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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by activistPnk@slrpnk.net to c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml

The problem:

The web has obviously reached a high level of #enshitification. Paywalls, exclusive walled gardens, #Cloudflare, popups, CAPTCHAs, tor-blockades, dark patterns (esp. w/cookies), javascript that makes the website an app (not a doc), etc.

Status quo solution (failure):

#Lemmy & the #threadiverse were designed to inherently trust humans to only post links to non-shit websites, and to only upvote content that has no links or links to non-shit venues.

It’s not working. The social approach is a systemic failure.

The fix:

  • stage 1 (metrics collection): There needs to be shitification metrics for every link. Readers should be able to click a “this link is shit” button on a per-link basis & there should be tick boxes to indicate the particular variety of shit that it is.

  • stage 2 (metrics usage): If many links with the same hostname show a pattern of matching enshitification factors, the Lemmy server should automatically tag all those links with a warning of some kind (e.g. ⚠, 💩, 🌩).

  • stage 3 (inclusive alternative): A replacement link to a mirror is offered. E.g. youtube → (non-CF’d invidious instance), cloudflare → archive.org, medium.com → (random scribe.rip instance), etc.

  • stage 4 (onsite archive): good samaritans and over-achievers should have the option to provide the full text for a given link so others can read the article without even fighting the site.

  • stage 5 (search reranking): whenever a human post a link and talks about it, search crawlers notice and give that site a high ranking. This is why search results have gotten lousy -- because the social approach has failed. Humans will post bad links. So links with a high enshitification score need to be obfuscated in some way (e.g. dots become asterisks) so search crawlers don’t overrate them going forward.

This needs to be recognized as a #LemmyBug.

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[-] mateomaui@reddthat.com 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You just identified the fallacy yourself.

Sometimes a paywalled source is the first to report on something. Calling that link a bad link is nonsense.

90+% of the time, using reader mode will bypass paywalls anyway.

Many people don’t know all the websites to redirect things through without that, so calling their contribution “bad” just because they posted that link isn’t the greatest.

It’s not even like it’s that big an issue, because usually someone else comes along that provides an alt link in the replies, so saying that this is a social failure is also ridiculous, because both were provided between two people.

Also, the notion that you or anyone else is socially filtering non-misinformation news sources from the rest of us, because you don’t see the value in it, or cannot figure out how to bypass the paywall yourself, isn’t all that great either.

edit: it’s also worth pointing out that if some people contributing links happen to be subscribers to a news source, as a subscriber they won’t necessarily know that a certain article is paywalled for everyone else, until they share it and someone who isn’t a subscriber gets the notice.

this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
-4 points (47.1% liked)

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