133
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
133 points (97.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43965 readers
1497 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
from Cory Doctorow's article on 'enshittification', which has become mandatory reading.
Just to add, the concept of a bait and switch, where you lure a party in with something and then swap it out once they are committed, is not a new idea in the slightest. This is just a modernized, refined tech version.
Uber and Lyft are good examples. Drive out most of the competition with an aggressive early phase where you spend most of your capital to shore up a massively negative balance sheet. You are baiting the customers to you with very low prices.
Then once the competition is eliminated, you raise your prices on the captive consumers that rely on the service to recoup your costs and start making money.
If you, in a video game, have ever lured something in with ranged attacks and then switched to melee to kill it, by plan, you executed this same strategy.
Every single discounted trial period for a subscription is employing a riff on the same concept, where they hope you're too lazy to cancel.
Fools been falling for the bait and switch since ... oh dawn of civilization maybe? Awareness of it defeats it, people don't take bait when they know it's bait. It is not complicated though, and does not require complex understanding to grasp.
IIRC, it's in the article, but what makes enshitification so prevalent in tech is that it mostly involves networks, wherein part of the value of using the application comes from the presence and concentration of other users and providers on it (network effect). Even Amazon, Netflix, and Uber, are subject to that effect because they capture providers, not just users you will interact with. It's a somewhat uniq trait that really exacerbates the problem. This trend will probably continue untill interoperability is legislated.
Right before the pandemic I was trying to not use Amazon anymore (I said f it during the pandemic because it was so hard to get ANYTHING for the first six months, but I need to go back to it). There was some random thing I wanted to buy, so I hunted down the manufacturer's website and ordered it from them directly.
The thing still arrived in an Amazon envelope from an Amazon fulfillment center in an Amazon delivery van, because the small manufacturer was using fulfilled-by-Amazon for all their logistics, even for stuff sold on their own website. So apparently I can't even stop using Amazon if I want to!
Your metaphor reminded me of killing vampires in Skyrim and it made me smile as I also feel a deep sorrow from the fact all major companies now are racing to the bottom while leaving their skidmarks on everything I used to love.
This can't be true, Reddit said they cared about community /s
That was a good read, the thing is that it seems that all of a sudden a lot of tech companies are getting more and more anti-consumer. I mean it’s not only the whole Reddit and Twitter thing, now Youtube is getting more aggressive with adblocking, Stackoverflow and their mod protest, Google dropping support for the open source diaper and messaging apps on Android…
Many companies are getting more aggressive against their customers, and in the end it feels like the internet as it used to be is really dying, and we might end up with the whole “dead internet theory” becoming reality. I don’t know it just feels very depressing.
If you haven't already, I suggest reading Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media, a blog post by Catherynne M. Valent. (It's actually referenced in the article above.)
It's long, funny, and angry and damn, did it strike a chord with me. It was written in December, '22 so pre-Reddit meltdown but still very relevant to it.
Some highlights include:
It does end on a hopeful note, though.
I cannot read that and feel how short-sighted it is. The death of online communities due to money sucks. But how about the actual death of physical people and their physical communities due to literally the exact same thing? It seems douchey to complain about capitalism killing message boards and not connect the idea at all to how it has been killing everything on earth since humans became a thing.
Here it is: good ol' "Whataboutism", I almost had hope that one discussion could survive without someone going "wait, what about this other thing that people know and probably care about, but is completely irrevelant to the current conversation at hand?" but ah well, today just wasn't the day, I guess.
Seriously tho, to borrow your first sentence: I can't help but read something like "But how about the actual death of physical people and their physical communities" and think...are people just incapable of caring about two seperate issues of different scales at the same time? I don't know, maybe I'm weird because I don't suddenly think of the all starving people around the world and bring them up when the topic of the closing of the food joint a couple of blocks down gets brought up by the regulars...
Interest rates. Money isn't free anymore. It's still not super expensive but it's 5x more expensive than what it used to be since 2008.
This is the answer. The age of free money is over and now we are seeing the effect; rampant inflation and high interest rates. The chickens come home to roost, always.
As a result, the burn rate and runway is starting to be factors in all businesses that aren’t making a profit.
Yep, VCs are unwilling to just fund any old thing hoping they'll hit the lottery right now when money is "expensive".
With all the distributed social networks getting popular only among tech-literate people it feels like we're getting a reverse- Eternal September as well.
2022-'23 really has been the year of enshitification
But I think it all started with Tumblr
A few companies open the floodgates and takes a lot of the blame, flak, and focus (see: Netflix, Twitter). Other companies can seize the moment and ride the wave to potentially increase profits with less blowback than they might otherwise receive.
I had just copied the link to post this.
Read this for an actual answer.
This, just this
I think the exception is companies “too big to die.” They serve as the archangels of tech so ALL other goals lead to being bought by FAANG or dying.
Apparently neither Twitter nor Reddit was too big to fail.