When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it.
This is a lot different from today, where any sort of journalist/writer/artist/filmmaker is basically dependent on making content that sells ads or generates revenue, because their entire industries have gone online, or in many cases, been destroyed by the tech industry itself.
It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. Instead of individuals trying to optimize their content for maximum income, it would instead work like this: if the group determines that you make great content, you get a small stipend monthly. There are no other expectations or optimization requirements, merely that you continue making the content. Ads are banned. It would be similar to the way tenure works at universities.
I doubt this would actually be successful organically, but it could work as a collective Kickstarter or nonprofit sort of thing.
Wouldn't work, because it's chasing after the dollar that has ultimately destroyed the internet.
Because the internet means income for so many people, doing whatever it takes to get your website to the top of search results matters a lot. That means that the hobbyist making a website cannot compete with the businesses who's lifeblood depend on edging those hobbyist pages off the search results.
What made the old internet so great was your search in lycos or yahoo could pull up a result from hobbyists across the internet with a good chance of being just an honest info dump by a fan. That became an issue when the ad money started entering the mix. All the sudden we got things like ask jeeves and expert sex change edging out good content for their garbage "Hey, we also searched those keywords" landing pages. Google's initial value ad was the fact that it gave you good results that avoided these tactics.
I'm afraid the old internet is simply gone forever. There will always be someone willing to break the system to get on top so they can make the money.
> the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security.
And a huge number of people weren't (depending on when in internet history we're talking about). The thing is that it doesn't actually cost much to make a website. High schoolers were doing it with allowance money and still can.
I don't think the underlying issue is that people can't afford to put stuff on the web. I think the underlying issue is that people discovered they can make money putting stuff on the web.
So the web has become primarily a marketplace of sorts, much like cable TV. That's what I think is the root cause of why the internet has become shit. Trying to make money is a powerful driver toward mediocrity, because you're going to want to maximize your customer base.
I don't think it's because people do and don't have preexisting employment, it's because people feel they can become "creators".
The metrics have turned from hits to followers, to enable a constant stream of monetised opinion and product placement.
I'll be the last person to say they shouldn't be paid for their work, but I think it has hurt our collective creativity that we focus so hard on how to become a celebrity and sell our audience to advertisers. I miss the days of relative anonymity on New grounds. I guess that has moved to Roblox but even that's poisoned by cash.
> When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security.
Hasn't this been the case for most of history? "The Arts" were historically disproportionately populated by aristocrats, their families, the idle wealthy, and people who could afford to dabble and create and not worry about their art bringing in money. Only very recently has this idea taken hold that it should be possible for any old person to create art and have that somehow finance his or her life. Not saying one is better than the other, but I think making a real living from art is a relatively recent invention.
"When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it."
No bogus distinction between "developers" and "users".
No so-called "tech" companies acting as middlemen, calling their commercial surveillance "services".
The word "monetize" is not one I recall seeing on the early internet.
The internet was once thought as a medium that could be used to sell widgets,^1 not as a medium to provide free "services" that are a front for commercial surveillance. People will pay for widgets. No one thinks, "How do I monetize selling widgets?" People will generally not pay for what today's "developers" are creating. Hence the question, "How do I monetize it?" Easy, just ruin the internet by selling people out to advertisers. Until it collapses under the weight of all the garbage.
Perhaps someone might try to argue that people in the early days were just not thinking creatively and "innovating", and that today, they are. Yeah, right. Having lived through those days, what I saw was nerds who failed, and failed again, to find a business model, something they could produce that people would pay for. Eventually they gave up and sold out to advertising, which no one on the internet ever liked at all. Now people think this is a "business model" and represents "innovation". To me, nerds today actually seem less creative and less innovative because generally they all do the same thing: sell out to advertising and conduct surveillance.
1. Not that I am a fan of the company and what they have done to internet commerce, but Amazon has done quite well selling widgets.
I think a better solution would be to bring back strong career security.
Allowing companies to increase their profits by laying off workers is a policy choice. As is allowing companies to outsource jobs to cheaper jurisdictions. There is no law of nature that says that the US has to allow free trade to impoverish and dispossess its middle class so that its upper class can get even wealthier.
