The early internet really was a wonderful place. Filled with godawful clip art sites but a wonderful place…
I remember being all “omg great the internet will finally free information everything will be awesome” in like 2008.
Then I read some Marxist analysis saying “nope, rather sooner than later the market principles, as the hegemonial/contemporary means of humans organizing themselves, will fuck it up and it will kinda suck lile everything else”
I even remember that feeling of hope: “nah this time they’re wrong”.
Turns out if you don’t change the political economy, shit trickles up into any nice social project.
… also this is why I love niches like reddit (ba dum tss), feddit
as the hegemonial/contemporary means of humans organizing themselves, will fuck it up and it will kinda suck lile everything else
“What started the enshittification?” is a really interesting question.
According to my biases, the original sin of the web was news orgs giving their content away for free. That led to “content from any site is trustworthy”, which led to the news orgs going bankrupt and the flailing attempts to return to profitability.
Along the way, disinformation became a thing, and the primary motivator on the web became advertising.
If we’d normalized paying for services, instead of monetizing user data, we would be in a better place.
(Realistically we would have a different set of problems, but 🤷)
Most websites started out free because the Web is very close to being “post-scarcity”.
Running a simple but successful website used by tens of thousands of people can be done in your spare time for cheaper than a Spotify subscription. A hobbyist website about fishing with 10.000 monthly users can probably be hosted reliably enough for $10/mo, plus a few hours of work. Even if you value your time highly (say, $50/h), that’s still a “$200/mo” website (almost all of which is time you’re billing to yourself). The breakeven point is then at $0.02/monthly user (and the more users you have, the lower the cost per user, down to fractions of fractions of a cent for a really big text-based website).
In that context it’s next to impossible to fairly pay for the service of running a text-based website. Payment processing costs are going to be, by far, the biggest share of the pie, which is ridiculous. So, advertisments and datamining it is (or was; datamining without explicit consent is at least illegal in the EU). Alternatively, donations (this is Twitch’s core business model, with which they’re even profitable in some markets, despite offering the most expensive service: realtime transcoded video).
Of course a news website also has salaries to pay. That significantly shifts the balance in favor of “pay for the service”, unfortunately that runs counter to user expectations. Plus the historical context of traditional news orgs subsidizing their new websites with traditional revenue streams, then finding themselves cornered when the web turned out to be more than just a fad or a hobby.
Another problem with additional revenue is feature bloat. Look at reddit, the website originally was actually really cheap to operate and was actually profitable on Reddit Gold alone (donations being a very common business model on the internet which IMO makes the most sense in most situations given the low costs).
But they had to add an image host (sure, imgur was probably not happy to be footing the bill) as well as a video player (why?), chat service (where’s the business value?!), a brand-new but completely unoptimized front-end UI, a mobile app (despite third-party devs already offering superior options FOR FREE), etc.
Reddit’s enshittification was caused by an overabundance of revenue from external investors asking for continuous growth, not from any inherent shortcoming in the original business plan. Same goes for pretty much every other enshittified website.Of course a news website also has salaries to pay. That significantly shifts the balance in favor of “pay for the service”, unfortunately that runs counter to user expectations. Plus the historical context of traditional news orgs subsidizing their new websites with traditional revenue streams, then finding themselves cornered when the web turned out to be more than just a fad or a hobby.
Exactly this.
Interesting approach, gonna think about it. So far I didn’t take disinformation as a result of news companies going broke.
Why would people forget that the BBC is more trustworthy then someones uncle, just because his opinion is for free? The distrust in “old authorities” like big newspaper or governments is, in my opinion, a long-term result of the broken promisses of the hegemony they are, or seem to be, part of.
The concept “people have to have to pay for quality information” doesn’t sit right with me. Relevant info should be available for everyone! And trustworthy news orgs should be funded pubicly.
I didn’t take disinformation as a result of news companies going broke.
I don’t think it’s the only reason, but it’s one of the reasons.
Part of the disinformation ecosystem is randos pumping out content so they can get ad clicks. Social media rewards that (etc), but the original sin is mixing timely investigative journalism with every other kind of free content online. It cheapens journalism.
The distrust in “old authorities” like big newspaper or governments is, in my opinion, a long-term result of the broken promisses of the hegemony they are, or seem to be, part of.
You’re right. And it’s somewhat deserved. But by training us that well-researched reporting should be free, those old authorities basically poisoned the well. We generally expect news to be free now. Which makes it really hard for new outfits to get started.
The concept “people have to have to pay for quality information” doesn’t sit right with me. Relevant info should be available for everyone!
Journalists need to eat. In the 1980s it seemed like almost every middle class household received a newspaper. I wasn’t able to find stats, but I suspect that most households found newspapers useful and could pay for them.
If we return to a model where news isn’t free, but it’s really cheap, I think we’d be okay.
And trustworthy news orgs should be funded pubicly.
I’m all for public funding, but NPR didn’t break Watergate, nor did CBC break the SNC-Lavelin affair. Western democracies co-evolved with a relatively adversarial private press.
We need ways for a private press to continue as we move further online. Non-profit models seem to work (at least for the Guardian), as do membership models (at least for Canadaland).
There are more useful web apps than before but blog/affiliate sites are a plague.
That said if I could make a ton of money by clogging up the internet with garbage content then I would. There is nothing holy about this place.
I went to a site today that had a full page cookie popup. When I clicked manage cookies to disable, it presented me with a a choice of “eagerly interested” and “consent”. WTF is that? I didn’t see the opt out option right away so i just left the page.
After 10 seconds of reading an overlay appears that asks you to subscribe to their newsletter.
I guess they really needed to tell me I wasn’t welcome but damn.
Bonus points if you had to enable JS beforehand because they load the content in via scripts afterwards.
- 30 mb of JS for 1 kb of text.
- Can't zoom or scroll freely without JS interfering.
- Double-click on a word and it calls another script for 'assistance' instead of selecting the word.
- Right-click is disabled or bring their own 'menu' that does nothing.
Right-click is disabled or bring their own ‘menu’ that does nothing.
Me trying to copy a link in discord web:
Websites already sucked by 2013
Yeah but boy we’ve sure managed to make them suck even harder over the past 10yrs
And sluggish as fuck
People act like 2010 wasn’t also bloated Flash sites that ran poorly though
Fuck flash, good games and fun memories, but also good riddance for accessibility.
I mean no website back then was telling you to block them if you want. They just didn’t use javascript to detect blockers.
Also web hosting has gone WAY up. My simple static website used to cost $5 per month to host. Now it’s $30 for the same spec server. The ones that are closer to $5 are so insanely oversold and slow, a website takes a good 30-45 seconds to load.
Unless you have millions of hits per month or your “static site” is Wordpress with a page builder, you might want to look into other web hosting offers. A VPS is overkill for a static site, and you can get a decent VPS for $10-$12 range. With enough bandwidth and io to host many static websites.
Hell most sites back then didn’t even have mobile support yet and still used tons of flash elements, that was just the beginning of mass internet adoption due to smart phones
