this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Your equating the software development with the running costs.
People have made OS and people have made YouTube alternatives. But that's nothing compared to the quantity of servers, networking infrastructure, storage, power usage, and labor to maintain and update it.
P2p isn't a valid alternative because that's just shifting costs onto your users. Just because a central entity isn't taking on the burden of cost doesn't mean the cost isn't there.
Pictures and text are rather low usage, both in storage and networking but video isn't. Especially when millions are watching videos at the same time.
What you’re saying is valid in a model where the server hosts content and provides it on demand, and that’s not what I was describing.
Here’s the model I had in my head, but I am not sure if anyone has attempted this yet:
1..user uploads a video which borrows resources from p2p network
2..the shared burden is shifted around as nodes become active or inactive
3..content is always available in asynchronous, on demand fashion
I don’t work in distributed and networked systems, so I don’t expect the above model to strictly be based in reality, but it’s not that fanciful based on the wiki article I shared
I guess it’s a fair point that users maybe don’t want to be responsible for the burden. In which case, I guess why complain about ads then 🤷♀️
You're right that this is possible. But the speed and quality are going to decline considerably under this model, particularly across distant regions.
You are kinda describing "maidsafe"
But maidsafe isn't fully free, you technically pay access by sharing/lending hardware to the network
Cool, so I don’t understand why it has to be fully free. I think people should be comfortable taking control of their technologies otherwise they should be okay with getting what they get from the service providers
I totally agree with you, I'm happy to pay when the service is good. I was only mentioning it wasn't fully free because I know some care about that.
Because the average internet user (and many FOSS users, sadly) have gotten into the mindset that they deserve everything for free, the way they want it.
(For those taking offense to the bit about freeloading FOSS users, I refer you to the FOSS dev burnout trend we were discussing a month ago)
Maybe if we would stop expecting these sites to provide wasteful ultra-huge megaHD videos, it wouldn't be a problem. Hell, even with YouTube, maybe if they just served DVD-quality videos they wouldn't need to push tons of ads on us in the first place. Our expectation for this crazy new pointless ultra-sharp quality videos is ridiculous and is part of the problem with content delivery these days.