this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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Enshittification

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What is enshittification?

The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source

The lifecycle of Big Internet

We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.

Embrace, extend and extinguish

We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.

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[–] bier@feddit.nl 12 points 2 days ago

Yeah it's a pretty bad take IMHO. When I was a kid we had one 386 desktop computer running MS-DOS. No laptops, phones or tablet. I always liked computers and when I went to high school I noticed a bunch of old broken computers in a storage room one day. Asked the computer teacher (we had computer classes learned MS Word and (blind) typing) if I could try to fix them. Me and a friend spend many luch breaks swapping parts, until about half of them worked again. Learning about something is mostly your willingness to learn. As a highschool kid I would have loved to get a laptop. If I had a Chromebook I'm fairly sure I would have tried to run a custom OS on it or see what else non standard thing I could have unlocked.