> their entire industries have gone online, or in many cases, been destroyed by the tech industry itself
Interesting point. It makes me think of what happened to typesetters (including my mother) when desktop publishing came along. It was a bloodbath. Everyone was suddenly creating their own reports and newsletters, usually doing a terrible job, instead of paying professionals to do it right. Which is fine, actually, but it did lead to a lot of those skilled professionals losing their livelihoods. A few figured out ways to make it, either as a boutique business catering to those who still wanted work done to traditional standards or by teaching others how to do it themselves better, but most ended up leaving the profession.
This is what's happening to a lot of artists, musicians, essayists, and others right now - even more so with "AI" everywhere. Lots of people unable to make a living with their hard-won skills, and insult added to injury as they have to watch others do those same things poorly. And programmers, just you wait until your livelihood consists of rescuing projects that went south because someone insisted on having ChatGPT write it instead of a professional human. For a fraction of what you used to make. I'm sure each and every one of you thinks you'll be one of the winners, still getting paid top dollar to do innovative work, but most of you are wrong. You'll probably get left high and dry just like most of your colleagues, and - unlike the typesetting example - it will mostly be our own collective fault.
"Enshittification" already means something else, so we need a new term for when technology both drives people out of work and heralds a massive decline in median work-product quality. (So it's not just "disruption" which has become a word used mostly by tools anyway). Amateurization? Tyrofication?
>It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work.
It did, for a while. It was called AdSense. And it was wonderful. Then the greed set in, the SEO farms took over, and here we are. It took a few decades, but that's the story.
Um.. being aligned with career security is nothing new, if anything it's gotten much worse.
Since most content creators dont' work on improving to the level they need to a handout would probably disable and undermine them more than not.
Maybe a partial grant or stipend to support them in their off hours after whatever their existing work is could be something to look at. Still, it likely needs to be something
There are so many areas other than social media to earn an income with content online.
When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it.
People struggling to pay the bills couldn't afford to be on the old Web. There were as many (or more) desperately poor people in the world 30 years ago, but they were too poor to get online at all. The needed hardware and service were expensive, and online stuff was unimportant to everyday life. So the early Web was dominated by university students and people with middle class careers at established institutions.
Today it's a lot less expensive and a lot more universal to communicate electronically. Many desperate scrabblers now use electronic communications in hopes of making money -- whether it's offshore scammers trying to defraud American retirees or "mom bloggers" enticing you to click on their unoriginal and unneeded "awesome diaper brands" article.
In absolute terms there are still a lot of people who don't need to make money from writing and therefore write things that are as interesting and commercially unmotivated as the best of the 1990s Web. A couple of examples that frequently show up on HN:
There are also some bloggers and substack writers who do get income from writing, but write about topics that are sufficiently far removed from product placement that their writings remain lucid, engaging, and untainted by desperation. A couple of examples:
Bret Devereaux's blog "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" https://acoup.blog/
There's still more good writing published on the Web than there are hours in the day to read it all. The thing that's harder now than in the 1990s is filtering out the commercially motivated writing. That's one of the things that keeps bringing me back to HN -- discovering interesting writers who aren't making "content" as a substrate for ads/promotions. (And yes, there's a lot of commercially motivated content here too, but that's not the part that keeps bringing me back.)
> It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. Instead of individuals trying to optimize their content for maximum income, it would instead work like this: if the group determines that you make great content, you get a small stipend monthly. There are no other expectations or optimization requirements, merely that you continue making the content
I don't know, I came to the internet (IRC/News) ~1990 and the WWW ~1993, when I wrote my first "homepage". I lived through the dotcom boom ~2000 with my own startup.
Sure internet was great back then, but I find it great today too. I create my own content on the internet just like 10 or 20 years ago on my website. I talk to people who send me an email about content on my website. I meet great people on LinkedIn.
I'm not on Facebook and practically left Twitter.
I assume like in other contexts people imagine a past that never existe
I don't think the fact that communities like this still exist is a point against them. They state in the article that they are also involved in communities they would consider "old internet" using modern tools.
I think their thesis was that as a whole the internet has become a more shit experience for the people using it. If you sampled 1000 random internet users decades ago they would have an experience closer to yours, if you did the same today I think it would be a lot "shittier"(to a lot of internet ysers, Facebook/twitter is "the internet")
I feel like this applies to more than just the internet.
New construction houses are crap quality. Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive.
But yes Google is probably the best example of this...type in any shopping term and Google search basically turns into a more cluttered Amazon search result page.
This is called survivorship bias. Plenty of hold houses were total shit. They're not around any longer. There is also a second bias of the depletion of natural materials older houses were made of, massive increases in population, and massively changed consumer tastes/requirements.
>Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive.
This is a mix of things occurring, though some of this can be attributed to VC culture. I mean, I can go to some restaurants and get super high quality food. But anything that has turned into a franchize is no longer about selling a product, it's more worried about growth month over month. Then when you add things like general inflation, remember your (great?) grand parents talking about nickel burgers, things in our economy march up in price over time. Oh, then add in we're selling to global markets, where if you're old enough we were generally selling to local/national markets.
Communication and distribution has massively changed (a lot of this is thanks to the internet itself) which means the way markets operate have massively changed. We're just really starting to notice this now.
I'm just confused about how the average person is supposed to navigate the internet. Is the assumption now that everybody knows about ad blocking plugins?
I think they're just used to it, or genuinely don't care that much. To them, reading an article through the four-line letterbox between the autoplaying video ad and the "you might also like..." box is just what the internet is.
The average person is locked into multiple walled gardens where ad blocking doesn't work, and the "feed" is curated specifically for maximum advertising exposure and lowered attention span.
I would expect that basic computer literacy is taught in schools, but I have no idea how these classes operate today. Seeing articles like "Gen Z Kids Apparently Don't Understand How File Systems Work" [1] make me wonder whether these courses even exist at all anymore
Belive it or not, but the Internet is usable even with Ads. I'd even say that Ad quality has gone up without adblock users noticing, I don't see fullscreen or 1/2 screen Ads anymore.
I agree that adds not only are annoying but that companies that capture an audience first and then introduce adds are crowding out more sustainable companies that don’t rely on ads but maybe on subscriptions.
Anyhow, as the internet slides ever deeper, the small web gets more fun every day. Now people may not blog as we did in the ‘00, but boy, do we micro blog on nostr as if we just discovered twitter for the first time.
It seems someone invents something new every other week when I’m on Nostr. It helps to follow hundreds of people (to avoid the echo chamber effect). Ands it’s an open protocol so nobody can stop anybody from just trying out goofy stuff. I love it.
Honestly, the phase we're in right now reminds me a LOT of the dot-com bubble burst. Low interest rates, tons of venture capital, companies hemorhaging cash and still skyrocketing their valuation, and from what I recall (I know memory can be faulty) towards the end of the bubble as companies got desperate to generate revenue we started to see nigh-unusable ad-riddled pages that looked very much like what we see these days.
Even though it'd be bad for me personally and for my career, I do hope the bubble bursts soon. There is no chance this is sustainable.
This feels more like an advertisement for bearblog than a meaningful critique. "Have you heard of enshittification? Well I guarantee my free product won't go that way. Sign up today!"
You ever drive down a main drag of any town or city pretty much anywhere that has a fairly unregulated capitalist system?
Advertising everywhere. Signage. People dressed as hotdogs paid a few bucks an hour to wave a sign shaped like a ketchup bottle.
The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different.
Enshitification isn't new, it's not even different from "making money and maximizing the bottom line". Capitalism is creative destruction driven by distributed profit seeking along the edges of relatively immobile statist and corporate oligopolistic structures.
This always involves cycles of enshitification that end in bottom feeding until extinguished by new techno-social revolutions.
GenXers were talking about the enshitification of main street with the spread of big box stores and malls in the 80s and 90s. Same system, same process, new generation.
> The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different.
It's obvious now that bringing the world to the net would make the net a lot more like the world, but you see, those of us who came up in the pre-Canter & Siegel days had actually hoped that it would make the world more like the (in the before times) net.
Except this was all triggered with the end of ZIRP...this all happened relatively recently.
High interest rates forced corporations to actually get serious about profitability. Layoffs, price hikes, charging more for less is all related to that.
I was surprised where that piece went, because I was thinking about enshittification from the other direction. Where he goes is "people now search reddit instead of google to get higher quality results because less monetizing." But what I had in mind in terms of the internet becoming shit is, how did reddit become so shitty compared to where reddit started? And my expected answer was going to be in the direction of "eternal september".
> companies that offer a free service but start charging once they've locked in a client-base (I'm looking at you Heroku).
I don’t know much about Heroku, or if it’s been enshittified (yet?), but a company that offers a free product and somewhere down the line starts charging for it sounds fine to me.
And anyone who believed a product produced by real people working at a real company could be free forever was kidding themselves.
