really illegal to break this kind of encryption (commonly called "Digital Rights Management" or "DRM"). Practically speaking, that means that if a company encrypts its videos, no one is allowed to do anything to those videos, even things that are legal, without the company's permission, because doing all those legal things requires breaking the DRM, and breaking the DRM is a felony (five years in prison, $500k fine, for a first offense).

Copyright law actually gives subscribers to services like Prime a lot of rights, and it empowers businesses that offer tools to exercise those rights. Back in 1976, Sony rolled out the Betamax, the first major home video recorder. After an eight-year court battle, the Supreme Court weighed in on VCRs and ruled that it was legal for all of us to record videos at home, both to watch them later, and to build a library of our favorite shows. They also ruled that it was legal for Sony – and by that time, every other electronics company – to make VHS systems, even if those systems could be used in ways that violated copyright because they were "capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use" (letting you tape shows off your TV).

Now, this was more than a decade before the DMCA – and its prohibition on breaking DRM – passed, but even after the DMCA came into effect, there was a lot of media that didn't have DRM, so a new generation of tech companies were able to make tools that were "capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use" and that didn't have to break any DRM to do it.

Think of the Ipod and Itunes, which, together, were sold as a way to rip CDs (which weren't encrypted), and play them back from both your desktop computer and a wildly successful pocket-sized portable device. Itunes even let you stream from one computer to another. The record industry hated this, but they couldn't do anything about it, thanks to the Supreme Court's Betamax ruling.

Indeed, they eventually swallowed their bile and started selling their products through the Itunes Music Store. These tracks had DRM and were thus permanently locked to Apple's ecosystem, and Apple immediately used that power to squeeze the labels, who decided they didn't like DRM after all, and licensed all those same tracks to Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store, whose slogan was "DRM: Don't Restrict Me":

https://memex.craphound.com/2008/02/01/amazons-anti-drm-tee/

Apple played a funny double role here. In marketing Itunes/Ipods ("Rip, Mix, Burn"), they were the world's biggest cheerleaders for all the things you were allowed to do with copyrighted works, even when the copyright holder objected. But with the Itunes Music Store and its mandatory DRM, the company was also one of the world's biggest cheerleaders for wrapping copyrighted works in a thin skin of IP that would allow copyright holders to shut down products like the Ipod and Itunes.

Microsoft, predictably enough, focused on the "lock everything to our platform" strategy. Then-CEO Steve Ballmer went on record calling every Ipod owner a "thief" and arguing that every record company should wrap music in Microsoft's Zune DRM, which would allow them to restrict anything they didn't like, even if copyright allowed it (and would also give Microsoft the same abusive leverage over labels that they famously exercised over Windows software companies):

https://web.archive.org/web/20050113051129/http://management.silicon.com/itpro/0,39024675,39124642,00.htm

In the end, Amazon's approach won. Apple dropped DRM, and Microsoft retired the Zune and shut down its DRM servers, screwing anyone who'd ever bought a Zune track by rendering that music permanently unplayable.

Around the same time as all this was going on, another company was making history by making uses of copyrighted works that the law allowed, but which the copyright holders hated. That company was Tivo, who products did for personal video recorders (PVRs) what Apple's Ipod did for digital portable music players. With a Tivo, you could record any show over cable (which was too expensive and complicated to encrypt) and terrestrial broadcast (which is illegal to encrypt, since those are the public's airwaves, on loan to the TV stations).

That meant that you could record any show, and keep it forever. What's more, you could very easily skip through ads (and rival players quickly emerged that did automatic ad-skipping). All of this was legal, but of course the cable companies and broadcasters hated it. Like Ballmer, TV execs called Tivo owners "thieves."

But Tivo didn't usher in the ad-supported TV apocalypse that furious, spittle-flecked industry reps insisted it would. Rather, it disciplined the TV and cable operators. Tivo owners actually sought out ads that were funny and well-made enough to go viral. Meanwhile, every time the industry decided to increase the amount of advertising in a show, they also increased the likelihood that their viewers would seek out a Tivo, or worse, one of those auto-ad-skipping PVRs.

