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the actual original article on Doctorow’s website with no tracking scripts: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Anything on Wired is usually available elsewhere in better form.
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Hard to say which is better to visit. If Doctorow is the author, he’s likely getting royalties from Wired, so the visit there helps. But it helps to drive traffic to his site, too.
Read on Wired, then Google it and click on Pluralistic? Hah
The Enshittification will continue until profits improve.
No, actually, enshitification will continue until the product/service dies due to everyone leaving for another product that is in one of the earlier stages of enshitification. Rinse. Repeat.
Reddit, for example, went too hard into enshittification before they worked out how to extract the money. The platform isn’t looking like it will die soon, but it also doesn’t look like it will make huge profits either.
I hate this word. Partly because it’s just a bad word for what it means (essentially e-space monopolizing/rent-seeking), but mostly because pretty much nobody uses it to mean that and just use it to call a service shit.
it got quickly adapted to mean Publicly Traded Company chasing quarterly profits, cutting corners etc.
and I think it’s a good word for that.
It’s more Publicly Traded Company abuses its monopoly position to destroy the market it’s operating in.
It’s not just rent seeking. It’s the point where screwing your customers isn’t enough, so you start screwing people you really shouldn’t in a normal capitalistic society; your investors, your employees, your advertisers, etc.
Basically it’s post-capitalist corporation. It used to be that customer paying cost of production + profit margin was the way you made money. Then because the product is cheap enough in the age of internet you can charge nothing and either pay for production through investors or through selling customer data to advertisers. That has the most profit per customers.
But once you’ve extracted everything from your customers and expansion that way isn’t possible, there’s only one way to increase the margin of profits. You screw over your investors, or your employees, or your advertisers. Since you have a monopoly on your customers at this point, they can’t really go anywhere else (also sunken cost), and they’ll pay upfront. You abuse the irrational behavior to its most, leading to market failure as your product does less and less, you’re rent seeking your investors, and your employees get lower and lower bonuses/salaries/empowerment.
Your company is getting enshittification.
That peak point when everyone was just using it to mean ‘getting worse’ like four months ago when new lemmings split from reddit was just the worst.
It sucks now.
The enshittification of …
Bleugh.
IIRC it was Cory Doctorow who first coined that word. In the talk he gave at DEFCON he defined it thusly:
“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
This is more or less what happened to Reddit. First, it was a safe haven for people fleeing from Digg. A few people bought Reddit Gold, server time was paid for, and good times were had by all. Over the years, Reddit started adding increasingly bizarre ways to give them money to make someone else’s post shiny, and started featuring them increasingly prominently, but no one really minded. After all, Reddit was still a pretty fun platform. They had cool little perks of being on there the April Fools stuff and RPAN, which was a great little look into whatever other people were doing at that moment. It was a fun thing that happened until it became Twitch 2, got monetized to hell and back, and then stopped happening. But I digress.
Sometime in 2023, Sam Altman decided to use Reddit to train GPT-4. Steve Huffman, absolutely incensed that someone other than him was making money off of the volunteer contributions and moderation actions of Reddit’s userbase, decided to start charging for API access and began stripping anyone who dared to protest this of their moderator rights, instead installing people who agreed with him. Everyone with a brain started leaving, and Reddit comment sections aren’t looking too… well, human anymore. Reddit is about as dead as a platform that still sees millions of comments a day can be.
