I get why all the sites are getting shittier (interest rates etc etc) -- but why are they all getting shittier in the same shitty dumb way?
it’s never just ads or subscriptions, it’s a shitty integrated fucking garbage algoritm driven with content you don’t want to see shown to you, the interface is ALWAYS shittier and worse, no explanation, just that it looks ‘modern’
I think it’s the same principle that led to the slogan “Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”. It’s a list of checkboxes that someone can present to investors and get money.
At the very least, I can confirm that the saying was definitely was a thing a decade or two ago, when IBM was major player in enterprise / corporate computing. They generally weren't the best computers, or the best value, or even particularly great - but they were a safe choice.
You went out and bought new computers for the XYZ department from some competitor - and if anything went wrong, your ass was on the line for buying unreliable garbage from a shitty company. If you bought IBM and the same thing happened, management would kind of shrug and assume that the same problem would have gone wrong on any other computer, because IBM is a trusted safe brand.
So the idea that no one ever got fired for buying IBM was a running joke in tech circles - that it's not bad, it's not good, but it is career-safe for the person signing the cheque - and the bean-counters buying computers really like safe.
I was just thinking something along these lines. Telling investors and venture capitalists that your site has "content algorithms" sounds a hell of a lot more professional than "we have ads and subscriptions", even if the algorithms in practice are just as bad, if not worse. What I've learned from my time in the corporate world is that quality of a product does not matter one bit, only how you sell the product marketing strategies and profit projections to investors.
That article from Doctorow does such an amazing job of explaining it and breaking it down. It just made it so painfully obvious that I'm disappointed that I didn't see the pattern on my own.
Algorithms are harder to prove and don’t interrupt the flow of content, thus less people get pissed, which means less people leave, and they can charge higher rates to advertisers.
It doesn’t work for you but it works for the casual user
Promoting shitty short rage bait content, charged headlines where no one reads the articles, etc drives traffic up with casual users who are far less likely to use ad blockers, far more likely to use native apps, far more likely to enable tracking features blindly, etc.
Power users don’t like it but power users don’t view ads, are more likely to be privacy focused, etc. they also are a very small demographic so they are simply ignored once they are annoying. Before they are annoying they are marketed to bc they can be milked with things like premium subscriptions for no ads or whatever.
Subscriptions don’t sell for social media, advertising doesn’t pay until you’re scaled wayyyyy up, and generally once advertising and outside funding gets seriously involved they start pushing you to get as many impressions as possible. So basically advertising is a cancer that ruins everything along with the capitalistic need for constant growth and endless profits
I would add misinformation to the set of tools used to increase engagement. People who are vulnerable to misinformation embrace it because it makes them feel more powerful, being in possession of "the hidden truth."
Sure. And it works both ways, also gets the other side who feel the need to comment to correct it. Divisive comment is similar, for many it drives feelings of superiority but for others it’s rage bait.
But there’s a lot of sub categories to toolset here. One of the interesting parts of Reddit was that it showed that users would categorize their ragebait; r/stupidfood, r/diwhy often featured obvious troll farm content that was designed to get people to just comment “this is so fucking stupid”. But when it got reposted to Reddit it got its own category and people subbed to it; they wanted to see more of it. They want to see videos of people wasting food to farm comments. once again the simpsons predict the future
Because they care about one metric: time spent watching ads.
If they only show you chronological - for example - there is a risk you open the app, find that nothing has happened (or what happened is of low quality). Controlling what you see makes it easier to also ensure there’s always a reason to visit the page. Leaving it all to recency or popularity or something means handing over the control of your time.
And it’s always going to piss off people but the important part is what it does for the big masses (which likely is - more time spent watching ads)
That's something that's been really nice about using Mastodon. It just shows you what you ask it to show you. There's 0 time wasted scrolling through content you never asked for hoping that the good stuff might accidentally bubble to the surface at some point.
Inflation/cost of living/etc isn't singlehandedly increasing "enshittification" but rather the boundless greed of capitalism which seeks infinite growth of profit.
It's unsustainable so we'd better make more humans to buy more stuff from a handful of people.
Companies seek profit but let’s not forget that as people, we control what we buy and use. We’re here on Lemmy because we reject the bullshit. If more of us rejected the bullshit, they stop doing it.
With the whole Netflix fiasco I offered to set up a VPN at my brother in law’s house (primary account holder) to get around it. Everyone was on board until I tried to show them how to use it. Now we are all giving him a few extra bucks a month because of the convenience for non tech people.
The best part is they all have access to my Plex server and just have to ask to get something. Maybe Ombi might be worth setting up.
Only somewhat related, but I think we need a better way to reference this platform. It's not just Lemmy. Some people may be drawn to other platforms like Kbin, but you'll still see both regardless of what you use. I just don't want to see people possibly alienate others due to being hyper specific about a decentralized platform that is almost entirely interoperable with other platforms.
But it takes a while to detect, form an opinion, then act on it. Suppose that 10,000 people per day reject some brand, say this is enough!, and refuse to buy their products. Well, the marketing and sales department has its work cut out: use mild deception, purchase competitors, change local laws, and make sure that more customers are added than the attrition. And even if they didn’t add any new customers, there are so many current customers for companies like proctor and gamble or nestle, that it will still take 15,000 days or 41 years for even half of the US population to “reject” the brand or company. It’s just not feasible for individuals to fight corporate advertising and marketing mechanics on appropriate time and economic scales.
But compared to a government regulatory body? That scares a company or industry, or at least it used to :(
Yeah, I agree, and sadly that busy marketing department can directly affect the attrition rate with no change to the product or corporate behavior. Price discovery and value is so detached from real demand through monopolies, vertical integration, and regulatory capture that it doesn’t even matter what customers want. I’m still waiting for fast and cheap internet that they’ve been promising for 25 years.
Edit: even the Reddit-Apollo dust up revealed that customer opinion is at best one consideration of many and relevant only at certain times.
Because VC money has dried up. For a very long time tech companies have had investors throw them basically infinite amounts of money and have proceeded under the idea “we’ll figure out profitability later”, now that money is starting to stop coming in and they are panicking and trying to reach profitability in the shortest amount of time possible.
A lot of websites use the same type of place like squarespace or WordPress. nd they use the same (or very very similar) layouts, colors, plugins and everything, for typically inexpensive prices. So you get a lot of same looking websites with similar ad placements, with similar ads and same articles. I mean there is an ongoing lawsuit with a “media company” that has like 200 websites that shovel out qanon lite news articles, that seem reputible because they’re named like “The Akron gazette” and “The Tampa articles” sound good, are bad. It’s just shitty people exploiting things, and we the average user suffer, while the below average suffer suffers more because they use all those ass sites, telling others, that it is the way.
The algorithm bullshit is to show you more content (and therefore more ads). The ideal for social media companies is like tik tok where you just scroll endlessly.
On twitter or Reddit I look at the posts from the accounts and subs I follow and then am done.
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