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Who Broke the Internet? (community.nodebb.org)

submitted 1 month ago by julian@community.nodebb.org to c/general-discussion@community.nodebb.org

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Today I'm listening to Who Broke the Internet?, a four-part series by pluralistic@mamot.fr on CBC's Understood podcast.

> Google Search was the gold standard — a product born in a dorm room during the internet’s early, idealistic era. But when internal emails surfaced they revealed a deeper conflict inside the company: was Google making Search worse, on purpose, to boost ad revenue? Google says its changes are all about benefiting users. Critics say it’s all part of a bigger pattern — one that host Cory Doctorow calls enshittification: the slow, deliberate decay of platforms in the name of profit.

Have you noticed internet search has become next to useless? It's like the arms-race between search and spam is ramping up, and not in a good way. Cory lays out the foundation that it isn't that simple, and that the degradation of search was brought on internally.

Check it out here or wherever you get your podcasts!

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[–] scott@loves.tech 2 points 1 month ago

This is one of the many reasons why I think decentralized social media, nomadic identity, and federated single sign on are the answer.

One of the causes of enshitification is that the platforms are between two competing interests, and are themselves a third competing interest. Typically, business, consumers, and the owners of the social media network.

Decentralized social media solves this by allowing consumers and businesses to be on their own websites, or a provider of their choice. No one in the middle controlling everything, and providers have to compete with each other.

Another cause of enshitification is monopolies and lock in. They can treat you like crap because they know that you need them. And even if you can download your data, you can't transfer it anywhere.

Decentralized social media, nomadic identity, and federated single sign on solve this by giving people a choice of where their account is. They can self-host or choose a provider, and then move if they don't like how they are being treated.

I know a lot of people loath the idea of commercial entities coming to decentralized social media, but it would prevent entification, and give users the choice to follow or block commercial websites. The power would be transferred back to the people (users, consumers, members, etc.), which is where it should be.