Given all the stink that TV execs raised over PVRs, you'd think that these represented a novel threat. But in fact, the TV industry's appetite for ads had been disciplined by viewers' access to new technology since 1956, when the first TV remotes appeared on the market (executives declared that anyone who changed the channel during an ad-break was a thief). Then came the mute button. Then the wireless remote. Meanwhile, a common VCR use-case – raised in the Supreme Court case – was fast-forwarding ads.

At each stage, TV adapted. Ads in TV shows represented a kind of offer: "Will you watch this many of these ads in return for a free TV show?" And the remote, the mute button, the wireless remote, the VCR, the PVR, and the ad-skipping PVR all represented a counter-offer. As economists would put it, the ability of viewers to make these counteroffers "shifted the equilibrium." If viewers had no defensive technology, they might tolerate more ads, but once they were able to enforce their preferences with technology, the industry couldn't enshittify its product to the liminal cusp of "so many ads that the viewer is right on the brink of turning off the TV (but not quite)."

This is the same equilibrium-shifting dynamic that we see on the open web, where more than 50% of users have installed an ad-blocker. The industry says, "Will you allow this many 'sign up to our mailing list' interrupters, pop ups, pop unders, autoplaying videos and other stuff that users hate but shareholders benefit from" and the ad-blocker makes a counteroffer: "How about 'nah?'":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

TV remotes, PVRs and ad-blockers are all examples of "adversarial interoperability" – a new product that plugs into an existing one, extending or modifying its functions without permission from (or even over the objections of) the original manufacturer:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Adversarial interop creates a powerful disciplining force on platform owners. Once a user grows so frustrated with a product's enshittification that they research, seek out, acquire and learn to use an adversarial interop tool, it's really game over. The printer owner who figures out where to get third-party ink is gone forever. Every time a company like HP raises its prices, they have to account for the number of customers who will finally figure out how to use generic ink and never, ever send another cent to HP.

This is where DMCA 1201 comes into play. Once a product is skinned with DRM, its manufacturers gain the right to prevent you from doing legal things, and can use the public's courts and law-enforcement apparatus to punish you for trying. Take HP: as soon as they started adding DRM to their cartridges, they gained the legal power to shut down companies that cloned, refilled or remanufactured their cartridges, and started raising the price of ink – which today sits at more than $10,000/gallon:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches

Using third party ink in your printer isn't illegal (it's your printer, right?). But making third party ink for your printer becomes illegal once you have to break DRM to do so, and so HP gets to transform tinted water into literally the most expensive fluid on Earth. The ink you use to print your kid's homework costs more than vintage Veuve Cliquot or sperm from a Kentucky Derby-winning thoroughbred.

Adversarial interoperability is a powerful tool for shifting the equilibrium between producers, intermediaries and buyers. DRM is an even more powerful way of wrenching that equilibrium back towards the intermediary, reducing the share that buyers and sellers are able to eke out of the transaction.

Prime Video, of course, is delivered via an app, which means it has DRM. That means that subscribers don't get to exercise the rights afforded to them by copyright – only the rights that Amazon permits them to have. There's no Tivo for Prime, because it would have to break the DRM to record the shows you stream from Prime. That allows Prime to pull all kinds of shady shit. For example, every year around this time, Amazon pulls popular Christmas movies from its free-to-watch tier and moves them into pay-per-view, only restoring them in the spring:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vudu/comments/1bpzanx/looks_like_amazon_removed_the_free_titles_from/

And of course, Prime sticks ads in its videos. You can't skip these ads – not because it's technically challenging to make a 30-second advance button for a video stream, and doing so wouldn't violate anyone's copyright – but because Amazon doesn't permit you to do so, and the fact that the video is wrapped in DRM makes it a felony to even try.

