On the “Enshittification” of Platforms: Technology Is Only Human After All | Hacker News Reader

On the “Enshittification” of Platforms: Technology Is Only Human After All

blog.zfeldman.com

> we’ve instead entered a period of “Enshittification”, where the platforms we loved and trusted have been taken over by corporate interests that no longer care what the users want or need.

It's funny to me because we've been here for many years. i.e. Facebook hasn't given two shits what people want or need in a decade. People have been asking for more control of their feed, and complaining about user-hostile decisions made all this time. The other big tech cos are no different, and "trust" has always been low..

Fair point, I think different platforms have gotten there sooner than others, but I'm just noticing far more of them reaching this point lately.

I think it's actually been happening on a broad economic scale with different scales of organizations being in different phases. Basically when a nation or company is expanding into new productive capacity without any previous thing there (expansion into vacuum) - things are good, but once one needs to replace entrenched interests then the enshitification starts. This is where the entrenched interests to ensure profits takes precedence to more efficient or productive value creation. IMHO, this can happens at company, industry, and nation level scales. E.g. The US in the 50's was early cycle, now it's in the late cycle with small GDP growth. China was in the expansion into vacuum phase with high GDP growth, and is in the latter stages of that ending.

It's also ripe for companies to extort and fleece users in several other categories of software dependence, especially with mobile phones, and even with cars that rely on software and signs of intentional sabotage are beginning to manifest in mission critical consumer and government systems and solutions just to encourage costly upgrades and updates.

It's long overdue to send a serious message to software makers that turn upon their user bases. Congress has dropped this ball too many times. We can abandon Facebutt and InstaGramps over abusive and user hostile changes, but when you have to watch a 5 minute ad before starting your car when your wife's water just broke, it all becomes too real... I know, dramatic example, but it can get that bad if we give it a pass now/

> It's funny to me because we've been here for many years

Bro it's called Capitalism, and it's been like this since the beginning.

An angry German guy wrote a critique of it years ago and got his name plastered on everything because of it. It's the same discussions, over and over.

Cory Doctorow gave it a fun name with a dirty word in it, but it's been happening for ages.

> …another way to look at it is that the system is working.

Article literally argues that the system works because it provides 12-15 years of quality community experience, even if thereafter the community gets thoughtlessly torn apart and destroyed. In other words, the author doesn’t understand the true nature or value of community.

Author here - yup, clearly I don't understand the true nature or value of community and haven't ever been a part of one myself and apparently it's something that's meant to be provided forever for free :).

Mostly kidding around, but I appreciate the comment and you reading the article! It is sad that communities are destroyed at the whims of gigantic corporations but it just seems to happen super often, I wish there was a way to prevent it.

There was something about the style of the piece that grated on me. Which is clearly a me thing, not a you thing. I apologize.

That is no problem at all, I appreciate the honesty! No apology necessary. Thanks for engaging with my article :).

Well there you have it: enshittification is inevitable, and it works. Therefore the "easy" solution is to lubricate the ramps away from enshittified platforms.

I do worry a bit when public stockholders (some of which are "regular" people) are the ones left holding the bag.

> Therefore the "easy" solution is to lubricate the ramps away from enshittified platforms.

I imagined people comically trying to travel up greased ramps, and sliding back down / falling. I think lubricating those ramps is exactly what our corporate overlords do.

Stockholders have the power to stop enshittification. They can vote in a new board and get new executives who wont do it. But of course that ... almost never happens. Why? Question left as an exercise.

Thats not always an option. Many (most?) of these mega online communities are literally not sustainable without an enshittification plan, with investor dollars pouring in being the primary source of income until the music stops.

> with investor dollars pouring in being the primary source of income until the music stops.

ya see there's your problem.

With all respect, fuck this. We can build platforms that won't be enshittified, we just choose not to, and throwing our hands up and saying "oh well! guess it's human nature to make everything bad in the name of shareholder value!" is a cop-out.

How? Enshittification appears to be inevitable to me, unless one has a benevolent benefactor paying all the bills. Or perhaps strong and wise regulators who can force profit motivated organizations to interoperate and enforce interests of users.

Yes, the problem is greed. The 80s were wrong. Greed is not good. It's terrible in fact.

That's kind of like saying "we can just hold elections" while ruled by a king.

Author here - I wrote this because I was trying to brainstorm solutions that would create more enduring platforms better for all and came up pretty dry as you can see.

Do you have any better ideas? I'd love to hear them!

To be clear, it's a good article as far as it goes and I appreciate you sharing it, but it's incredibly frustrating to me when people in our field come right up to the edge of criticizing capitalism and then just back off.

Enshittification isn't limited to tech; it happens to just about everything in a capitalist society, because it benefits capital.

