Fearing enshittification is one reason I want to keep my company private. If I have to answer to stockholders, then I’m not answering to customers, and that’s shitty.
Fearing enshittification is one reason I want to keep my company private. If I have to answer to stockholders, then I’m not answering to customers, and that’s shitty.
I get it. His most recent post talks about how enshittification isn't just limited to digital platforms, it's inevitable whenever monopolies are allowed to form.
100%. I never wanna work for public company again. I left a huge one after constant thrashing of canceling projects and trips so the accountants could move money around for the quarterly earnings reports only to revive after. Went to a couple small private ones then yr ago employer went public. Been so downhill so fast. Company isn’t recognizable to the one I accepted offer from. I’m leaving when I find a private fit.
I would consult a lawyer, basically iirc you can add to the bylaws that you are not just about making money and then you are only obligated to share dividends if you keep the majority of the voting rights.
The real cost of enshittification is that they make it impossible for others to run honest business.
Who will pay a subscription for privacy respecting services when there are a dozen free alternatives. True cost of running online business has been completely hidden from users and for so long that they will never accept those that want to cover the costs upfront.
e.g. how many of you remain on Lemmy if instance owners asked for a monthly fee to cover their server costs?
Well, not entirely. We can move out to the wilderness and live off the land with very minimal interaction with civilization. We don’t because iPhones and medicine are too good to give up.
At least in feddit (main German instance) there were a lot of posts offering up financial support, but it was declined because it was not needed.
I think especially the smaller communities wouldn't have a problem coming with funds for hosting. Donations for lemmy developers have also increased significantly since the main exodus.
I get your scepticism, but I think the lemmy community for the most part wants this thing to "succeed" and is willing to chip in a reasonable amount.
Depends honestly but there’s a fee I’d be willing to pay to support if there was ongoing development and efforts for things user privacy and responsible moderation.
If they are 100% transparent in regard to where the money goes, I'm in. The problem with something like youtube premium is not that it's unaffordable to the majority of users. It's that at this point you have to assume that they don't need the subscription fee to cover their costs, but to shove that money up some CEOs or shareholders asses. Yeah that's not gonna happen unless they force me to and even then I'd think twice about if I really need that service.
The last two words of my username will official disappear by that point. And it's not like someone other than me is already referring to themself as "Resol" without a suffix anyway.
Dunno if for other people, but that's the main issue for me. When you pay a subscription, at least in my mind trained in the 90s and early 00s, plus now with Enshittification, you are not only basically paying rent to a landlord, but you are basically paying a "ransom" – a bet that the service won't be rug-pulled from under your feet at any moment's notice.
Instead I'd prefer something like a one-time lifetime payment, like what SDF does, or a long-period subscription eg.: 5-yearly or 10-yearly instead of monthly / yearly. That way, even if it's going to eventually be Enshittified, you have better reason to trust that you're going to get some useful lifespan out of it.
Cory Doctorow coins the term "enshittification" to describe how platforms start out benefiting users but eventually abuse users and business customers to extract all value.
Facebook started by prioritizing user privacy over ads but now prioritizes profits over all else.
Network effects are a double-edged sword - they lock users in but also make platforms vulnerable if users leave en masse.
Low switching costs due to universality and interoperability allow competitors to reverse engineer platforms and plug in competing services.
Mandatory interoperability and limiting data control can curb platform power by distributing control to users and smaller companies.
Recent antitrust actions aim to roll back decades of lax merger policy that let platforms consolidate power.
Breakups will take a long time so interoperability is a faster way to restore competition.
Laws should limit abusive behavior rather than rely on platforms to self-regulate.
Federated open services fail gracefully and encourage migration to better platforms.
Political will is growing but change will be gradual - focus should be on harm reduction in the near term.
I watched the video yesterday and I couldn't really understand what the plan is. What I got was something like "the corps are too big for the consumers to do anything and laws are very slow to made".
Did I miss something about the "audacious(?)" plan?
That may have been true in the past, but in the last 30 years I've watched a lot of companies that should have outright failed because they were terribly managed get a few dumptruck loads of taxpayer money to keep them afloat.
We're well past the stage of "if they fuck themselves, let them fail" and deep into "If you're not going to buy their shit, we'll just take them money straight out of your paycheck"
It doesn't necessarily roll off the tongue, but that's a good thing. It seems to be catching on, and frankly those large companies and orgs that are enshittifying and get labeled thusly might actually not love being called out with it, and hopefully slow their roll.
Doubtful, but a man can dream.
I used to work at S***ify... which is currently enshittifying at top-speed. It fits.
Lets kill off the damned cookie popups. Nobody cares, its literally the most useless 5 seconds of every persons life to have to dismiss and never read what it says