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Items tagged with: Enshittification
The Ulysses Pact: I had never heard of that, but I've lived by it for years.
Excellent article (as usual) by @pluralistic that explains why you should never put much effort into a platform that you can't leave without a cost. Don't get locked in, don't let the Network Effect bite you in the behind.
→ Bluesky and enshittification (by @pluralistic)
pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/uly…
“I would like to use Bluesky. They've done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on #moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I've got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.”
“My rule – I don't join a service that I can't leave without switching costs – is my Ulysses Pact, and it's keeping me #safe from danger I've sailed into too many times before.”
pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/uly…
@pluralistic 's words on Bluesky and #enshittification are, to me, true.
These two paragraphs say everything about why I can't trust Bluesky to always have good intentions:
'But here's the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they'd never sell out. I know those people, the old blogger mafia who started the CMSes, social media services, and publishing platforms where I find myself trapped. I considered them friends (I still consider most of them friends), and I knew them well enough to believe that they really cared about their users.
They did care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.'
This is a brilliant video by @thelinuxEXP about how insidiously enshittification creeps into people's lives, just one tiny change at a time until the frog is boiled:
tilvids.com/w/uDYuAtt8cZYFfspG…
(BTW this isn't a real Linux distro, it's just meant as an example of how enshittification works!)
What would an ENSH*TTIFIED Linux distro look like?
Just for fun, I decided to try and imagine what a Linux distro would look like if it got hit by the enshittification stick that seems to affect every digital product of service these days. 👏 SUPPOR...TILvids
#enshittification
@falsemirror @NBCNews
Interesting observation: One of the conclusions of my #ChangingHowWeChoose book is that one key to successful moral social communities is groups that provide easy and low-cost group switching. @pluralistic points out that this is the key to #mastodon 's success over #BlueSky and #xitter
Basically, the logic from the book is the following: Because the fundamental pro-social conflict is between individual goals and group goals, groups with cooperative communities (due to their social codes that align these goals) outperform groups without. If we have the opportunity to switch groups, cooperative people will migrate to cooperative groups, do better than the selfish, and the overall prosocial moral structure will improve.
In pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/uly…, @pluralistic suggests that this also reduces #enshittification .
Fascinating!
Great piece on BlueSky and enshittification by @pluralistic. “I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.”
Read more: mollywhite.net/micro/entry/blu…
Cory’s piece: pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/uly…
Molly White
Great piece on BlueSky and enshittification by Cory Doctorow. “I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.Molly White
"A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones"
Well us Brits have always been amazed at how white and pearly American teeth are but dentistry is the US has clearly gone down the same oligopolistic and #enshittification rabbithole that the rest of American medicine has - as already documented by #pluralistic.
"Many dental clinics that offer implants have consolidated into chains owned by private equity firms that have bought out much of implant dentistry. In health care, private equity investment is sometimes criticized for overtreatment and prioritizing short-term profit over patients."
In the UK dentistry is increasingly privatised and our new Health Minister has been well bribed by the (often American) health companies to move even more of our health care to private sector contractors who will obviously take their cut. This will not end well.
arstechnica.com/health/2024/11…
A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones
It turns out you may not have needed those implants after all.Ars Contributors (Ars Technica)
