Twitter and reddit are in an intense race to become the shittiest website. I wonder who will win...
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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I still can't understand how spez saw what Twitter was doing and thought it looked like a good idea
It's the new rise of CEOs and millionaires seeking to milk the internet to the last fractional dime. Leave morals and critical thinking at the door. Every major company is doing this now, shutting out everything even remotely capable of being scraped into a LLM and paywalling what used to be free to satisfy post-covid shareholders. Accessibility be damned, line must go up.
Beyond that we have Google crippling the Android and Chromium open source code, Youtube blocking user accounts using adblock, Twitch banning sponsor spots who sidestep their pockets, and of course all of them are doubling down on AI with massive amounts of corporate sponsored IP theft and data laundering on an incompressible scale, suffocating any human content (see the Amazon book crisis).
I'm convinced the next era of the internet is going to become decentralized. We're badically hitting the phase of enshitification of everything that was good on the internet. Water flows into and forms into the shape of a cup. The internet is not a place to be beholden into the shape of whatever corporations think they can control. Water will flow where it wants to go to. The fediverse is what happens when water is diverted and cannot be contained in the tiny tank they try to build to contain the ocean that the internet is. Be the water.
The pandemic really did accelerate the enshittification of everything after it pushed everyone into online ecosystems. Shareholders want to keep that market and turn all that captured data into profit, especially in the face of the uprising of LLMs.
Unfortunately one major PR problem with the dismantling of those entrenched ecosystems is explaining that the Fediverse is fundamentally NOT the scam infested Web3 envisioned by absolutionist techbros. Even the word 'decentralised' has negative connotations now. We need a coordinated marketing/narrative push (compare it to email servers for the boomer managers) and offer pre-built Docker images for companies to host. That could really change the tide of things when LTS builds exist with little to no barrier to entry. Sell the prospect of corporate PR departments controlling their own first party news published direct to reader's feeds with no loss in moderation control on either side. It would be a huge boon for everyone.
TLDR: Federated services very much could be the next era but we still need much more people, including companies, on board to reach critical mass.
CEOs are realising they can be openly disdainful to their users because their users are addicted to the product.
I think we are seeing the initial stages of the next dotcom bubble pop. It's no longer seen as a good idea to pour endless piles of money into platforms that have rarely if ever been profitable. It's time to get into the black or the funds will dry up. Elon's antics may have just sped it along, otherwise you can thank this perpetually-approaching "recession" for it.
I might know it as something else, but what is the Amazon book crisis?
Probably referring to Amazon being absolutely inundated with junk books written by ai. It's flooded with them. An avalanche of garbage. Like good luck ever writing something and it organically gaining any sort of following without a sponsor to spread awareness or to boost sales to get you to a spot on the list with some visibility.
Yup. The top spots are absolutely flooded with AI garbage and it is nigh impossible to have any meaningful visibility. In a related issue, there are writers getting scammed by 'artists' submitting AI artwork for their commissioned covers which subsequently fucks the copyrights with severe cost to reprint all of the books. Shit is fucked for anyone in any creative field right now.
They are both being forced by the same pressures. It shouldn't be surprising that their responses are similar.
Those pressures being narcissism and idiocy?
There are no pressures forcing them to destroy these sites.
There are paths to profitability that don't include the drastic and hostile changes that they're making.
OH MY GOD IT'S FACEBOOK IN WITH THE CHAIR!
Get ready for the fumble in the jungle! It'll be the fuckup of the year!
I was skeptical at first, but I'm now 100% certain this is all intentional. Twitter and Reddit were too inspirational to the masses. The fascists are here to stomp it down. 44bn is all it cost them for Twitter, not sure they even had to spend much on Reddit.
Apparently Spez will do it for free.
Twitter had a massive head start, and YouTube might be entering the competition soon as well!
Cory Doctorow invented a term for it: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
He sure did. Enshittification is a common feature of crapitalism (that's capitalism where the market isn't really free because huge corporations hold a crazy amount of influence and there's a lack of meaningful regulation).
They're the same picture.
Twitter is the clear winner here.
this, haha. maybe we’ll also see a fight in a boxing ring?
I'm actually happy about that, because now if I accidentally click on a Twitter link, I won't have to actually load the tweet.
My thoughts exactly. Now Twitter is officially dead to me.
As long as there's still brave warriors that use Twitter and share screenshots of shitposts. I know not every user is an idiot, but the collective IQ there feels substantially low. It's the original "everyone can publicize their opinion in seconds" platform. I see it as the birthplace of those moments where something funny turns to concerning, to depressing... "Oh, this is for real. These people exist and are in numbers. Yikes."
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Oh ok. Guess I'll just not access it all then.
Big whoop.
Mastodon it is
Imagine using Twitter after Elon takeover.
Imagine using Twitter for the last decade!!
Image: "oh no! Anyways."
The quicker he can destroy twitter the better a definitive replacement can be chosen. I'm not looking for a centralized service again, (a connected one like lemmy or Mastadon if they can make their communities easier to search and join with), but I like the fact that everyone was on it. Last thing I want is to have like 5-10 different twitter like apps just to follow specific people etc, and the same for reddit and such.
Right now, lemmy def seems to be the best promise to replace reddit and the fact that the fedivserse works so well with it right now is awesome ... just waiting for more communities to pop up to match some I was part of on reddit and I'll be golden!
Thanks Twitter for protecting me from the opinion of edgy 23 year olds
I refuse to sign in to view content. I will just move on.
With the new rate limiting, I think it would be not too long before one would need to buy Twitter to use twitter.
Coming Soon: Elon, screaming into a void that only he pays for...
ETA: Or maybe "even he doesn't pay for", if some of the other rumors are correct.
I tried to load one or two the other day and was like … meh. Moved on. Now I’ll just not open Twitter links. All good.
What’s sad is I’ve been closely following this and was still somewhat confused… how is a casual user gonna know what the fuck is going on?
I wonder if companies that use twitter to promote their junk will have to change things up.
Someone told me there were new Baldur’s Gate classes so I went to google, which lead me to a gaming article, which lead me to a tweet by the devs. The link didn’t load so I just gave up
I've never had a Twitter account. Anyway ...
I have mastodon and like 50% of the people I followed on Twitter are also there. So I don't care. let twitter slowly die.
I used the search until they locked that behind login. Now that simply viewing tweets is locked behind a login screen... you guessed it, I don't bother with the site at all now. These clowns think their sites are indispensable, but there are plenty of alternatives (including simply going without).
"Oh No, anyways"
Seems like Nitter is also not working... shame.
I never really used Twitter. Occasionally someone would link something to it but that's about it. Wonder if this will apply to web crawlers? And if so, wonder if that'll directly hurt search results.
In the words of Curly Bill Brocius .... "well ...... bye."
How does this work for news articles that embed a tweet in their article?
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