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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I am pretty confident it's the smartphone OSs (Android and iOS) that are more at fault. I remember having to install a file browser on my smartphone. Kids grown up with smartphones may not even know there are files and folder structures.
Yeah, and I feel like you could play around with javascript to make stuff happen in the browser on a chrome book, can't you?
I'm old enough that it was BASIC I played around with when I was a kid. Not a language I ever used since, but the important thing is to get a feel for logic, make some incredibly stupid choices when making a program and learn from that. If a kid wants to play around on a computer to make it do something they created, I think they'll find a way.
Also AI can be helpful when starting on a new language. Yeah I had to learn the hard way by googling stuff and getting the syntax wrong, and using a lot of guess work. There's still a learning curve before you just know the syntax without stopping to think or asking the AI, but it was that way before, it was just googling things you gotta do before you really know it. And before that a lot more trial and error to figure it out.