Hey everyone, I see a lot of people throwing around the term “enshittification” to describe the long-term and systemic decline of many of the centralized social media platforms, most recently Reddit. I commented this elsewhere, but thought everyone might benefit for reading Cory Doctorow’s original article coining the term. The first sentence here sums it up nicely:
“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’m a big proponent for tracing and crediting the origins of ideas, and I think this one speaks to a lot of people right now. For all its flaws and occasional user-unfriendliness, I think the main draw of the Fediverse is an escape from this profit-driven cycle.
You can also follow the Mastodon account for Cory’s blog @pluralistic (yay federation!).
In the step between being good to their users and abusing their users, eternal September occurs. Early adopters tend to be curious and technically minded sorts of people, and the users that follow them, less so. Right now I’m enjoying that posts here tend to be more thoughtful and in good faith than what one usually finds on reddit.