Ares Land wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 3:15 pm
I don't know how to explain the US though! One thing I don't understand, for instance, is why the Silicon Valley used to be able to turn out good products in the 2000s and 2010s -- Gmail, Google Maps, even Twitter (which, surprising as it may seem, was an interesting place and not a huge troll farm back in the days). Now we get good stuff once and again, but let's admit it, it's mostly drivel.
Lots of reasons, I think. One is that the wrong lesson was taken from the Internet boom. Rather than "it turns out to be really useful to connect everything to the web", the lesson drawn was "You can make a lot of money by monopolizing a new medium."
The thing is, enshittification is built into the model. That is, the procedure is:
1. Make a product that pleases the customers, for free, making no money but building a monopoly and destroying pre-web competition. Everybody likes this part.
2. Turn it into a product aimed at people who can make money on the platform and pay for it: advertisers, Amazon suppliers, content creators.
3. Turn it into a product to maximize shareholder value. By this point no one can leave, so the customers and suppliers are both screwed.
You can't really just be nostalgic for step 1, because it was free for customers
as a trap, to build market share. If people had to pay to get the services received, the platform wouldn't have grown as fast.
I think the mistake the rest of society made was never figuring out micropayments. Yes, really.
As someone on Mefi put it, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." When only investors and advertisers provide the money, the enshittification process is inevitable.
Now, micropayments never worked because no one wants to allocate $0.30, or $0.03, or whatever, every time they access a web page. To make it work, it'd have to be built into the system, and automatic-- probably an extra charge from your ISP. You'd need a tracking system to distribute the money... but guess what,
we already have that tracking system, it's just there to help advertisers and platforms, not content creators.
Could a system where individual users pay for a network actually function? Sure, we have one in the US, and it's even run by for-profit companies; it's called "telephones." Imagine how unusable telephones would be if instead calls were paid for via ads. (Scammers and spammers are bad enough, but at least they have to pay for phone service too.)