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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Well said. The Internet was certainly a lot more fun before anyone figured out how to make money on it. But it's insane that these companies make more money now than even the largest giants did when I was a kid, and it's still not enough for them. I'm just flabbergasted by their insatiable desire. They could keep a good product and still pull insane profits, but they're willing to burn it all down for another percentage point on their quarterly return. I guess that's a change to the world in general now too. There used to be a common wisdom that if you built a great product, and made your customers happy, you'd be successful. The prevailing attitude now is that the success that comes from that isn't enough anymore. You need to make the worst product that you're still able to sell, and then make sure you sell it to the same people multiple times. It's gross.
It’s the cancer that capitalism truly is. If you’re not growing, you’re failing and enshittification is an inevitable late stage consequence of capitalism.
It’s just pump and dump.
Maybe, but I don't think it is. Enshittification is a direct result of our tax policy that encourages cashing out, only looks at the short term, and requires constant growth.
There was a time when companies built a reputation and held onto it for a hundred years. We could go back to that.
Tax the rich.
Agreed. We need to revert to meaningful tax brackets and apply some new ones to prevent billionaires.
Yup. Wikipedia is a good example for an instance that solely exists to support people.
There are plenty sites of this. Take a look at some websites that are teaching you skills without asking for money and so on.
That's how I remember the internet. Sharing knowledge. Of course bigger sites need to make ends meet somehow and that fine with me. But as you already said - more more more.
I’d say that the old Internet is still there. It’s just sharing space with the much bigger, much more mainstream, capitalist juggernaut now, with limited overlap.
Other than online shopping, my Internet use hasn’t changed all that much since 2008, other than having to add a bunch of anti-tracking stuff to my web browser.
Yeah. I just know that forums aren't a thing any more. Old fashioned browser games are rare.
Otherwise a lot of valuable news sites became clickbait ad bloated monsters. Only a few are still good.
But yeah.. it gets easily overshadowed
What they do is the essence of capitalism. More growth. More profits. Enough, or the same as last year, is not sufficient. It must be more, the numbers must go up. And any publicly traded company is legally bound to pursue gains for its shareholders, they actually cannot stop. What makes a corporation is the same thing that makes them hellbent on yet another fraction of a percentage in profits.
The whole system is utterly ridiculous and fundamentally incompatible with reality, once you actually think about these things. A system demanding infinite growth in a finite world.
This is a lovely summary of modern capitalism. The carnival barkers would have you still believe that excellence rises to the top, but it doesn't. What wins is the appearance of excellence, as a facade for the least effort possible, like you said.
Share markets created this perverse incentive that rewards businesses for appearing successful even if they produce fuck all. I'm thinking of Jack Welch era GE or today's preeminent carbon credit trading firm, Tesla Motors.
It reminds me of the feedback loop engulfing the major LLMs as they consume more and more of their own content and start outputting lower and lower quality: the original goal of rewarding the best is long lost, replaced by making line go up at all costs.
The 90s were worse imo when it came to quarterly returns