Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.
Optimization is the natural path of all things commercial. When the Internet was young it was more experimental as a whole and that was fun for people. Computing is still experimental but the experimentation isn’t obvious as it was back then. Unfortunately that means adventure finding you across your computer screen doesn’t happen as often. You either need to look for it around the fringes or look beyond the monitor.
Turning your service to shit to extract the most money from your “users” at the expense of usability is the end result of commercialisation in every instance that has ever existed so far during capitalism.
Even if it destroys the product, this will not stop capitalists ruining it in the name of a few extra dollars/currency in the short term.
Good observation. Your options are to reduce your reliance on such services or become increasingly mad at the world. I think the former is more attractive.
or become increasingly mad at the world
The solution to things going wrong and getting worse is performative smug apathy. Get schwifty.
Optimization is the natural path of all things commercial
That’s an enshittified way of describing enshittification.
For a lot of people, there’s nothing more fun and creative than an unsolved problem.
Monetization/commercialization/organization of the Internet was a super complex problem for a lot of business trying to make it big, and it made for a beautiful shitshow.
But now that the business problem is approaching solution, it’s losing that fun and creativity.