cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn’t have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to “five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four” (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don’t have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!
👍good👍 idea💡 bro 💪 fuck🤬 😤😤😤 emogys🫠 they ruin💩 the 😌sanctity🙏 of 🧑💻online🌍 discourse🗣️ and∧ 😩debase😈 👩👩👦👦us👥 all∀
→If➡️ I 👁️ ever see👀 another🫴 🍑emojee💯 I’m ⏰gonna🪬 💦💦💦 🍆 ⚰️ 🚾 ⚠️ ☯️🅱️ 😎😎😎
Case in point. People will smear themselves with shit while being proud of it, while also being able to raise a circlejerk cult on demand, all because of the lowered bar.
Circlejerking purely based on the emotional reactions that the worst qualities of people want to troll and brigade other people with is a toxic motivation for a lot of people, and memes and emojis act as the principal facilitators for it when truth is they have much better alternatives and have had much better alternatives in the written language and iconography in no small part due to the purging of their presence throughout human history. Modern society isn’t the only one who discovered how to draw dicks or smileys onto things, but just like cryptobullshit like NFT is treated seriously now, they seem to think that because it is in a digital modern medium it must be good now.
People are gonna be people whether they are online or IRL. None of the things you’re having issues with stem from social media itself; it comes from people being people.
Fortunately for education that it is able to get people to be more than people then.
TFW cute pictures: 😱 😠 🤬 😤
TFW sanctimonious drivel: 😌 👍 😍 🥳