That's the explicit plan isn't it? Become central to something, then profit because you've got too much of a market share to stop.
I think it is true that Facebook is vulnerable to what it has done. Because it's all about people interacting, there is a point at which despite the network lock-in, people are repelled and stop coming, and it loses its monopoly. Especially given the age range they've cultivated, I don't think they've got long.
Amazon, by contrast, has achieved dominance and made people dependent on it in a much more physical way, by being the main place to get so many things, and driving competitors out of business.
Facebook wants me to buy guns and disrespect federal authority.
People are way, way more dependent on Amazon than is apparent from the fleet of delivery vans. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, a lot of people would fall out of touch but that's most of the impact. Take out Amazon Web Services, and a whole lot of what people consider "the internet" disappears.
Yes, I feel Amazon and Google are the most entrenched. I see Facebook with an AOL-type trajectory. For my purposes it sucks so very. very much. Why do I see what I see? Why can't I find what I saw yesterday or even 10 minutes ago. Unfortunately a few activities I am involved in rely on it.
I'm vaguely back on Facebook (under yet a different pseud) in order to promote my local blog. The thing that I can't wrap my head around is the hundreds of videos under the general "5 minute hacks" guise which are weirdly compelling, involve a ton of that plasticky stuff that you can pour into a mold in order to create a 3d object, and clearly involve about 40-100 hours worth of work but are spliced together at an entertaining clip as you try to figure out what the fuck they're making. Oh, a mold of a hand on hinges to act as a swivel hook to hold your hand? Oh, a sculpture of a bullet puncturing an orange underwater? Oh, a woman creating her own bizarrely complicated makeup palette where each color is its own procedure?
I suppose this is how TikTok and YouTube and whatever video-based platforms are purported to suck people in, but I mostly just never cross paths with these things.
Facebook has become remarkably crap. My feed is now 90% advertising and things trying to get me to look at meme accounts, and 10% stuff that my friends are doing. Of course this is amplified because my friends are mostly now off Facebook, or, if they are still on it, not active.
All FB wants to show me is conventionally attractive women comedians making sex jokes. It's wouldn't be so bad, if their politics weren't so retrograde and the jokes stale. Still, I feel like it is at least attempting to show me the sort of thing I instinctively click on.
12: Is that their short video section?
I always vaguely feel like we're supposed to hate but maybe not?
I feel like it's not so much "supposed to hate" as supposed to be frequently right but kind of exhausting to read on a regular basis?
6.1: I keep getting oddly compelling videos of Asian guys building things with cement or bricks or bambo and of white guys doing blacksmithy things. And really, dubious cooking.
I started a state and local politics blog and am moving my activity over there from various social media sites. The goal is to be a left-leaning partisan propaganda outfit in support of our local Democrats, and to be a platform for bottom-up organizing, fund raising, and policy development. And to not be dependent on the Facebooks and Googles while doing it.
I've been recruiting some other writers and have had good support from my friends at the state house, so it seems to be off to a decent start.
Mike Masnick has a good follow-up to the Doctorow piece that goes into more detail about various aspects of the process.
5- you can still get reverse chronological order of just your friends (plus ads interspersed), they've just buried it and called it something else. Go to feeds->friends and the order will be kept consistent. The only oddity is there's some limit to how far back you can go that seems to vary day to day. When you reach the limit it says you're all caught up, there is no more content.
Facebook mainly shows me artistic reconstructions of extinct animals and plants, because that's what I trained it to do. It serves the function of bringing various sites for that kind of stuff reasonably well, but it's a limited value.
Google's core thing of being the go to search engine persists because people are too lazy to type duckduckgo, as far as I can see.
There's dead and there's dead. You can still use alta vista if you really want to.
It's a great article. I wonder though whether it overemphasizes internet platforms relative to more general processes. For example, one of the clearest enshittifications of the last 20 years is what's happened to Apple stores. They used to be a great experience with helpful knowledgeable employees who had time to help you, and now they're profit-per-square-foot-maximizing machines which are absolutely miserable experiences for customers. And because opening new stores would hurt profit-per-square-foot there's literally only two in my entire state. And this has nothing to do with a 3-way dance with advertisers or customers, but it does fit into the article in Teo's link, which is that Wall Street demands that everything be awful.
Ooh, 19.1 is smart, I should try that. Instead I trained it to show me cute dresses when I couldn't do any people watching during the pandemic.