(In general though I agree with the sentiment of the article.)
Typically you'll need some form of monopoly, close monopoly, or collusion between competing entities. For websites this can be the 'network-effect' cost. You use that site because everyone else you know uses that site.
The web itself is an environment ripe for abuse because, again typically, your end user doesn't pay directly for the services (they are the product). This is pretty much why every large social media site is an advertizer. About the only way to make money pushing web pages is by selling your users to advertisers.
I'll tell you why the internet became shit: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
No, seriously. There's no one big thing or even a bunch of big things. Instead it is a ton of little things that accumulate over decades. While this video is about voting[0], it is better we recognize that voting is actually about social choice. The crazy thing is that we can continually attempt to maximize our own objectives and because we live in a many player system this strategy can lead to a worse setting than where we began.
I want that to sink in. Because, we like to paint people to be evil (there's definitely clear cases) but most of the time there's no conspiracy and it is just the nature of a chaotic system and our strategies. Our world is complex enough that we can no longer employ strategies where we only consider the optimization objectives of us and our immediate allies. To optimize our objectives we need to actually consider those far from (i.e. people we disagree with) us and actually work with them in some capacity.
The article brings up Reddit, so I'll use it as an example (and goes for HN too). Lots of people even try to be helpful and will write comments (maybe this is for themselves too), but you'll often see a long chain of nearly identical comments/replies that aren't done in a joke. They're simply done because people didn't read the other replies before replying themselves (sometimes there are collisions), and the more this happens the more likely people are not going to read all the replies. Momentum is one hell of a force.
You'll also see naive and wrong comments float to the top while detailed correct comments are lost in the sea (I'm not saying my conjecture is correct, but you can see this phenomena on any subreddit in your domain expertise unless it is very niche). Just because people are trying to be helpful, might stroke their own ego because they presume correctness, and others reading can validate because it sounds reasonable. I mean how often do we hear for calls of debate? Debate isn't a means to get to objective truths, though it can be useful in matters that have no objective truths (e.g. this meta discussion itself). Truth has a lower bound in complexity, but we don't like complexity and we don't like chaos. We like conspiracies because we fear the chaos so much, because it is better to have evil men in charge than no one at the wheel. But I'm claiming a significant part of enshitification is due to the latter. That we can reduce it if we coordinate better by not just looking for our own/local gains.
Yeah, you could say that I'm even doing it as I'm writing here. Hard to tell. But I'll also welcome disagreement to my comments and we can discuss. I think things will always be noisy but it's working through and with that noise that gets us further. There are no global optimas in large solution spaces like these, so there'll always be critiques and trade-offs. Which we could say is damning, or we can see as a blessing as it gives more spice to life and allow us to adapt to the dynamic state of things where the importance of those differences is ever changing.
We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, and for using HN primarily for ideological battle. These things are not what the site is for and destroy what it is for.
[+] [-] keiferski|1 year ago|reply
This is a lot different from today, where any sort of journalist/writer/artist/filmmaker is basically dependent on making content that sells ads or generates revenue, because their entire industries have gone online, or in many cases, been destroyed by the tech industry itself.
It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. Instead of individuals trying to optimize their content for maximum income, it would instead work like this: if the group determines that you make great content, you get a small stipend monthly. There are no other expectations or optimization requirements, merely that you continue making the content. Ads are banned. It would be similar to the way tenure works at universities.
I doubt this would actually be successful organically, but it could work as a collective Kickstarter or nonprofit sort of thing.
[+] [-] cogman10|1 year ago|reply
Because the internet means income for so many people, doing whatever it takes to get your website to the top of search results matters a lot. That means that the hobbyist making a website cannot compete with the businesses who's lifeblood depend on edging those hobbyist pages off the search results.
What made the old internet so great was your search in lycos or yahoo could pull up a result from hobbyists across the internet with a good chance of being just an honest info dump by a fan. That became an issue when the ad money started entering the mix. All the sudden we got things like ask jeeves and expert sex change edging out good content for their garbage "Hey, we also searched those keywords" landing pages. Google's initial value ad was the fact that it gave you good results that avoided these tactics.
I'm afraid the old internet is simply gone forever. There will always be someone willing to break the system to get on top so they can make the money.
[+] [-] JohnFen|1 year ago|reply
And a huge number of people weren't (depending on when in internet history we're talking about). The thing is that it doesn't actually cost much to make a website. High schoolers were doing it with allowance money and still can.
