this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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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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They operated at a loss just for this reason. Years of loss revenue to trick people into using the service and building a user base only to pull the rug out from under us and go ad crazy. They did this to themselves, we got used to being ad free so now they think we will just roll over and accept the ads. Too bad there wasn't a way to sue companies for operating at a loss on purpose to artificially create a market then fundamentally change the product after the fact but as it was a "free" service there is only one stakeholder.
"bait and switch" is the technical term.
I am not sure if this applies here as they technically kept the service the same as it was before. Bait and switch is more different and not over a long time.
You are technically correct. The term for Google was doing is "dumping."
I think, dumping is the first part of what we discussed, then there's the second part where you can set an arbitrary price or do other unfair things because you've become effectively a monopoly.
But the public opinion clearly showed me that I shouldn't interfere with this discussion 😅
Also, operating at a loss allows to throw away the contenders that have to somehow profit to survive. Well sometimes those scammy services don't get to the point of actually getting money (kind of like Reddit)
But I guess this is what to expect from any free service, very few of them are run as a form of charity, or at least I think so
People think everything online is free. But everything one does online has a cost and we don't want to pay it. So we got ads.
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