Lets kill off the damned cookie popups. Nobody cares, its literally the most useless 5 seconds of every persons life to have to dismiss and never read what it says
I watched the video yesterday and I couldn’t really understand what the plan is. What I got was something like “the corps are too big for the consumers to do anything and laws are very slow to made”.
Did I miss something about the “audacious(?)” plan?
Cory Doctorow coins the term “enshittification” to describe how platforms start out benefiting users but eventually abuse users and business customers to extract all value.
Facebook started by prioritizing user privacy over ads but now prioritizes profits over all else.
Network effects are a double-edged sword - they lock users in but also make platforms vulnerable if users leave en masse.
Low switching costs due to universality and interoperability allow competitors to reverse engineer platforms and plug in competing services.
Mandatory interoperability and limiting data control can curb platform power by distributing control to users and smaller companies.
Recent antitrust actions aim to roll back decades of lax merger policy that let platforms consolidate power.
Breakups will take a long time so interoperability is a faster way to restore competition.
Laws should limit abusive behavior rather than rely on platforms to self-regulate.
Federated open services fail gracefully and encourage migration to better platforms.
Political will is growing but change will be gradual - focus should be on harm reduction in the near term.
The real cost of enshittification is that they make it impossible for others to run honest business.
Who will pay a subscription for privacy respecting services when there are a dozen free alternatives. True cost of running online business has been completely hidden from users and for so long that they will never accept those that want to cover the costs upfront.
e.g. how many of you remain on Lemmy if instance owners asked for a monthly fee to cover their server costs?
At least in feddit (main German instance) there were a lot of posts offering up financial support, but it was declined because it was not needed.
I think especially the smaller communities wouldn’t have a problem coming with funds for hosting. Donations for lemmy developers have also increased significantly since the main exodus.
I get your scepticism, but I think the lemmy community for the most part wants this thing to “succeed” and is willing to chip in a reasonable amount.
Depends honestly but there’s a fee I’d be willing to pay to support if there was ongoing development and efforts for things user privacy and responsible moderation.
Well, not entirely. We can move out to the wilderness and live off the land with very minimal interaction with civilization. We don’t because iPhones and medicine are too good to give up.
I was thinking about using Kagi myself, but it’s more expensive than my site hosting, mail and 1 TiB storage Nextcloud instance combined. It’s hard to justify that cost if the alternative is free and works fine enough most of the time.
If they are 100% transparent in regard to where the money goes, I’m in. The problem with something like youtube premium is not that it’s unaffordable to the majority of users. It’s that at this point you have to assume that they don’t need the subscription fee to cover their costs, but to shove that money up some CEOs or shareholders asses. Yeah that’s not gonna happen unless they force me to and even then I’d think twice about if I really need that service.
The last two words of my username will official disappear by that point. And it’s not like someone other than me is already referring to themself as “Resol” without a suffix anyway.
Dunno if for other people, but that’s the main issue for me. When you pay a subscription, at least in my mind trained in the 90s and early 00s, plus now with Enshittification, you are not only basically paying rent to a landlord, but you are basically paying a “ransom” – a bet that the service won’t be rug-pulled from under your feet at any moment’s notice.
Instead I’d prefer something like a one-time lifetime payment, like what SDF does, or a long-period subscription eg.: 5-yearly or 10-yearly instead of monthly / yearly. That way, even if it’s going to eventually be Enshittified, you have better reason to trust that you’re going to get some useful lifespan out of it.
Fearing enshittification is one reason I want to keep my company private. If I have to answer to stockholders, then I’m not answering to customers, and that’s shitty.
Well good news... you don't have to fucking answer to stockholders. That's a fucking lie perpetrated by Harvard Business sociopaths and their bootlicking bitchboys.
All you have to do is what's in the best interest of the business. If someone doesn't like it they can sell the fucking stock.
The ruling of that Supreme Court case was that publicly-traded companies are obligated to act in the interests of their shareholders, rather than employees or customers. Cargo cultist MBA-types – those who have superficial knowledge, but lack actual understanding – think that means companies must be purely sociopathic and slavishly work to increase quarter-to-quarter stock returns at all costs, but that’s not actually true because management is still allowed to take things like long-term stability and customer goodwill into account.
“The best interest of the business” is far too lenient in its wording. Some of the shareholder derivative lawsuits out there are fucking wild.
Simple things such as “paying your workers too much”, “acting with too much emphasis on morality over capital gains”, it all does have to come back to shareholder profits, ever since Dodge Vs. Ford.
That’s not what was decided in Dodge v. Ford. That case decided that corporations are allowed to act in the interest of majority shareholders even if it hurts the interests of minority shareholders. The Dodge brothers owned Ford shares and were trying to use their position to force Ford to stop competing with Dodge.
Further:
“In fact, courts have consistently refused to hold directors liable for failing to maximise shareholder value.”
"In 2014, the United States Supreme Court voiced its position in no uncertain terms. In Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., the Supreme Court stated that “Modern corporate law does not require for profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else”.
Re the second part: this works differently in delaware, where over half of all fortune 500 companies were incorporated.
