As far as I’m concerned, Search is the most egregious and worrisome case of enshittification of them all. Because Search is our starting point for everything on the internet. How do you find the article or blog you want to read, the plumber you want to hire, the thing you want to buy, the discussion group in which you want to comment— the answer to the question on your mind? It all comes from Search. If I could decentralize and protect one part of the internet, it would be Search. I want to encounter all the little hidden corners of the web that feel so out of reach and silent now.
I wholeheartedly agree and would say the lack of being able to thoroughly search the net like it was mid 00s is the No 1 thing that has been depowered ... enshitified - beginning in the early to mid 10s that loss what I say down to the lack of search engine competition and the most popular or main engine, Google, ensuring spam results got thicker which encouraged more clicks and thus more revenue. In the last few years since then, much more absence of results from some sites falls into shit web site building incorporating being far too clever features, must MUST track, and oh no, web crawlers and search bots might be stealing our info ...whatever reasons - for example, a few months ago I wasn't even that surprised when a once searchable site that lists music played on a tv program, (ABC - Australia's Rage) which played each weekend, web dev inserted their aren't we clever card and ... no more search results.
Brainstorming: some subreddits are still going strong despite the overall (ipo/shareholder-driven) downturn. Some extremely niche hobby forums are still alive and well, eg. FountainPenNetwork. Specific software help/discussion forums are alive, eg. Autodesk. Those are a few places I can think of where it seems that where real humans congregate and have real conversations. Not sure how useful that is, but thinking out loud.
Google search has gone from the greatest product on the internet twenty years ago to the worst today. Fractional reserve banking gave MBAs so much money Page and Brin sold out to them. Now it is run by clueless MBA types.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 31.1 ms ] threadAt least to the 15% who can think.
A small group of humans were brilliant enough to invent the internet. Then in a blink of an eye, a bunch of other humans turned genius into stupidity.
We can't have nice things? We don't deserve them.
How do we stop this? Lets brainstorm ways that we can push back against this.
What are some examples of things that are NOT becoming prone to ‘enshittification’ / platform decay.
Then we can build and have platforms that stop this from happening, I would love to hear solutions.