This means that Amazon gets to seek a different equilibrium than TV companies have had to accept since 1956 and the invention of the TV remote. Amazon doesn't have to limit the quantity, volume, and invasiveness of its ads to "less the amount that would drive our subscribers to install and use an ad-skipping plugin." Instead, they can shoot for the much more lucrative equilibrium of "so obnoxious that the viewer is almost ready to cancel their subscription (but not quite)."

That's pretty much exactly how Kelly Day, the Amazon exec in charge of Prime Video, put it to the Financial Times: they're increasing the number of ads because "we haven’t really seen a groundswell of people churning out or cancelling":

https://www.ft.com/content/f8112991-820c-4e09-bcf4-23b5e0f190a5

At this point, attentive readers might be asking themselves, "Doesn't Amazon have to worry about Prime viewers who watch in their browsers?" After all browsers are built on open standards, and anyone can make one, so there should be browsers that can auto-skip Prime ads, right?

Wrong, alas. Back in 2017, the W3C – the organization that makes the most important browser standards – caved to pressure from the entertainment industry and the largest browser companies and created "Encrypted Media Extensions" (EME), a "standard" for video DRM that blocks all adversarial interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

This had the almost immediate effect of making it impossible to create an independent browser without licensing proprietary tech from Google – now a convicted monopolist! – who won't give you a license if you implement recording, ad-skipping, or any other legal (but dispreferred) feature:

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/

This means that for Amazon, there's no way to shift value away from the platform to you. The company has locked you in, and has locked out anyone who might offer you a better deal. Companies that know you are technologically defenseless are endlessly inventive in finding ways to make things worse for you to make things better for them. Take Youtube, another DRM-video-serving platform that has jacked up the number of ads you have to sit through in order to watch a video – even as they slash payments to performers. They've got a new move: they're gonna start showing you ads while your video is paused:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/09/20/youtube-pause-ads-rollout/75306204007/

That is the kind of fuckery you only come up with when your victory condition is "a service that's almost so bad our customers quit (but not quite)."

In Amazon's case, the math is even worse. After all, Youtube may have near-total market dominance over a certain segment of the video market, but Prime Video is bundled with Prime Delivery, which the vast majority of US households subscribe to. You have to give up a lot to cancel your Prime subscription – especially since Amazon's predatory pricing devastated the rest of the retail sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

Amazon's founding principle was "customer obsession." Ex-Amazoners tell me that this was more than an empty platitude: arguments over product design were won or lost based on whether they could satisfy the "customer obsession" litmus test. Now, everyone falls short of their ideals, but sticking to your ideals isn't merely a matter of internal discipline, of willpower. Living up to your ideals is a matter of external discipline, too. When Amazon no longer had to contend with competitors or regulators, when it was able to use DRM to control its customers and use the law to prevent them from using its products in legal ways, it lost those external sources of discipline.

Amazon suppliers have long complained of the company's high-handed treatment of the vendors who supplied it with goods. Its workers have complained bitterly and loudly about the dangerous and oppressive conditions in its warehouses and delivery vans. But Amazon's customers have consistently given Amazon high marks on quality and trustworthiness.

The reason Amazon treated its workers and suppliers badly and its customers well wasn't that it liked customers and hated workers and suppliers. Amazon was engaged in a cold-blooded calculus: it understood that treating customers well would give it control over those customers, and that this would translate market power to retain suppliers even as it ripped them off and screwed them over.

But now, Amazon has clearly concluded that it no longer needs to keep customers happy in order to retain them. Instead, it's shooting for "keeping customers so angry that they're almost ready to take their business elsewhere (but not quite)." You see this in the steady decline of Amazon product search, which preferences the products that pay the biggest bribes for search placement over the best matches:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

And you see it in the steady enshittification of Prime Video. Amazon's character never changed. The company always had a predatory side. But now that monopoly and IP law have insulated it from consequences for its actions, there's no longer any reason to keep the predator in check.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/03/mother-may-i/#minmax

[discrepancybot]

This is an essay version of the 2024 McLuhan Lecture given by writer Cory Doctorow in Berlin. A vid of his lecture (and more) is included in the link below.

