offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.

The Man Who Killed Google Search

This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem.

^{Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)}

We released version 2.3.0 of the #ActivityPub plugin for #WordPress.

Some new features:

* Support for alt-attributes
* Prioritize attachments based on the post format (article => all, audio => audio, video => video, ...)
* Improve JS widgets
* A better default content handling based on the Object Type
* You can now add/remove the capability to use ActivityPub for each User

Full changelog: https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#230---2024-04-16

Download: https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/releases/tag/2.3.0

#Automattic

wordpress-activitypub/CHANGELOG.md at master · Automattic/wordpress-activitypub

ActivityPub for WordPress. Contribute to Automattic/wordpress-activitypub development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

Some important context as this news breaks:

#WordPress is an open-source project, available at WordPress.org.

One of its co-founders, Matt Mullenweg, is CEO of #Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and owns #Tumblr.

They can’t sell what they don’t have, so “WordPress” here refers to WordPress.com, *not* self-hosted WordPress instances.

BUT many self-hosted instances use the Jetpack plugin, which does send data to WordPress.com, so that might be sold 🤬

https://mastodon.social/@404mediaco/112004850884204466

404 Media

2024-02-27 18:26:33

NEW: Tumblr and Wordpress are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to internal documentation we've reviewed

https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/

Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools

Internal documents obtained by 404 Media show that Tumblr staff compiled users' data as part of a deal with Midjourney and OpenAI.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

We just released version 2.0.0 of the #ActivityPub plugin for #WordPress (WordPress.com release is planned for tomorrow).

Main feature: Full bidirectional/threaded comment federation 🎉

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/releases/tag/2.0.0

Thanks #Automattic @mattwiebe @kanru @linos @mediaformat @mat @webrocker @sentynel and @janboddez for your contributions

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

Release 2.0.0 · Automattic/wordpress-activitypub

What's Changed Normalize attributes that can have mixed value types by @pfefferle in #586 some phpcs fixes by @pfefferle in #590 WebFinger: Add support for URLs by @pfefferle in #594 Remove deprec...

^GitHub