Enshittification: The 2023 Digital Word of the Year
Enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author of The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse:
“Here is how platforms die: first, they 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. I call this enshittification.”
"Enshittification," Cory Doctorow's coinage describing the process by which internet media platforms become increasingly unusable and un-quittable, has been named 2023's "Digital Word of the Year." Here, we break down what the term means and Doctorow's solution to the internet's relentless enshittification.
The problem with fedi is that you need some kind of lowest common denominator gatekeeper. So that a client can tell the server: I don’t want to see x,y,z and it works reliably.
In order to have that functionality, someone has to class that content first. You can’t trust the author implicitly, so you have to trust either the server or a moderation group.
How you define the mod group, be it random community member based on comment and post karma, or a trusted ring of insiders with votes, or some other method, data still needs a place to be stored.
isn't that just subscribing to different communities though? and relying on the voting system, but that's much more ostensibly democratic than just An Algorithm
Vote counting is an algorithm. I think a lot of people want a unicorn and are apalled when someone offers them a magical horse with a horn because it's not what they wanted.