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