They're Looting the Internet

“This is the state of the modern internet—ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a ‘service’ or a ‘portal,’ but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money”

“platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of ‘content discovery,’ a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are ‘good for you’”

“it’s hard to even suggest we use these apps. The term ‘use’ suggests a level of user control that Meta has spent over a decade destroying”

“It’s the direct result of The Rot Economy, a growth-at-all-costs mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies where tech companies profitably punish users as a means of showing the markets eternal growth”

“this means twisting platforms from offering a service to driving engagement”

“The optimistic, respectful and trusting approach to legislation around online platforms has led to an internet riddled with decay and pain, one that incentivizes mining human beings like veins of ore”

“these platforms were (and are) a form of bait-and-switch, the underpinning philosophy of Cory Doctorow’s ‘Enshittification’ theory, where platforms build massive monopolies based on offering good, useful services, and then slowly turn the screws on the customer to seek ever-growing profits”

“I feel that enshittification misses one crucial thing — that these companies aren’t doing this out of a lack of profitability or failure of their business model, but because the modern internet has become somewhere between a social experiment and a human mining operation”

“The core problem lies in the fact that these platforms don’t really create anything, and their only value exists in making an internet of billions of people small enough to comprehend”

“the internet has become dominated by powerful forces that don’t contribute to the product that enriches them”

“By allowing — and encouraging — search engine optimization (SEO), Google handed matches to arsonists and pointed to the most flammable parts of the internet”

“After profiting handsomely from being the middleman between content creation and internet users, big tech is in the process of looting the internet as a means of training models that it hopes can replace human beings themselves”

“Every single tech company making a LLM is stealing, justifying it by using the previous model of the internet where everything published online was there for the taking and conflating access to content with ownership in the process”

“the people making the products are not building things for human beings, but to show the markets that they’d continue to grow”

“These people aren’t innovators, or creators, or even service providers—they’re thieves and landlords insulated by weak regulation and markets that have become disconnected from the concept of good business”

“It’s the hallmark of a tech industry dedicated to creating problems that it charges you to solve, a sickly beast borne of venture capital and a lack of innovation. When you’re rich and powerful, you no longer face real problems, and as a result fail to consider the solutions that would measurably improve a person’s life”

“Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg don’t worry about bills, or face actual busywork, or real challenges—they get paid hundreds of millions of dollars to come up with ways to express growth to hedge funds”