Best explanation I’ve seen so far of why platforms like Reddit tend to get crappy after a certain amount of time.
Corporate-owned, for-profit platforms, I think you mean. No such thing has happened to Wikipedia, TV Tropes, or Debian. All of these have had their share of drama over the years, with many an angry declaration that it’s ruined forever by one questionable decision or another, but they’re still around and they’re not being intentionally made objectively worse for the purpose of monetizing users.
(I realize Debian is an operating system and not a website, but I mention it because its corporate-owned for-profit descendant Ubuntu is an example of non-website enshittification.)
This nails how platforms like Amazon, Facebook, TikTok, and now Reddit, shift from user-focused to hardcore profit-chasing. I can’t say that “Enshittification” is my favorite word, but the essay paints a convincing picture of the web overrun by monopolies. It’s a worthy read if you’ve been feeling used by these platforms lately.
Cory Doctorow is a treasure. One of the biggest shames for the internet over the past decade has been users flocking to proprietary corporate platform after proprietary corporate platform while they all ultimately meet the same fate in the end. At least this time around people are choosing FOSS non-profit alternatives in higher numbers.
Past two decades, you mean? (I’m still mad about the crowd choosing MSN Messenger over open protocol chat programs back in '00)
Eh, there were some floating around. XMPP was fairly common, as LiveJournal, Google, Facebook, Skype, AOL, Xfire, and lord knows what else all had varying degrees of support for it.
Take a look at Matrix.
This long, well-written rant talks a lot about how we end up in this situation. It really resonated for me. The more we have people trying to extract maximum shareholder value on the backs of all of us, the more inevitable the death of any centralized social media platform becomes.
Wonderful piece of writing that takes the internet as a place for human connection so seriously; I almost teared up at the end. Thanks for sharing it with us!
Interesting read. It explains a lot. So Reddit is pivoting away from providing value to communities towards providing value to advertisers and (soon to be) shareholders
This was a good read. Heard about this article for a while, as well as a mention of it on the WAN show and then later on Mastodon. Sums up neatly in my opinion why social spaces should not really be run by private companies, and instead by individuals.
As for Amazon… not sure what the solution for that would be, but the current situation benefits neither customer nor seller. They’ve practically monopolised retail outside of groceries imo
