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Items tagged with: enshittification
- Ja, konstant geblieben (12%, 1 vote)
- Ja, hat zugenommen (37%, 3 votes)
- Ja, hat abgenommen (12%, 1 vote)
- Nein, gar nicht (mehr) (37%, 3 votes)
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)
🧠 Boost if you wish investors and marketers would start investing money into HI (Human Intelligence) again.
#HI #HumanIntelligence #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #enshittification
"But SEO is just giving people what they want!"
False.
Patient zero: if I search the web for a phone number, what I *want* is to know whose phone number it is.
The top results should be pages that contain that phone number and information about what person or business it belongs to (including, if it's a business, their own web site).
What I don't want—what NOBODY wants—are spammy, scammy, for-pay reverse phone lookup companies.
1. Find information that already exists for free (or that is extremely cheap to get)*.
2. Either put it behind a paywall or wrap it in ads until it is virtually unusable (or both).
3. Find a way to increase the search ranking of your version.
This is not a business model, this is ruining the web for money.
* ~ Also, some aren't even doing this (e.g., like a reverse phone lookup service that PRETENDS to have data it doesn't).
#Google is turning #GMail from an Email provider into a website.
No more access via standard email protocols such as #IMAP and #POP
The final stage of #enshittification . Locking the users in.
I wonder how they want to get rid of SMTP as stated in the support posting.
I guess this means outgoing SMTP to forward mail to a real email server.
I guess without relaying I won't ever receive any notifications Google services send to me again as I don't use the Gmail website.
I host my own Email server for many years, thank you.
Timeline for transition
Summer of 2024:
If you (or your users) try to connect to a less secure app for the first time, you will not be able to. This restriction includes third-party apps that still use basic authentication, such as CalDAV, CardDAV, IMAP, SMTP, and POP, to access Gmail, Google Calendar, and Contacts. If you’re not trying to connect for the first time, you will be able to continue using the apps until they’re turned off.
In the Google Admin console, you will not be able to access the turn on and off setting for less secure apps.
Users will not be able to turn IMAP on or off in their Gmail settings.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/14114704?hl=en&sjid=8073259250606890309-EU
I admit that I feel salty about the word “enshittification” taking off instead of my phrase for the same thing: “user domestication”. I prefer the latter because it emphasizes the gross disrespect so many platforms show their users, and how the lack of autonomy/mobility naturally leads to enshittification.
Any platform able to get away with enshittification will do so when given the incentive. Enshittification emphasizes the process of a platform’s downfall; we should be taking steps to prevent that from happening in the first place by keeping platforms open. Vigilance against enshittification is misplaced when better spent against user domestication.
Originally posted on https://seirdy.one/notes/2024/01/11/enshittification-and-user-domestication/ (POSSE). #enshittification #UserDomestication
Enshittification and user domestication
I admit that I feel salty about the word “enshittification” taking off instead of my phrase for the same thing: “user domestication”. I prefer the latterSeirdy’s Home
Youtube's tantrum escalates.
Forced to concede that they cannot outpace ad blocking extensions, parent company Google artificially limits the rate of extension updates in Chrome.
No justification for the user experience is given, and in fact this makes chrome users more vulnerable to attacks injected via ads.
Chrome’s next weapon in the War on Ad Blockers: Slower extension updates
When ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game, make the mouse slower.Ars Technica
1. Read this:
“Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot.”
2. Go here:
#git #gitHub #codeberg #enshittification #BigTech #cooperative #dev
Universe 2023: Copilot transforms GitHub into the AI-powered developer platform - The GitHub Blog
GitHub is announcing general availability of GitHub Copilot Chat and previews of the new GitHub Copilot Enterprise offering, new AI-powered security features, and the GitHub Copilot Partner Program.Thomas Dohmke (The GitHub Blog)