What's the deal with that f*xoxo website? Is this the fucking future of film "journalism" on the web? They seem to just churn out tons of either completely automated or extremely low-effort posts (over 70 already today), more often than not consisting of nothing more than a headline, a (probably AI-generated) image with and the whole post body just the headline being repeated, you know, like this fucking masterpiece here: https://www.fxoxo.com/51163/ I wonder what the motivation behind that thing is, as i don't see any ads or other means of monetization, (this can't truly be a work of passion, i think... or can it?) but that might be down to either my browser or the site actually being as broken as it appears to me at first glance (empty menus and all that...). It has the superficial look of your average web magazine (a gripe i have even with some actually pretty good music blogs i follow) but its content seems clearly made to entirely fit in a single toot/tweet/fart/etc. Normally i would just shrug this thing off and move on with my life. The fact that the account regularly gets boosted by @movies and thus randomly appears in my federated timeline kinda exemplifies my view on algorithmic and otherwise fully automated content on the fediverse which is: I don't like it one bit! What i'd very much prefer would be actual human curation of quality things. Only knowledgeable humans can discern worthy stuff from time-killing low-quality drivel and anything algorithmic and automated can and will be gamed and flooded with garbage in no time. #WhatIsThis#Enshitternet#ContentFarms#Curation#Movies#Cinemastodon#Film@film
When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the #enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
People make fun of that "don't be evil" motto, but if your key employees took the gig because they didn't want to be evil, and then you ask them to be evil, they might just quit. Hell, they might make a stink on the way out the door, too:
How did the company get this bad? In part, this is the "curse of bigness." The company can't grow by attracting new users. When you have 90%+ of the market, there are no new customers to sign up.