Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Do you think maybe it’ll be different with a federated and thus less centralized platform like Lemmy? Or do you think it will just delay this process? Cause right now lemmy and kbin seem to be pretty good.
I think that the FOSS Fediverse platforms are significantly resistant to enshittification.
That same article explores what enables enshittification and what precludes it:
The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability).
Fediverse platforms:
are highly interoperable - e.g. you can use Lemmy or Kbin and still see the same posts
mostly FOSS, so anyone can fork them whenever they want if they don’t like some particular change
most instances currently aren’t operated for profit - certainly if your instance started displaying ads you could switch to another instance (or set one up) and still access all the same content as you did previously
In fediverse, the data is already public. You’ll just need to run an instance, start federating and the data will flow directly into your instance. Whether someone will somehow find a way to extract profit from this system is remain to be seen.
Whether someone will somehow find a way to extract profit from this system is remain to be seen.
I think it’s inevitable that someone will find a way to profit, even if it’s just scraping the data for training LLMs, or for something like those shitty sites that just duplicate GitHub issues.
The question of enshittification isn’t whether someone can find a way to profit, it’s whether someone can find a way to change the platform to increase their profit.
From https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
This is going to be the most quoted literary work of the 21st century
Do you think maybe it’ll be different with a federated and thus less centralized platform like Lemmy? Or do you think it will just delay this process? Cause right now lemmy and kbin seem to be pretty good.
I think that the FOSS Fediverse platforms are significantly resistant to enshittification.
That same article explores what enables enshittification and what precludes it:
Fediverse platforms:
In fediverse, the data is already public. You’ll just need to run an instance, start federating and the data will flow directly into your instance. Whether someone will somehow find a way to extract profit from this system is remain to be seen.
I think it’s inevitable that someone will find a way to profit, even if it’s just scraping the data for training LLMs, or for something like those shitty sites that just duplicate GitHub issues.
The question of enshittification isn’t whether someone can find a way to profit, it’s whether someone can find a way to change the platform to increase their profit.
As long as humans are involved and we are looking at a long enough timeframe, the answer is probably always yes.