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this post was submitted on 18 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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That's only partially true. "Simple" pages like a wiki are stupidly cheap in comparison of operational costs. This is not some online image editor, some huge social media outlet or whatever. From a content perspective, the traffic to be served is an absolute joke.
What drives costs for operations up is stupid design decisions (e.g. Cora) and bloating your own page using several ad providers, trackers and a metric fuck ton of additional services like disqus and whatever all of this idiotic shit is called.
And what drives "cost of operations" up the most is pure greed, because for most parts there is no longer an internet community, where someone wants to contribute something cool. Maybe that's where they started, but seeing their page hits climb obviously makes them think about monetizing them. Just add some non intrusive ads, page views still climb, and you see the money coming in - in the case of Fandom with mostly zero effort, since the content is brought by the editors, who even also generate ad views, while generating content. Add one more ad, income doubled. Add a potentially more intrusive ad bringing more money per view - maybe your income triples. It's all just a pump and dump until it becomes the ad-riddled trash, but you don't really need to care, since it's still high ranking in Google results and still brings in visitors.
Obviously this does not apply to all, but to a fucking lot if not most pages, and it's getting even worse with gen-AI content and "features".