The inventor of the word "enshittification" outlines the process in detail. He describes this era as the "enshittocene". Before you despair, he does offer some remedies.

Pluralistic: My McLuhan lecture on enshittification (30 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

An excerpt...

[T]he capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and woolly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize. The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams. The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.

If you'd like to see the internet de-enshittified, quit using platforms which contribute to the process. Not mentioning names, but they're run by multi-billionaires who could afford to buy entire countries.

While no platform is 100% perfect, Tumblr has been rather resistant to enshittification. Cory Docterow has an account here if you wish to follow him.

@mostlysignssomeportents

The tech oligarchs have turned the internet into a tool for extracting resources from us as if we were one large collective strip mine. Their only goals seem to be the preternatural accumulation of even more wealth and the ability to manipulate those in power. We need to become more aware of our own part in this and put distance between ourselves and the monopolies which we now help to prop up.

If you remember nothing else from this...

DON'T FEED THE OLIGARCHS.

[yaodunk]

The Bloated Carcass Of Reddit Festers

Enshittification is no subtle cancer; nor am I wise to what must be fathomless nuance in web design's infrastructural undertow and technological execution. But I've been around the virtual tesseract a few times, myself, and have a fair sense of any product's potential purpose and where one's function must have been waylaid mid-delivery in a given instance.

I thought I'd make this blog to bring my perspective of one puzzling example of a site to light, in some free time Reddit or its ilk may have similarly squandered for me otherwise. Having used Reddit on and off the past dozen years, its enshittification proves a vexation I'm perennially disappointed in. I've never built a site, or exercised my programming muscles beyond a handful of little games here and there; I've never managed a virtual service or product of my own, or worked in a field that does. And yet, some anomalies in how a service is delivered and utilized can stand out as “not fulfilling the user's expectations/experiences by any given metric” to any layman.

It's fair to say Reddit died a long time ago—that is, the full-functioning forum for netizens, by netizens. Feel free to consult anyone with any degree of internet history in their purlieu instead of my page here on the matter of where it went or what it did; I'm a singular perspective without the whole picture. I remember a less heavy-handed algorithmic advertisement application with broader respect paid to the range of user experience. I still use old.reddit, for however long it's useful—being able to see usernames and RES tags and what-have-you leaves some idea of what I'm looking at, at least—and it's been marginally efficient at killing time. But New Reddit (the umpteenth iteration) would likely cut those margins significantly. Alas, this is the obvious, surface-level enshittification anyone might pick up on. I'm writing to stick my scalpel into a few choice specimens that have piqued me from the wounds in its decaying flesh.

In general, I'd take a stab at the facilitation of pandering to conservative (supremacist) dogma and all its auxiliary fascism, as it stands a capitalist enterprise of data aggregation and exploitation. I'd hope to stomach the purulent cancers plainly visible in every one of its forums that happen to fall to the right of even Sanders-esque ideology. It's kith and kin to the idea that the present cost of sustainability be negligently passed upon until it grows into an unsustainable tumor everyone else must pay the longer, greater cost of treating. I would understand that connection to a desultory array of issues spawned from such a mutation: rampant astroturfing; bots spamming and scamming every page; further right-wing radicalization propagated with the aid or apathetic abetment of their veneer of official oversight. You'd be surprised how loud those who reflexively rage at anything left of hunting the homeless for sport can be. Or just further disappointed; it's not surprising, given their forums' mainstreaming.