I don't think the underlying issue is that people can't afford to put stuff on the web. I think the underlying issue is that people discovered they can make money putting stuff on the web.
So the web has become primarily a marketplace of sorts, much like cable TV. That's what I think is the root cause of why the internet has become shit. Trying to make money is a powerful driver toward mediocrity, because you're going to want to maximize your customer base.
[+] [-] oliwarner|1 year ago|reply
I don't think it's because people do and don't have preexisting employment, it's because people feel they can become "creators".
The metrics have turned from hits to followers, to enable a constant stream of monetised opinion and product placement.
I'll be the last person to say they shouldn't be paid for their work, but I think it has hurt our collective creativity that we focus so hard on how to become a celebrity and sell our audience to advertisers. I miss the days of relative anonymity on New grounds. I guess that has moved to Roblox but even that's poisoned by cash.
[+] [-] barfbagginus|1 year ago|reply
The current Internet hides those people - who I assure you still exist - who are trying to share knowledge for free.
[+] [-] ryandrake|1 year ago|reply
Hasn't this been the case for most of history? "The Arts" were historically disproportionately populated by aristocrats, their families, the idle wealthy, and people who could afford to dabble and create and not worry about their art bringing in money. Only very recently has this idea taken hold that it should be possible for any old person to create art and have that somehow finance his or her life. Not saying one is better than the other, but I think making a real living from art is a relatively recent invention.
[+] [-] alabhyajindal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|1 year ago|reply
No bogus distinction between "developers" and "users".
No so-called "tech" companies acting as middlemen, calling their commercial surveillance "services".
The word "monetize" is not one I recall seeing on the early internet.
The internet was once thought as a medium that could be used to sell widgets,^1 not as a medium to provide free "services" that are a front for commercial surveillance. People will pay for widgets. No one thinks, "How do I monetize selling widgets?" People will generally not pay for what today's "developers" are creating. Hence the question, "How do I monetize it?" Easy, just ruin the internet by selling people out to advertisers. Until it collapses under the weight of all the garbage.
Perhaps someone might try to argue that people in the early days were just not thinking creatively and "innovating", and that today, they are. Yeah, right. Having lived through those days, what I saw was nerds who failed, and failed again, to find a business model, something they could produce that people would pay for. Eventually they gave up and sold out to advertising, which no one on the internet ever liked at all. Now people think this is a "business model" and represents "innovation". To me, nerds today actually seem less creative and less innovative because generally they all do the same thing: sell out to advertising and conduct surveillance.
1. Not that I am a fan of the company and what they have done to internet commerce, but Amazon has done quite well selling widgets.
[+] [-] bdw5204|1 year ago|reply
Allowing companies to increase their profits by laying off workers is a policy choice. As is allowing companies to outsource jobs to cheaper jurisdictions. There is no law of nature that says that the US has to allow free trade to impoverish and dispossess its middle class so that its upper class can get even wealthier.
[+] [-] notacoward|1 year ago|reply
Interesting point. It makes me think of what happened to typesetters (including my mother) when desktop publishing came along. It was a bloodbath. Everyone was suddenly creating their own reports and newsletters, usually doing a terrible job, instead of paying professionals to do it right. Which is fine, actually, but it did lead to a lot of those skilled professionals losing their livelihoods. A few figured out ways to make it, either as a boutique business catering to those who still wanted work done to traditional standards or by teaching others how to do it themselves better, but most ended up leaving the profession.
This is what's happening to a lot of artists, musicians, essayists, and others right now - even more so with "AI" everywhere. Lots of people unable to make a living with their hard-won skills, and insult added to injury as they have to watch others do those same things poorly. And programmers, just you wait until your livelihood consists of rescuing projects that went south because someone insisted on having ChatGPT write it instead of a professional human. For a fraction of what you used to make. I'm sure each and every one of you thinks you'll be one of the winners, still getting paid top dollar to do innovative work, but most of you are wrong. You'll probably get left high and dry just like most of your colleagues, and - unlike the typesetting example - it will mostly be our own collective fault.
"Enshittification" already means something else, so we need a new term for when technology both drives people out of work and heralds a massive decline in median work-product quality. (So it's not just "disruption" which has become a word used mostly by tools anyway). Amateurization? Tyrofication?
[+] [-] jaggs|1 year ago|reply
It did, for a while. It was called AdSense. And it was wonderful. Then the greed set in, the SEO farms took over, and here we are. It took a few decades, but that's the story.
