DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification - Cory Doctorow
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn't have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four" (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don't have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!
Hahahaha. "Go back to"?
Just because you don't know what they are called today doesn't mean those sites stopped existing. Shock and gore sites have been part of the Internet for a long time because they fill a human desire, same as porn and gambling and anything that makes your brain think you're being naughty enough to hand out that sweet dopamine reward.
Slightly before the internet we had The Coliseum for our gore fetish.
Watching people die fills a desire to who?
I can't possibly imagine the kind of person that would think watching people die is somehow on par with whacking off, and gambling? I mean did you really just compare whacking it and playing slots in Vegas to watching someone get killed?
Teenagers, adrenaline junkies, other thrill seekers of all sorts. People jumping out of airplanes is a popular hobby worldwide and so is controlled falling down snow-covered mountains. People get happy doing weird stuff, what can I tell you?
You should do some reading on humans and violence as entertainment. It’s been a part of civilization since the beginning, homie.
Bread and circus has worked since Caesar. Ever heard of the Coliseum?
That's fine, you don't have to understand everything everyone else does.