'Another internet is possible': Norway rails against 'enshittification' | Hacker News Reader

'Another internet is possible': Norway rails against 'enshittification'

theguardian.com

47 pointsvoxleone24 comments

The original report is very well written [1], and has good actionable recommendations too (interoperability, portability, decentralization, creating new competition).

[1] https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/breaking-f...

very early internet adopter here. A whole generationof frogs got boiled,cooked, and eaten, but that was in a realy fancy new pot, filled from a glacial fed lake. Now there is fetid swamp, with rotting half eaten corpses of the first, frogs floating around, and the gobbring sounds of the elites trying to force the entire world population in there while touting the latest turdnological development.

I much prefer your "turdnological" to "enshittification"! It doesn't take itself so seriously.

I don't get it. If they think a service has "enshittificated", then why not see it as a business opportunity to make a better service and steal their customers?

Think of it this way: no one banned phpBB. There are plenty of 1990s style forums around. But they are deserted - precisely because they are not addictive enough and their engagement is poor. Same happens to everything that tries to opt out of enshittification - it never picks up usage.

What happened to the guy who created an AI-powered free replacement for Bloomberg? No one heard of that thing since its launch. Because it is too boring. But everyone scrolls their eyes out of X full of ragebait and slop.

There are plenty of semi-private invite only or private phpBB forums that have walled off the bots, grifters, shills, trolls and AI. Many of us found that being too inclusive invited everything that facilitated the enshitification. I encourage people to create their own small community and keep it small. Quality of quantity of crap.

I saw a great lot of forums decline and evaporate without being hit with any of the ailments you listed. People just lose interest because it is not "fun" enough - unlike the social media ragebait.

Certainly true in some cases. People also migrate as a flock to a new thing and stay if enough of their friends moved if there are enough colorful flashy widgets. I see it more as corporate capture and mass surveillance for sales, marketing, selling trends to governments and many other reasons. Those of us that remained in our little isolated bubbles are also on those platforms and remain connected even if the platforms get too censorious or controlling. People are less afraid of being "cancelled" if they have a place to fall back on.

Biggest example of it, is Blackberry. It ceased to exist while being a great business tool loved by managers of fat ass companies everywhere - who were more than willing to shell out a lot of cash for Blackberry servers and handsets, so money was never a problem at all, it was a key business tool for F500 corps. It only died out because users BADLY wanted the enshittified iOS experience with IG and the like that Blackberry locked them out of, and begged and lobbied their bosses to switch them over to iPhones for corporate messaging...

Adding Blackberry was just like a private forum in that it's users data was kept inside the corporation on private servers and outside the view of governments. That is a threat to many third parties that would love to have visibility into that data for a myriad of nefarious reasons. The same switch-over also happened with internal systems moving to Google docs and other centralized monitoring. I would love to see a chaos monkey test of all the big centralized systems going offline to see what breaks.

I think you misuse the term enshitification here. E. is intentional and top-down, what you discribe is a demographic shift that you dont nescessarily have to wall off. A reputation system, like here on HN or user customizable filters, can work in your case too. The difference is, is a top-down authority in charge or entites below.

I totally get it. Having small semi-private bubbles escapes the top-down. There will always be someone operating a forum but anyone can run a forum, especially today with tools to automate deploying them. I see each forum as a distributed directory of categories that are independent from the corporate capture top down. No corporate, no capture, only as censorious as each admin. Forum operators are only beholden to the law. Reputation systems are no perfect as they can amplify echo chambers which HN and Reddit are certainly not immune to. They are quite the double edged sword and create their own sub-class of enshittification which I must compensate for by removing karma from my view. Nothing is perfect nor ever will be. I will always use a balanced combination of walled off forums and bigger platforms like this to dip my toe into the pool of the masses which I can escape any time I want a break from it.

That's exactly what "enshittification" [1] describes. I strongly recommend Doctorow's book "Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it" [2].

A shorter introduction would be his recent talk at 39C3: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

[2]: https://shop.craphound.com/

So if you think you can do better than the "enshittificated" business, just build one yourself. That's my point.

Upfront investment, the network effect or vendor lock-in work against you. Linux is doing that competitive rebuild for decades.

With the risk of sounding like I'm brushing off what you're saying (I am not) and breaking one or two rules on this forum, please read the article because it addresses your question to some degree.

For example (my emphasis in the quoted texts):

> Together they urged policymakers in 14 countries that straddle the Atlantic to take action against enshittification, arguing that it was not an inevitable process but rather the result of policy decisions.

> Policymakers were urged to double down on the enforcement of existing laws, such as those designed to protect consumers and their data, as well as work to foster greater competition in digital markets, for example through the use of public procurement processes to favour alternatives to big tech.

From the report (my emphasis in the quoted texts):

> The path we are on can be challenged and reversed – we can have a better digital world. This requires rebalancing the power between consumers, big tech companies and alternative service providers.

> The fight to disenshittify the internet is also a fight for innovation: Big Tech is able to enshittify their services after they have become dominant and restricted competition. By pruning back the excesses of big tech, alternative services can get the nourishment they need to grow and flourish. However, this requires active policy choices and vigorous enforcement of existing laws.

As you can see, it's not merely a case of building better alternatives, although that plays a role. The biggest issues stem from market dominance, preventing the emergence of new players and innovators, using existing (huge) leverage to pass preferential laws etc. This is a systemic problem, not one that "the market" should solve.

So it's just anti big tech all over again right?

The links I mentioned explain precisely (and at length) why you cannot "just build it yourself".

Enshittification means a lot more than just "we made it worse". It's more "we got in a position where we could make it worse, and nobody can do anything about it". Of course I oversimplify it a lot, I just can't say it better than Doctorow.

Again, I suggest you watch that 39C3 talk (it's like 45min?) because Doctorow talks really well and it's a very good introduction to the problem. His book goes into a lot more details and gives a lot more examples, but I understand that it's already almost impossible to get someone to watch a 45min presentation, so reading a whole book is out of the question for most people... :-)

Business loses money to gain customers and then need to make a profit.

I'm shocked.

Do we not know how businesses work?

If you don't find enough value in the business, just quit and find another or build one yourself.

Dude, if you can't be arsed to even consider the idea behind "enshittification", just stop complaining about it. It is an interesting concept, but you have to read a few words to get it.

Enshittification is just a business technique. They lose money to gain customers. They then need to make a profit back.

So what? I don't see a problem with that.

You don't understand what the concept of enshittification is, and keep proving it. Just go read about it (I shared links), or leave me alone.

You don't understand the concept of business and keep proving it. Just go read about business or leave me alone.

Except that we are talking about enshittification. The fact that you don't understand quantum physics or insects brings nothing here. Why would you care if I understand business here? We're talking about enshittification.

If you want to say that "enshittification makes no sense", the VERY LEAST you can do is spend a few minutes trying to understand what enshittification is. It is an entire concept, Doctorow wrote a whole book about it. It's not "whatever you understand when you hear the word".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com