[+] [-] j45|1 year ago|reply
Since most content creators dont' work on improving to the level they need to a handout would probably disable and undermine them more than not.
Maybe a partial grant or stipend to support them in their off hours after whatever their existing work is could be something to look at. Still, it likely needs to be something
There are so many areas other than social media to earn an income with content online.
[+] [-] philipkglass|1 year ago|reply
People struggling to pay the bills couldn't afford to be on the old Web. There were as many (or more) desperately poor people in the world 30 years ago, but they were too poor to get online at all. The needed hardware and service were expensive, and online stuff was unimportant to everyday life. So the early Web was dominated by university students and people with middle class careers at established institutions.
Today it's a lot less expensive and a lot more universal to communicate electronically. Many desperate scrabblers now use electronic communications in hopes of making money -- whether it's offshore scammers trying to defraud American retirees or "mom bloggers" enticing you to click on their unoriginal and unneeded "awesome diaper brands" article.
In absolute terms there are still a lot of people who don't need to make money from writing and therefore write things that are as interesting and commercially unmotivated as the best of the 1990s Web. A couple of examples that frequently show up on HN:
Ken Shirriff's blog https://www.righto.com/
Daniel Lemire's blog https://lemire.me/blog/
There are also some bloggers and substack writers who do get income from writing, but write about topics that are sufficiently far removed from product placement that their writings remain lucid, engaging, and untainted by desperation. A couple of examples:
Bret Devereaux's blog "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" https://acoup.blog/
Hannah Ritchie's substack "Sustainability by numbers" https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/about
There's still more good writing published on the Web than there are hours in the day to read it all. The thing that's harder now than in the 1990s is filtering out the commercially motivated writing. That's one of the things that keeps bringing me back to HN -- discovering interesting writers who aren't making "content" as a substrate for ads/promotions. (And yes, there's a lot of commercially motivated content here too, but that's not the part that keeps bringing me back.)
[+] [-] jjmarr|1 year ago|reply
I think you invented Patreon.
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|1 year ago|reply
Sure internet was great back then, but I find it great today too. I create my own content on the internet just like 10 or 20 years ago on my website. I talk to people who send me an email about content on my website. I meet great people on LinkedIn.
I'm not on Facebook and practically left Twitter.
I assume like in other contexts people imagine a past that never existe
[+] [-] Xelynega|1 year ago|reply
I think their thesis was that as a whole the internet has become a more shit experience for the people using it. If you sampled 1000 random internet users decades ago they would have an experience closer to yours, if you did the same today I think it would be a lot "shittier"(to a lot of internet ysers, Facebook/twitter is "the internet")
[+] [-] j45|1 year ago|reply
Change just has to be good for the many, and not the few.
[+] [-] tempsy|1 year ago|reply
New construction houses are crap quality. Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive.
But yes Google is probably the best example of this...type in any shopping term and Google search basically turns into a more cluttered Amazon search result page.
[+] [-] pixl97|1 year ago|reply
This is called survivorship bias. Plenty of hold houses were total shit. They're not around any longer. There is also a second bias of the depletion of natural materials older houses were made of, massive increases in population, and massively changed consumer tastes/requirements.
>Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive.
This is a mix of things occurring, though some of this can be attributed to VC culture. I mean, I can go to some restaurants and get super high quality food. But anything that has turned into a franchize is no longer about selling a product, it's more worried about growth month over month. Then when you add things like general inflation, remember your (great?) grand parents talking about nickel burgers, things in our economy march up in price over time. Oh, then add in we're selling to global markets, where if you're old enough we were generally selling to local/national markets.
Communication and distribution has massively changed (a lot of this is thanks to the internet itself) which means the way markets operate have massively changed. We're just really starting to notice this now.
[+] [-] zero-sharp|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] deergomoo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] btbuildem|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Minor49er|1 year ago|reply
[1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems
[+] [-] nolist_policy|1 year ago|reply
Privacy on the other hand...
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] sevagh|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] janandonly|1 year ago|reply
Anyhow, as the internet slides ever deeper, the small web gets more fun every day. Now people may not blog as we did in the ‘00, but boy, do we micro blog on nostr as if we just discovered twitter for the first time.
It seems someone invents something new every other week when I’m on Nostr. It helps to follow hundreds of people (to avoid the echo chamber effect). Ands it’s an open protocol so nobody can stop anybody from just trying out goofy stuff. I love it.
