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)}

Tay gently pushed the plastic door of the printer shut with an edifying "click".

Servicing Dark Printers had been illegal for years now. They enjoyed the seditious thrill.

---

It had started as a subscription grab after the printer companies tried hobbling third party toner cartridges.

"Subscribe for a monthly fee and you'll never run out of toner again."

"Let us monitor your printer so you don't have to."

People saw it for what it was - vendor lock in - but they had no choice really, not after all the printer companies started doing it.

Then came generative AI.

Everyone wanted to scrape every word ever written on the internet, tokenize it and feed it to an #LLM. #Reddit sold out, then #Tumblr, even open source darling #WordPress - selling out their user base for filthy token lucre.

So people started hiding their words, their art, their thoughts, their expression, not behind disrespected robots.txt, but through obscurity.

Rejecting Website Boy's "fewer algorithmic fanfares", they forked into the Dark Fedi.

Unscrapeable, unscrutable, ungovernable.

---

But people had forgotten about the printers.

The printers had to be connected 24/7, for "monitoring".

But you could tokenize postscript as easily as HTML.

And so every time a document was sent to a printer, it was harvested for tokens. Even secure documents. Documents not online.

---

Tay shut the metal door behind them, Dark Printer cossetted safely in its Faraday cage, and shuffled the hot stack of A4 paper it had borne.

It was a children's story, about how words were sacred, and special, and how you had to earn the right to use them.

---

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

* Facebook has AI.
* Google has AI.
* Microsoft has AI.
* Reddit has AI.
* Tumblr has AI.
* WordPress services on their DOT Com has AI.

In 2024, you must assume, any service you cannot download and install yourself, will have AI and will use whatever you write to train an AI.

#Facebook #Reddit #Google #Microsoft #Tumblr #WordPress #AI

Do you have a blog at Wordpress.com? Congrats! You will soon be feeding all your content to an AI, unless you opt-out. Same with Tumblr! (Why I self-host, reason #4711) Source: https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/ and many more

UPDATE: Seems it already happened. Content from 2014-2023 has already been shared. So your opt-out will just be honoured going forward. If and how already sent content will be handled by the receiving 3rd party after you opt-out remains a mystery

#WordPress #Tumblr #AI #MidJourney

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)}

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)}

!Friendica Support If I quote-share a post coming from #Tumblr or #Diaspora on Friendica, I learnt that some platforms (Mastodon, Misskey, ...) aren't able to display this as expected. In Friendica, I see a preview image of the post, which is what I would expect:

Looking at this from Mastodon, it looks slightly less usable but at least there's still something:

On Misskey, as has been reported (can't reproduce as I don't have or want an account there), it seems the post is empty.

Hubzilla is where it looks best:

This is kind of a mess. It seems similar for Diaspoar posts. What can be done, or who's responsible to handle that right, from a standards perspective? Is there any way to be reasonably sure posts look at least usable on all federated platforms?

cc @Aljoscha Rittner (beandev)