We have to move past this economic model.

Thank you for engaging in some conversation here, it's good to have a dialogue.

I used to be more edgy and socialist/communist in what I wish our government really was, but I think lately and in writing these article I've realized maybe capitalism isn't the most terrible thing in the word.

Are you arguing for socialism/communism, or some other form of government/economic model in that case? Assuming you're in "the industry" would you personally settle for less pay or privilege to enable this?

I like to think I would, but it's hard stuff, and goes against many people's nature. At this point, I hate to say it, but it's hard to extract myself from this tech ecosystem/system of government. I donate to charities, donate my time when I can, and try to be a good citizen within the system, but I don't see how to change the system overall without something that seems really extreme and impossible. Still want to "fight the power" and all that but honestly, are there real solutions in that?

> would you personally settle for less pay or privilege to enable this?

Absolutely. Among other things, I already spend a significant chunk of my paycheck supporting people who, in a country with a functioning social safety net and disability system that doesn't force people into poverty, would not need my support.

> are there real solutions in that?

So many problems in our industry are directly caused by capitalists being capitalists. We don't have enough positions for junior devs because companies need to execute as quickly as possible to satisfy VC's dreams of capturing the market before anyone else can come in. We take on mountains of tech debt for the same reason. Documentation isn't profitable, so we don't spend time on it. Big companies buy smaller ones just to kill off their products.

I don't have a perfect layout for a new society, but it's very, very hard for me to see how a defeatist attitude helps.

In particular, as technologists, I think we can do at least a little about this. We can stop carrying water for capital, for one thing; we can also stop aspiring to be capitalists ourselves. And finally, I really do think, even in this system and this economy, that we can carry some of the weight of building new systems for organization that don't serve at the whims of capital. ActivityPub isn't perfect, but it does work! We can iterate on that blueprint and build even better, more open, more effective social spaces that don't require billionaire bailouts. And we can support regulation that actually makes sense, and shout down legislation that doesn't.

There is so much we can do. I believe in us.

> people's nature

What is people's nature? The history of the world is pretty much ceaseless violence -- "ugly brutish and short" is how Hobbes put it.

> Assuming you're in "the industry" would you personally settle for less pay or privilege to enable this?

Pay in STEM is declining steadily, and things like H1B visas, automation, and offshoring exist to drive it down further. Tech workers are simply on the part of the Titanic that's last to sink, but make no mistake, stuff is going down.

You're getting less pay, and "privilege" has nothing to do with it, to the point where I'm not sure you understand what it means. You have (or don't have) privilege no matter what your pay is; getting a 50k pay bump won't make you less black; billionaires are still out there marrying pretty (but broke as hell) blond women.

> Still want to "fight the power" and all that but honestly, are there real solutions in that?

This has nothing to do with rah rah Fight the Power teenage rebellion, and again I question if you even get what is even being argued for.

There's plenty of FOSS fediverse stuff that's very interesting, but until monetization is figured out, creators have little reason to push content there. Without content, selfies and photos of lunch aren't going to interest many people.

Take PeerTube—great on paper. Can you run ads on your instance to cover bandwidth and storage? No. Can you run ads on the videos you create? No.

The alternative decentralized solutions themselves aren't the problem, it's the economics of it.

> There's plenty of FOSS fediverse stuff that's very interesting, but until monetization is figured out, creators have little reason to push content there.

Problem being, non monetized things are interesting because they are not monetized. If you make it possible to profit from them, they will go down the path of every other profitable system: all the goodness gets squeezed out to extract profit.

Then the problem of scale and incentive applies.

There's no incentive to create/host interesting content if there's no way to recoup the costs for creating it and/or distributing it.

I do agree that non-monetized things are interesting, however a lot of interesting things happen because there's an actual budget and means of supporting oneself and family.

I say this as someone who ran a netlabel that gave away all their content for free, and still regularly gives away plenty of content that isn't directly monetized. The moment a tune saw any kind of popularity, bandwidth for free downloads became a problem in terms of scale (could no longer self-host from home) and then ultimately cost.

Something could be decentralized and FOSS, but also allow you to inject your own ads. That isn't a difficult problem to solve, but PeerTube has no interest in doing it, yet would be a sure-fire way to turn it into a big deal.

None of you are on Tumblr and it shows.

I heard Tumblr still has an awesome community! Very good point. While it seems the majority of things have enshittified, maybe it hasn't as much, and that's pretty cool. How?

The main reason Tumblr never became shit is because it never wanted to make a lot of money, it's perfectly fine carrying along being unprofitable.

What do you mean? Tumblr definitely reached a point where it was objectively past its best—they even banned NSFW content.

Enshittification starts at the keypress, yo. We are all responsible.

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