[+] [-] quasarj|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnMakin|1 year ago|reply
Even though it'd be bad for me personally and for my career, I do hope the bubble bursts soon. There is no chance this is sustainable.
[+] [-] pmarreck|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] xbpx|1 year ago|reply
The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different.
Enshitification isn't new, it's not even different from "making money and maximizing the bottom line". Capitalism is creative destruction driven by distributed profit seeking along the edges of relatively immobile statist and corporate oligopolistic structures.
This always involves cycles of enshitification that end in bottom feeding until extinguished by new techno-social revolutions.
GenXers were talking about the enshitification of main street with the spread of big box stores and malls in the 80s and 90s. Same system, same process, new generation.
[+] [-] 082349872349872|1 year ago|reply
It's obvious now that bringing the world to the net would make the net a lot more like the world, but you see, those of us who came up in the pre-Canter & Siegel days had actually hoped that it would make the world more like the (in the before times) net.
[+] [-] tempsy|1 year ago|reply
High interest rates forced corporations to actually get serious about profitability. Layoffs, price hikes, charging more for less is all related to that.
[+] [-] fsckboy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] epalm|1 year ago|reply
I don’t know much about Heroku, or if it’s been enshittified (yet?), but a company that offers a free product and somewhere down the line starts charging for it sounds fine to me.
And anyone who believed a product produced by real people working at a real company could be free forever was kidding themselves.
(In general though I agree with the sentiment of the article.)
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|1 year ago|reply
Corner the market by providing good service to business users and consumers.
Abuse your users because there aren't many other choices.
Abuse your business users.
[+] [-] pixl97|1 year ago|reply
The web itself is an environment ripe for abuse because, again typically, your end user doesn't pay directly for the services (they are the product). This is pretty much why every large social media site is an advertizer. About the only way to make money pushing web pages is by selling your users to advertisers.
[+] [-] godelski|1 year ago|reply
No, seriously. There's no one big thing or even a bunch of big things. Instead it is a ton of little things that accumulate over decades. While this video is about voting[0], it is better we recognize that voting is actually about social choice. The crazy thing is that we can continually attempt to maximize our own objectives and because we live in a many player system this strategy can lead to a worse setting than where we began.
I want that to sink in. Because, we like to paint people to be evil (there's definitely clear cases) but most of the time there's no conspiracy and it is just the nature of a chaotic system and our strategies. Our world is complex enough that we can no longer employ strategies where we only consider the optimization objectives of us and our immediate allies. To optimize our objectives we need to actually consider those far from (i.e. people we disagree with) us and actually work with them in some capacity.
The article brings up Reddit, so I'll use it as an example (and goes for HN too). Lots of people even try to be helpful and will write comments (maybe this is for themselves too), but you'll often see a long chain of nearly identical comments/replies that aren't done in a joke. They're simply done because people didn't read the other replies before replying themselves (sometimes there are collisions), and the more this happens the more likely people are not going to read all the replies. Momentum is one hell of a force.
You'll also see naive and wrong comments float to the top while detailed correct comments are lost in the sea (I'm not saying my conjecture is correct, but you can see this phenomena on any subreddit in your domain expertise unless it is very niche). Just because people are trying to be helpful, might stroke their own ego because they presume correctness, and others reading can validate because it sounds reasonable. I mean how often do we hear for calls of debate? Debate isn't a means to get to objective truths, though it can be useful in matters that have no objective truths (e.g. this meta discussion itself). Truth has a lower bound in complexity, but we don't like complexity and we don't like chaos. We like conspiracies because we fear the chaos so much, because it is better to have evil men in charge than no one at the wheel. But I'm claiming a significant part of enshitification is due to the latter. That we can reduce it if we coordinate better by not just looking for our own/local gains.
Yeah, you could say that I'm even doing it as I'm writing here. Hard to tell. But I'll also welcome disagreement to my comments and we can discuss. I think things will always be noisy but it's working through and with that noise that gets us further. There are no global optimas in large solution spaces like these, so there'll always be critiques and trade-offs. Which we could say is damning, or we can see as a blessing as it gives more spice to life and allow us to adapt to the dynamic state of things where the importance of those differences is ever changing.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] camdenlock|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] dang|1 year ago|reply
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
[+] [-] banish-m4|1 year ago|reply