But I would finally be incisive about less damning, smaller, banausic issues springing to ire. It seems the maintenance of the site has some shocking patterns of failure and malfunction. I'm not the first, nor in select company, in my experience with this. Despite the apparent resistance to improvement, there is room and need for some positive effort there. Give me my soapbox, be it in this void of nonsense as a long-winded spiel of questions whose answers may or may not find footing, and my flabbers will be gasted no more. These are but a few, specific examples of my vexation.

Have you had an account on Reddit simply no longer allow you access without reason? Apparently many people have. Just four posts in the help/bug reporting subreddits, or “communities”, in the last couple days by my count. The site seems to have just logged people out, told them their correct password is incorrect, and either refused to let you change it (An unexpected error occurred!) or say an updated password is also incorrect. Care to get help from the administrators on trying to fix this, or any word on what happened or why? Submit a ticket, and maybe in a few months someone will get back to you. I certainly have yet to receive a response in this time, at least.

Report something on their site that violates the “Content Policy”? Woah there, bucko, maybe the moderators of the subreddit want to violate the content policy and decide to warn you for “report abuse”, in which case you better not do it twice, or it'll get your account suspended. You can always use the report form that goes right to Official Administrators, though. Wait, you're reporting hate speech? Well, make sure whichever system it goes into has some idea of what that phrase means, or what constitutes its definition, because sometimes blatant dehumanizing rhetoric falls just short of “promoting hate” and their hands are woefully, carelessly tied. Don't have an account to report it? Just fill out the form email-only, and you'll have a quick response in your inbox telling you that they have different ways of dealing with reported Hate Speech and you'll have to use an account to report it instead, which sometimes tells you to reply via email with the report and doing so only gets you the exact same email in response telling you to fill out a report form and receive the same email again and again so nobody ever does anything about their site platforming hate speech, which is very much not allowed—except when it is, which is always.

Maybe you've filled out the form reporting a whole subreddit/community that exists only to violate this supposed policy against hate speech? Sometimes that works—I've seen subreddits banned after doing so, although the very same content just gets hosted on another, which inexplicably eludes the same treatment. Oh, but as of late, filling out that form simply gets you an email telling you your account has been suspended/locked. Didn't have an account? No such suspension possibly exists? Huh. Anyway, the communities posting about ethnically cleansing minorities aren't going anywhere. Whatever decayed code lingers in the system to automatically inform you of this rhetorical account's imaginary suspension will surely be looked at sooner than them, anyway.

Whether it's bringing attention to violent, supremacist behavior, or making sure it falls under the less-divisive category of “rude, vulgar, or offensive”—which will grant you but a quick “we care deeply about allowing conversations, even controversial ones, to exist” message—it seems Reddit has no bandwidth to be consistent with the idea of their supposed content policy, at least less than they have to platform its cancerous violations. But as the adage goes: The Purpose of a System is What It Does.

And Reddit, as a system of communication, is communicating quite effectively that it does not care to improve. The handful of uncurious administrators steering that ship won't look past the shareholders and exploitation money to seriously address the issues. Cancers don't do anything beyond make cancer; the regressive root that's forming the site's tumors will thus only enshittify. Cancer can grow with you—Reddit has certainly grown quite large; the internet has exploded with growth, after all—but it's not going to be a very healthy growth until the tumor is excised, treated, and repaired.

I leave room for my having been mistaken on the finer points involved, as anyone with critical-thinking skills would, however there's no denying the sheer malignancy of unsustainable practices at any scale. I find Mastodon and the federated social networks (shoutout to kolektiva.social) a nicer forum, nowadays—however long that might last—and take my news from the variety of sources available, as to diversify my consumption. I'm not attached to any one site, no matter how much I use it, but Reddit's bloated corpse provides a fascinating milieu to peruse while available. Perhaps, when the tumors finish growing over the rest, that will no longer be the case.

All that said, I have too much time on my hands, and I'd be better off further curbing my use of Reddit and its ilk. My blogging into the void is just a meager fancy that others might commiserate on the subject, so let it be just that: venting.