Hey everyone, I see a lot of people throwing around the term “enshittification” to describe the long-term and systemic decline of many of the centralized social media platforms, most recently Reddit. I commented this elsewhere, but thought everyone might benefit for reading Cory Doctorow’s original article coining the term. The first sentence here sums it up nicely:
“Here is how platforms die: first, they 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.”
I’m a big proponent for tracing and crediting the origins of ideas, and I think this one speaks to a lot of people right now. For all its flaws and occasional user-unfriendliness, I think the main draw of the Fediverse is an escape from this profit-driven cycle.
You can also follow the Mastodon account for Cory’s blog @pluralistic (yay federation!).
It’s a basic monopoly move. Why is Google making it’s search function shitty? Because it’s a monopoly and you won’t go to a competitor. Reddit assumes that it can make these moves because it doesn’t have a competitor, and if it did, it could buy out the competitor right now.