cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: 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. It doesn’t have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to “five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four” (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don’t have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!
I get the idea, but I also don’t want to go back to the days when BestGore and LiveLeak were around either, you know
Hahahaha. “Go back to”?
Just because you don’t know what they are called today doesn’t mean those sites stopped existing. Shock and gore sites have been part of the Internet for a long time because they fill a human desire, same as porn and gambling and anything that makes your brain think you’re being naughty enough to hand out that sweet dopamine reward.
Watching people die fills a desire to who?
I can’t possibly imagine the kind of person that would think watching people die is somehow on par with whacking off, and gambling? I mean did you really just compare whacking it and playing slots in Vegas to watching someone get killed?
What are you talking about? The internet is full of people being mangled in Ukraine or shot in police footage . If anything there is more death online now than before.
Yes, but right now their experience is carefully tailored by Facebook, Google, or reddit so they don’t have to experience them.
Exactly. By making the internet more welcoming to advertisers, in a way we also made it more easy going. I would rather not go back to the days where just scrolling opened you up to seeing gore, goatse, or worse.
Like it’s valid to want good moderation. I think that’s all the other person was saying
