2006 - 2022: Corporate content hosts are so cheap and easy that no one has an incentive to learn to self-host content, and people who were previously self-hosting content move over to big "social" platforms
2022 - … : Platforms close off in every imaginable way and start taking every opportunity to extract rents from users, benefits that originally got people to move over now gone, but the network effects are such you can no longer switch to open alternatives or convince other people to do so
@mcc 2023-? Second (at least) dot-com bubble bursts as companies learn that most people hate dealing with the walls they put up more than they hate missing out on the "content" that's created for free by their users. We're already seeing this with Twitter and Reddit, and probably Netflix as well.
@mcc Well, I think advertising-supported content is already a bubble long due for bursting. Companies buy advertising because they think that x amount of clicks or x seconds of videos watched equals advertising dollars well spent, but it doesn't actually correlate with sales. I'm pretty sure most people have trained themselves to click "Skip ads" as soon as that option appears, and most ads that do get "watched" are because somebody started a video and wandered off to do something else.
@cholling@mcc I think they used to call this reputation mining: buy a profitable company, squeeze its good name for immediate profits while destroying the very reason they succeeded in the first place (Sears).
@john380@cholling@mcc Not necessarily - My take is that we've been in a ZIRP for 15 years, which is beyond the behavioral event horizon for many humans; now that the cheap money has gone the way of the dodo, investors insist on maintaining the same returns (ain't infinite greed grand?), and that leads to an acceleration of the enshittification process (as it's all about value extraction) for the whole social sector.
@mcc@cholling I think it might be true just not in absolutes. The space of people seeking free/open alternatives might widen, but it might also be true that the majority remain stuck and it looks marvelous from the business/financial side.
@mcc@cholling I am actually quite sure. Easy access is what has driven popularity of these platforms. Unfortunately for companies, they can't really extract more from this.
@mcc
I never had a Twitter but it sounds to me like it fell off the deep end. I've left forums and sites when the community got sick of how toxic the community was and I don't see how people are going to put up with Twitter much longer when musk is out here tweeting stuff like "cis is a slur". My last moments logged into reddit felt pretty much the same @cholling
@mcc I just don't understand why politicians choose to put up with it with their own communication. It would be so easy for the white house (or even the political parties themselves) to set up their own mastodon instance.
Have you seen what's going on under literally every post from Biden?
It wasnt and unfortunately isnt only a question of price: Increasingly harsh and often poor regulation has made hosting for yourself or using a smaller platform less attractive.
It created expensive legal risks for all internet services but small and medium ones cannot handle such risks remotly as good as a large company. As such the already huge companies benefit the most from it while smaller ones have one more reason to go bankrupt.
@mcc
It would be funny to try to correlate this to two factors:
Treasury of the biggest social media providers (in terms of how long they can operate without additional cash injection)
Profitability (as a percentage of sales)
Interest rates
If you are not profitable, and are faced with increasing capital cost you will want to prevent perceived "freeloaders" from using your service (note that this includes both human users and companies grafting their business onto your resources)
@mcc also people stopped paying developers to build open projects but instead paid us to build on top of closed ecosystems. Now our open projects are mothballed and out of favour making it increasingly difficult to update and maintain.
Hope is not entirely lost but I hope we have learned a lesson and hope we can get support for developers as well as users.
@mcc now, now mcc. You are forgetting the absolutely nasty attitude of people stumbling into the Hosting Roman Oegy and ridiculing people who are self hosting, declaring then dangerous loons and excited thst the big tech companies could push them out
@mcc now, now mcc. You are forgetting the absolutely nasty attitude of people stumbling into the Hosting Roman Orgy and ridiculing people who are self hosting, declaring then dangerous loons and excited that the big tech companies could push them out
@mcc
2024 - ... : People takes the internet back after network effect shift into the :fediverse:
Big social companies implode spectacularly after a constant two years of bad decisions.
@ASegar I cannot post to Twitter without doing business with Elon Musk, something I do not want to do. Also, from what I hear you can't post to Twitter anyway because it's down all morning.
@mcc Absolutely, your choice. But if there are social channels that you want to use (like Mastodon 😀) you can post links to your self-hosted content on them while maintaining control of your content.
@mcc I don't know how to remedy any of this, I barely understand what you wrote, but I have the gist of it. And I, too, have no idea how to switch anything at all.
#Enshittification is not accidental. It's a deliberate policy on the part of a platform corporation, to use #ChokepointCapitalism as a way to squeeze suppliers and consumers.
As @mcc reminds us, that happens only once the corporation believes they've locked in one side; when they've got a lock on you and you feel you have no better option, that's when they squeeze you to extract value.
I feel like there are admin problems and legal concerns now that didn't quite exist to the the same extent in the past, that are an obstacle to people setting up their own sites on their own servers in the old fashioned way.
@admin@mcc managed hosting is a better answer. I can rattle off a bunch of names that will spin you up a WP site with your own domain name for a couple bucks a month. Masto.host will spin up an instance for you and your friends for less than $10/mo. We need the same for Peertube/pixelfed/Frendica etc.
Most folks don't need or want to get into a Linux stack, and I don't know about you, but finding an admin I don't have to trust su to is preferable even if I'm capable
@bnys@mcc It's our fault. We put up with ads on the Internet in the first place. We fought ads off on Usenet for a time but gave up when the Web came along. We said "it's OK if the Internet becomes nothing but a means of serving ads." And it did.
If you feel you were incorrectly banned just press the button and we'll look into it.
Because YT has an AWESOME track record of looking into things that have gone wrong (when it happens to someone with a large enough following to get attention in the media).
Took them over 3 weeks to deal with someone who stole a WB account to sell trump bucks & other sketchy stuff.
@mcc@you_jo_girl I just can't wait until they do attention-tracking ads where it doesn't count until you look at it and the volume is up. Because we know that's coming eventually.
@mcc Feck's sake. I held out on adblocking on YouTube tbh because it seemed fair to content providers, but then some plonker put so many ads into their videos, so poorly timed, that I couldn't watch a single 5min figure skating programme without being interrupted twice to be told about something not available in my country.
If they really want people to watch ads they should start by taking a long hard look at the ads.
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