this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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Enshittification

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What is enshittification?

The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source

The lifecycle of Big Internet

We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.

Embrace, extend and extinguish

We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/23650890

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[–] ineffable 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

A summary (no AI, I actually read things then summarise them):

The digital world is the real world - It's where most people in Western society spend most of their personal social time, and a lot of other time (e.g. work)

But it's shit. It wasn't always shit, but it is. Platforms don't do what you want them to do, or even what they used to do. Cory Doctorow's enshitiffication describes one mechanism, but really the problem is the rot economy - a mindset that causes technology providers to consider only growth and profit over anything that might be important to real people

This has made technology (and by extension much of everyday life) traumatic. As a tech savvy person you may be aware of some or all of this, including the effects and motivations, and may even be able to avoid some - but by being in the readership of this article, you have to acknowledge you are in a privileged minority

Take the example of someone buying one of the most sold laptops from a big retailer - a common and necessary way for large numbers of people to access the digital world. By the time you fight the kludge of Windows with its integrations and bloatware and updates, then try and use a browser on this underpowered machine, you've already been bludgeoned into accepting that everything digital is just terrible, with no way of knowing or understanding that this is not your fault

This is not a trap you can easily escape, and any suggestion that these users are to blame because they bought cheap technology is just another example of the lack of economic awareness and empathy that lead to recent US election results. Similarly, blaming users for a lack of digital literacy when the technology is actively thwarting them would be inappropriate

So what's the answer? I don't know. At the very least we need to be empathetic, be aware, and raise awareness that this is happening. Why is this important? Because the digital world is the real world, and it's being stolen from us