What I think drives a lot of this is simply that data directly tied to revenue and profit is more easily available and so can drive all decision making. In a less computerized world, it was somewhat difficult to figure out which decisions were driving profits, and as a result most employees were making decisions based on producing the best product they could. The driving question was "what do customers want and like" and the hope was then that the ad department and the execs could turn good products into profits. But now you can see more easily exactly what is driving revenue and profits, and so almost no one is working on making the product good, they're all working on making it profitable. Except of course at the early VC-funded stages where there's no revenue at all so it's impossible to profit-maximize and so people are focused on making a popular product.
Facebook's model of retaining my engagement is to show me things that make me hostile and angry. They serve me ads that intentional piss me off. Anti-CRT propaganda, ads for Hillsboro College, books about "American" history.
Such things goad me into leaving comments that say "hey, this is bullshit, stop spreading these horrible things." etc. Which Facebook interprets as my interest and serves me even more of them.
What really frustrates me is knowing that they can tell if you pay attention to a post, so even if you can train yourself not to click or comment, that's not enough you have to also train yourself not to linger on material you don't want. It's dystopian.
16: Local politics blogs UNITE!
14 as supposed to be frequently right but kind of exhausting to read on a regular basis
That's a good summary and why I only see his threads when a friend quotes part of one. His first few books are intriguingly weird, but later on they seemed like they would be overly didactic for me, so I haven't read them.
27: Amen to that. We are grass roots AF.
Just now on Facebook, something called the Texas Public Policy Foundation tells me
Just like Sam Houston, you are a Texas Hero. You are a leader and dedicate your life to a brighter future for all Texans. You focus on creating opportunity for future generations through education. That's why you're invited to join the Come and Take It Society!
That's great that I don't even have to be from Texas to be a Texas Hero in the Come and Take It Society.
I try to focus on the generosity of "come and take it". Why thank you!
Lately Facebook has been pushing me to posts in an ADU-builder community, which tend to be highly benign.
34 is awesome and will be my interpretation of the phrase from this point forward.
Imagining it encircling a cartoon image of a kindly grandmother holding out a tray of cookies.
OK, it tickled me enough to make 37 into an actual image. On my Mastodon where you can see it, Rob.
Facebook shows me lots of videos of street fights.
For a while it was intent on pelting me with college sophomore-quality stories about various bits of medieval history. I'm dangerously susceptible to that kind of thing.
Someone used the phrase "You get what you get and you don't throw a fit" in a meeting I was at today.
I always hated that phrase.
On the way home I realized I should have said "I'm sorry your parents didn't raise you to have any agency."
Regional variation: it was "you don't fuss a bit" in my experience.
I think it was heebie that pointed out that only rhymes in the south and "you don't get upset" prevails elsewhere.
There's one Lorax who speaks for the trees and one for the assholes.
Possibly it also rhymes in New Zealand?
Oh wait, in Kiwi /æ/ becomes /ɛ/, /ɛ/ becomes /ɪ/, but /ɪ/ becomes /ə/, as we saw with that guy saying "dick pəcs".
42: Yeah. kind of a personalized version of the almost always dreadful "It is what it is." I say 'almost always' as I find it apt in terms of things like the workings of gravity as opposed to various workplace directives and polices which is where I would generally here it used.
You get what you get at the Come and Take It (Society).
"Thought-terminating cliches". My wife's workplace has a strong culture of "it is what it is", which is maddening, since what "it is" is usually terrible.
I am amused by 6, because Facebook also pushed a lot of resin-craft videos at me, and while I'm sure there's some artistry involved, at this point I'm very tired of the stuff-in-resin-then-turned-on-a-lathe genre.
The Come and Take it Society sounds pretty socialist to me.
Thank you to 18! I had no idea, it's so much better. I've really gotten down to barely using it, not on any principle, just on the shittification. What's funny/odd is that about once a day I'll get a feed that's mostly people, but any other time I check, it's almost exclusively suggesting groups and pages rather than any content I've selected.
supposed to be frequently right but kind of exhausting to read on a regular basis
Yes, exactly, I also don't really trust him to be arguing in good faith--he'll nutpick, mischaracterize, valorize, all the rhetorical tricks to rile up the reader and make sure they agree with his conclusion. Feh.
22 is pretty good. And is also kind of a good example of Doctorow's tendentiousness: here's a phenomenon that can largely be explained by morally neutral forces, so let's portray it as a malign conspiracy aimed at making us all miserable.
My tolerance for "it is what it is" is bolstered by the S-O-C-K-S/ eso si que es thing. My brain retreats from the tedious cliche and instead finds amusement in that dumbness.
facebook purity seems to work pretty well.