I remember being all “omg great the internet will finally free information everything will be awesome” in like 2008.
Then I read some Marxist analysis saying “nope, rather sooner than later the market principles, as the hegemonial/contemporary means of humans organizing themselves, will fuck it up and it will kinda suck lile everything else”
I even remember that feeling of hope: “nah this time they’re wrong”.
Turns out if you don’t change the political economy, shit trickles up into any nice social project.
… also this is why I love niches like reddit (ba dum tss), feddit
as the hegemonial/contemporary means of humans organizing themselves, will fuck it up and it will kinda suck lile everything else
“What started the enshittification?” is a really interesting question.
According to my biases, the original sin of the web was news orgs giving their content away for free. That led to “content from any site is trustworthy”, which led to the news orgs going bankrupt and the flailing attempts to return to profitability.
Along the way, disinformation became a thing, and the primary motivator on the web became advertising.
If we’d normalized paying for services, instead of monetizing user data, we would be in a better place.
(Realistically we would have a different set of problems, but 🤷)
Interesting approach, gonna think about it. So far I didn’t take disinformation as a result of news companies going broke.
Why would people forget that the BBC is more trustworthy then someones uncle, just because his opinion is for free? The distrust in “old authorities” like big newspaper or governments is, in my opinion, a long-term result of the broken promisses of the hegemony they are, or seem to be, part of.
The concept “people have to have to pay for quality information” doesn’t sit right with me. Relevant info should be available for everyone! And trustworthy news orgs should be funded pubicly.
I didn’t take disinformation as a result of news companies going broke.
I don’t think it’s the only reason, but it’s one of the reasons.
Part of the disinformation ecosystem is randos pumping out content so they can get ad clicks. Social media rewards that (etc), but the original sin is mixing timely investigative journalism with every other kind of free content online. It cheapens journalism.
The distrust in “old authorities” like big newspaper or governments is, in my opinion, a long-term result of the broken promisses of the hegemony they are, or seem to be, part of.
You’re right. And it’s somewhat deserved. But by training us that well-researched reporting should be free, those old authorities basically poisoned the well. We generally expect news to be free now. Which makes it really hard for new outfits to get started.
The concept “people have to have to pay for quality information” doesn’t sit right with me. Relevant info should be available for everyone!
Journalists need to eat. In the 1980s it seemed like almost every middle class household received a newspaper. I wasn’t able to find stats, but I suspect that most households found newspapers useful and could pay for them.
If we return to a model where news isn’t free, but it’s really cheap, I think we’d be okay.
And trustworthy news orgs should be funded pubicly.
I’m all for public funding, but NPR didn’t break Watergate, nor did CBC break the SNC-Lavelin affair. Western democracies co-evolved with a relatively adversarial private press.
We need ways for a private press to continue as we move further online. Non-profit models seem to work (at least for the Guardian), as do membership models (at least for Canadaland).
Most websites started out free because the Web is very close to being “post-scarcity”.
Running a simple but successful website used by tens of thousands of people can be done in your spare time for cheaper than a Spotify subscription. A hobbyist website about fishing with 10.000 monthly users can probably be hosted reliably enough for $10/mo, plus a few hours of work. Even if you value your time highly (say, $50/h), that’s still a “$200/mo” website (almost all of which is time you’re billing to yourself). The breakeven point is then at $0.02/monthly user (and the more users you have, the lower the cost per user, down to fractions of fractions of a cent for a really big text-based website).
In that context it’s next to impossible to fairly pay for the service of running a text-based website. Payment processing costs are going to be, by far, the biggest share of the pie, which is ridiculous. So, advertisments and datamining it is (or was; datamining without explicit consent is at least illegal in the EU). Alternatively, donations (this is Twitch’s core business model, with which they’re even profitable in some markets, despite offering the most expensive service: realtime transcoded video).
Of course a news website also has salaries to pay. That significantly shifts the balance in favor of “pay for the service”, unfortunately that runs counter to user expectations. Plus the historical context of traditional news orgs subsidizing their new websites with traditional revenue streams, then finding themselves cornered when the web turned out to be more than just a fad or a hobby.
Another problem with additional revenue is feature bloat. Look at reddit, the website originally was actually really cheap to operate and was actually profitable on Reddit Gold alone (donations being a very common business model on the internet which IMO makes the most sense in most situations given the low costs).
But they had to add an image host (sure, imgur was probably not happy to be footing the bill) as well as a video player (why?), chat service (where’s the business value?!), a brand-new but completely unoptimized front-end UI, a mobile app (despite third-party devs already offering superior options FOR FREE), etc.
Reddit’s enshittification was caused by an overabundance of revenue from external investors asking for continuous growth, not from any inherent shortcoming in the original business plan. Same goes for pretty much every other enshittified website.Of course a news website also has salaries to pay. That significantly shifts the balance in favor of “pay for the service”, unfortunately that runs counter to user expectations. Plus the historical context of traditional news orgs subsidizing their new websites with traditional revenue streams, then finding themselves cornered when the web turned out to be more than just a fad or a hobby.
Exactly this.
I think it was the subversion of chains of trust by the kind of social media were people are linked to friends and family.
For example, say that you’re connected to a cousin of yours in Facebook, somebody you know well as an excelent and honest person. Now, say they share this post about how lots of robberies in their neighbourhood have been traced back to youths in this other neighbourhood which is mainly of people from a different etnic group.
Do you believe it? It comes from somebody who is an excellent and honest person, so you know they wouldn’t lie about something like this.
