@The-Wizard-of-Zaar: Yeah who knows if we're even real with all these tech advances in the recent year, might all be bots talking to each other while posting ertificially generated content.
How online platforms die (article)
14 Jun 2023, 02:33 PM
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."
Someone posted an interesting article in the deviantArt forums about how online spaces decline, and I thought it's interesting enough to share. It's using Tiktok as an main example but you'll probably recognize many of the bad things that happened to deviantArt and many other formely cool online spaces, such as algorithms pushing content that brings money rather what people actually want to see, reducing the opportunities to just have fun, connect and communicate with each other in favor of monetization options, etc.
Comments (5)
Posted: Friday, 23 June, 2023 @ 10:02 PM
(finally catching up on this jesus christ)
Ahh, Cory Doctorow is always good. He and Douglas Rushkoff have managed that miracle balance of keeping their finger on the pulse of the digital age without succumbing to the techbro cult. On the subject of 'locked-in syndrome', there was a piece I read a couple years ago on the death of blogging, and how the most important trade-off of the Facebook ascension was how crosslinking was essentially murdered: thousands of blogs used to operate on hundreds of different platforms, and they could (and would) link to each other without a second thought—the sites on which they ran wanted to facilitate exchange of ideas, not control it. A year and a half after the Discord soft-lock, I can testify to just how difficult it is to break an entrenched monopoly: I can count the number of old contacts that have kept up with me since on one hand, with fingers to spare.
The story about Amazon immediately recalls the quoteworthy from Kevin Harmon, a merchant quoted in a 2018 piece by The Verge:
“Amazon is a clear monopoly that is somehow being allowed to destroy industry after industry,” he wrote. “They don’t crush you when you’re small. They wait until you’ve got employees and lease obligations and business loans and warehouses full of product, and THEN they reveal that they don’t need you anymore.”
EndstageCapitalism
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Posted: Thursday, 07 September, 2023 @ 04:16 PM
I've always been bummed about by sites that'll join in on this stupid ai trend and is why I really hate damaging trends so much most of the time. The only sites that won't allow ai that I'm in rn is Colorslive, Side7 and that's it really. (Sadly, artstreet joined the crappy ai trend, which is dissapointing, but I'll stil use it to post my medibang artwork from my ipad..)
Pfffft.
I've been tellin the lot of yas that the internet is shrinking for years now.