Ever-diminishing returns and increasingly toxic environments have turned once-promising platforms for news and entertainment into steaming trash heaps.
'Enshittification' seems like a modern re-phrasing of what Marx described as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time. Under the shiny futuristic veneer, the tech industry is still just our old friend capitalism.
Speaking as a reader, rather than a writer, I love the way you can find out so much through these platforms, and hate the detritus that clogs up my brain because one has to pour through so much trash to learn anything interesting. I go all the way back to the message-board era. Message boards hooked me, Twitter hooked me...even reddit hooked me at one point. Ridiculously, I keep thinking that if it is all destroyed I won’t have these distractions. Of course, I know all kinds of weird stuff from these distractions, which is how they hooked me. It doesn’t matter how bad they get, if there’s the chance somebody is going to explain stuff, I will be lurking around trying to see what will turn up. But it is now like panning for gold in the sewer. Where I am going with this is that I’ve always had this fantasy that there will be some venue--early blogging years came the closest--where I will not have to dig through 100 pounds of garbage for one nugget of gold. I had some hopes for Substack but I don’t think it’s going to be the thing. My internet utopia does not exist.
Sorry, I don't use Twitter so this is probably a stupid question, but what does "Facebook, Twitter, and the rest simply stopped distributing links to websites" mean? If you send out a tweet with a link in it, does the tweet not go anywhere? Or does it go out but the link doesn't work?
Mastodon wasn't working for me. I don't know if a distributed network is helpful. There's real benefits to a centralized service and I think our problem is that no one has been governing them well. That's why I like Cohost. They have financial transparency and a meaningful change log. (I'm not affiliated in any way, aside from having an account there.)
$150 for 1000 words was the standard rate back in 1990 if you wanted ‘exposure’, just to show how bad rates are now. That’s $231 in money today.
Who would've thought unregulated social media platforms whose only incentive is profit would suffer a decline? A real head-scratcher, it is.
'Enshittification' seems like a modern re-phrasing of what Marx described as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time. Under the shiny futuristic veneer, the tech industry is still just our old friend capitalism.
I get most of my breaking news from Snapchat’s map these days.
And I feel fine...
Speaking as a reader, rather than a writer, I love the way you can find out so much through these platforms, and hate the detritus that clogs up my brain because one has to pour through so much trash to learn anything interesting. I go all the way back to the message-board era. Message boards hooked me, Twitter hooked me...even reddit hooked me at one point. Ridiculously, I keep thinking that if it is all destroyed I won’t have these distractions. Of course, I know all kinds of weird stuff from these distractions, which is how they hooked me. It doesn’t matter how bad they get, if there’s the chance somebody is going to explain stuff, I will be lurking around trying to see what will turn up. But it is now like panning for gold in the sewer. Where I am going with this is that I’ve always had this fantasy that there will be some venue--early blogging years came the closest--where I will not have to dig through 100 pounds of garbage for one nugget of gold. I had some hopes for Substack but I don’t think it’s going to be the thing. My internet utopia does not exist.
Sorry, I don't use Twitter so this is probably a stupid question, but what does "Facebook, Twitter, and the rest simply stopped distributing links to websites" mean? If you send out a tweet with a link in it, does the tweet not go anywhere? Or does it go out but the link doesn't work?
Mastodon wasn't working for me. I don't know if a distributed network is helpful. There's real benefits to a centralized service and I think our problem is that no one has been governing them well. That's why I like Cohost. They have financial transparency and a meaningful change log. (I'm not affiliated in any way, aside from having an account there.)