My blogging activity peaked about 5 years ago. Around that time, I started seeing this effect of enshittification of online platforms. Before Musk bought Twitter, it was the number one source of visitors to my blog. I had 20k followers on Twitter at the time, and I noticed that these platforms were starting to use the algorithm, filtering things down.

The independent web is already here, quietly thriving while Big Tech implodes under its own extractive weight. All you have to do is join it.

I am hopeful. Not optimistic. Fuck optimism! Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. I know that what we do matters. Hope is the belief that if we can improve things, even in small ways, we can ascend the gradient toward the world we want, and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at our lower elevation, will be revealed. Hope is a discipline. It requires that you not give in to despair. So I'm here to tell you: don't despair.

The fact that you have to figure out whether the discussion you're trying to join is on Twitter or Bluesky, Mastodon or Instagram – that is just the most Prodigy/AOL/Compuserve-ass way of running a digital world. I mean, 1990 called and they want their walled gardens back

But most of all, enshittification is the result of anticircumvention law's ban on interoperability.

t was reported that a staggering one billion PCs were still running Windows 10, even though a full half were eligible to upgrade to the AI-satured Windows 11.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result of a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment

then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers;

I like having as few opportunities as possible for would-be enshittifiers to mess around with what I'm trying to do

Enshittification, you'll recall, is the lifecycle of the online platform: first, the platform allocates surpluses to end-users; then, once users are locked in, those surpluses are taken away and given to business-customers. Once the advertisers, publishers, sellers, creators and performers are locked in, the surplus is clawed away from them and taken by the publishers.

The enshittification of Amazon – where you search for a specific product and get six screens of ads for different, worse ones – is the natural end-state of chokepoint capitalism: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

That same enshittification is on every platform, and "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" is just a way of saying, "Now that you're stuck here, we're going to enshittify your experience."