Willfully ignoring the minor detail about ford being sued to stop enriching the lives of their workers says enough about how productive this conversation’s going to be.
“The best interest of the business” is far too lenient in its wording.
And yet that's how it works, because business is not a linear thing. Do you have any idea how long "MUXEMOOSE PROOFITS!!!!" types have been whining about the price of Costco's hot dog?
100%. I never wanna work for public company again. I left a huge one after constant thrashing of canceling projects and trips so the accountants could move money around for the quarterly earnings reports only to revive after. Went to a couple small private ones then ~2yrs ago employer went public. Been so downhill so fast. Company isn’t recognizable to the one I accepted offer from. I’m leaving when I find a good private fit.
Fearing enshittification is one reason I want to keep my company private. If I have to answer to stockholders, then I’m not answering to customers, and that’s shitty.
I get it. His most recent post talks about how enshittification isn’t just limited to digital platforms, it’s inevitable whenever monopolies are allowed to form.
100%. I never wanna work for public company again. I left a huge one after constant thrashing of canceling projects and trips so the accountants could move money around for the quarterly earnings reports only to revive after. Went to a couple small private ones then yr ago employer went public. Been so downhill so fast. Company isn’t recognizable to the one I accepted offer from. I’m leaving when I find a private fit.
I would consult a lawyer, basically iirc you can add to the bylaws that you are not just about making money and then you are only obligated to share dividends if you keep the majority of the voting rights.
It doesn’t necessarily roll off the tongue, but that’s a good thing. It seems to be catching on, and frankly those large companies and orgs that are enshittifying and get labeled thusly might actually not love being called out with it, and hopefully slow their roll.
Doubtful, but a man can dream.
I used to work at S***ify… which is currently enshittifying at top-speed. It fits.
Welp… how long-winded do you want me to get on this one? You could look up literally hundreds of examples in mainstream news about how Shopify came up as a lean scrappy underdog circa 2012 alongside many of the second wave of budding platforms. In those days they were just a snowboard company who hated the pre-rolled ecomm solutions (especially Amazon) and came up with their own way.
Turns out a few other people liked their way as well… so they pivoted to SaaS and took off running. Their mantra at that time (and they still pull it out on the regular now… for laughs) was “Arming the rebels” (against Amazon…)
They built their SaaS platform on world-class customer/merchant support. Built things users asked for. Hired talented people who were inspired by the environment of doing good in the world… etc etc. They believed in what they were doing… i.e. “Make Commerce Better.”
Around the time I joined (2021) they got absolutely fucking hammered by new clients/merchants over lockdown. They were primed for “easy dropshipping” this and “low-cost barrier to entry” that for tens of millions of broke people sitting at home for lockdowns across 18+ months, looking for (pre-rolled) ways to earn an income. Their own marketing to small and emergin businesses (easy money over here!) ended up fucking them in the end.
They did an over-hiring wave like any other tech compan at the time. Very shortly after their email and chat support queues were overrun (weeks-long wait times) they reduces phone support hours for normal merchants before killing them completely shortly thereafter (workers can only field one call at a time, vs 3 chats and multiple emails per hour)… Obv they kept phones open for Plus merchants (enterprise, of course). That’s Enshittification - Stage 1. They built their business, name, and reputation helping the little guy (the “rebels”)… and now they were pulling up the ladder behind them to help the Plus/enterprize clients get and remain profitable, instead.
I could keep going. If you look far enough into it they started aggressively courting Enterprize clients last year after their shares tanked, and after they laid off 30% of staff… and while they do that they need to pull finances and resources further away from their “rebels” to keep the Nikes and the Chapters of the world happy. Established mega-corps don’t love it if you’re giving “the little guy” stellar support while you give them (Nike) the same level. They want “better”, at all times.
They’ve been at multi-billion dollar valuation for years prior to Covid. It was the pressure through lockdowns and out the other side tha pressured them to keep growing profitability, sent them over the edge of enshittification. They’ve clearly taken a lot of advice from Wall Street and Silicon Valley about how to stay on the money train (from same)… during tough financial times. They’re already pulling top-notch support from their enterprize clients, and third-party app devs (ask me how I know that). The next (obvious) phase is to claw back those margins that keep enterprize clients happy, once they have enough of them locked in that a few leaving won’t hurt them. That’s phase 3, if you haven’t been keeping track.
Do you need more of a primer, or did I answer your question?
I read halfway through this comment fully under the impression it was about Spotify and was profoundly confused until I scrolled up and realized my mistake.
But rent seeking sounds too… clean. It’s almost an euphemism. Because in the end, the result is that for a whole lot of people, the experience of using the services goes to shit.
Edit: I just googled it and yeah, you’re exactly right. Interesting!
That may have been true in the past, but in the last 30 years I’ve watched a lot of companies that should have outright failed because they were terribly managed get a few dumptruck loads of taxpayer money to keep them afloat.
We’re well past the stage of “if they fuck themselves, let them fail” and deep into “If you’re not going to buy their shit, we’ll just take them money straight out of your paycheck”
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