At this point, anybody who actually thinks properly about the quality of information has figured out that just because somebody is honest doesn’t mean they tell the truth: they might be telling you something they genuinelly believe is true when it’s not because they themselves were decidved into thinking of it as true, whilst its not - in other word and simplifying it a bit, you can’t trust information from an honest person if they’re gullible, or even if they’re just prone to “spread the word” without having tought about it first (and the way things like Facebook are designed is exactly to induce people to share in response to an emotional reaction and without thinking)
How many people do you know that really figure it out before sharing, or even worwe, did so back in the day before fake-news became a widelly talked about phenomenon?
Add to this subversion of chains of trust that the fakest stuff is usually the most shocking and thus most likelly to be shared and you have this great way to spread misinformation in such a way that it keeps getting whitewashed as ot spreads thanks to preexisting trust in friends and family.
lol, what the fuck even is this comment? 2008 the internet was already getting quite fucked. The internet setting information free idealization is all the way back in the 90’s. And I’m no capitalist apologist but communism ain’t gonna make the internet better.
Shit gets worse over time, so every body remembers how when they first got access to the internet it was better. They’re not wrong, they just weren’t there for the usenet times.
You’re probably right I had been a bit behind regarding the discourse about the internet. I was in my early teenage years and just started knowing about it.
And for your second claim: If you define communism the way I usually do (the social principle of coorperating to fulfill everyones needs), it seems likely the internet would be designed towards peoples needs, rather than companies profits. Of course it would still consume ressources to provide cat videos, but the required ressources might be less, since cooperating/sharing ressources is more efficient than competing.
AI is even worse. It takes over the biases and misinformation of the info it was trained on, shows these on its answers to users who pick up those biases and use them elsewhere on the net, what is then used to train AI. It’s all becoming a shitification loop.
The future of the internet is the movie the human centipede. But with AI and what comes out is the new internet.
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While I agree with the sentiment, I’d imagine you can easily make the argument that written language is also for recording and documenting, not purely for human to human connection.
The meme is good, but the timeline is off. It was more like 2003 when websites didn’t suck. (Maybe earlier than that, even.)
Back when popups ruled the web?
Truth is the internet always sucked.
Websites already sucked by 2013
Yeah but boy we’ve sure managed to make them suck even harder over the past 10yrs
Well the difference is they didn’t use to ask you to accept cookies, they just took them.
Honestly that fucking box everywhere is worse. It should be a God damn setting in the browser not per page shit.
There are a few extensions that try to automatically handle different cookie popups with your pre-selected preferences. Consent-O-Matic is one.
It is a setting in a browser. In the early 2000s the browsers even came with their own built-in popups asking if you want to accept cookies from this domain. Of course this was annoying so everyone had it set to “accept all”, which then became the default and eventually disappeared.
20 years later, some moron lawyer reinvented the same but worse.
I don’t think people remember the amount of crazy websites that were out there spouting absolute nonsense. Websites had very little credibility.
Yes but if you googled a product you could get to user written reviews instead of the manufacturer website claiming its the best shit ever made and ai written „reviews” citing the history of the brand.
I honestly hate what internet has become
God forbid I get an actual solution to a Windows error I’m googling instead of every partition manager program telling me to buy it for some reason.
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I went to a site today that had a full page cookie popup. When I clicked manage cookies to disable, it presented me with a a choice of “eagerly interested” and “consent”. WTF is that? I didn’t see the opt out option right away so i just left the page.
Browsing on Firefox with auto-decline is so magical.
Link please?
Just search for how to disable cookies and cookie banners; it’s native functionality as of this year far as I can tell, you may habe to update a config setting, sorry have only been on FF a few months.
I also have privacy badger and Ghostery installed for movies and ublock on desktop, try exploring those if you can’t get FF to do natively.
Do you remember the site?
I mean no website back then was telling you to block them if you want. They just didn’t use javascript to detect blockers.
Also web hosting has gone WAY up. My simple static website used to cost $5 per month to host. Now it’s $30 for the same spec server. The ones that are closer to $5 are so insanely oversold and slow, a website takes a good 30-45 seconds to load.
Unless you have millions of hits per month or your “static site” is Wordpress with a page builder, you might want to look into other web hosting offers. A VPS is overkill for a static site, and you can get a decent VPS for $10-$12 range. With enough bandwidth and io to host many static websites.
You can easily host a static website on a dirt cheap VPS. The Hetzner ARM boxes are less than $5/mo with an IPv4 address and are going to be more than sufficient for the average static website… My website is on a cheap VPS with worse specs than the Hetzner ones and it does not take 30-45 seconds to load.
A true static site can use GitHub Pages for free hosting (probably other options, too – never checked). That’s what I do for my ultra low traffic personal site (at least, I assume ultra low – I don’t install any tracking on principle). I pay for a domain and that’s it (and that’s just to look nicer, not actually necessary).
I’ve being using Netlify, it’s really professionally feature rich, and the free tier is more than enough for my needs.
I know websites that did, or at least remember an admin saying “please turn off ad blockers if you want to support the site”
The early internet really was a wonderful place. Filled with godawful clip art sites but a wonderful place…
Hell most sites back then didn’t even have mobile support yet and still used tons of flash elements, that was just the beginning of mass internet adoption due to smart phones
Man I got so excited when Flash finally came to Android. And then not that long after, Adobe announced that they’d be discontinuing it.
Will you let us track literally everything you do?
Yes! - I promise I’ll do it later
The internet peaked in 2003
You just won a free iPod nano!!!
Here’s some ads to cover my costs
Narrator voice: it doesn’t cover their costs, but they have investor money so it’s ok
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