Why big tech companies suck right now. Looking at you Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Spotify, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube… (sponsor was here)
Some of Cory Doctorow’s stuff! Ensh*ttification: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ End-to-End: https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-d6046dca366f
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I think this is the market model of a lot of American startup companies having a huge financial backbone. Work years even decades on loss in order to catch as much of the market as possible, and once you are a market leader start the enshittification and abuse your market position.
I think it’s a human trait. In many places people imagine a successful life as enduring to get to some position and then being an important guy who can screw everyone.
And patents and IP indirectly perpetuate that worldview. “Invent” something and then live on royalties. “Discover” something and then that too. Write a book and then any reference to it means royalties. At least in dreams and fairy-tales it looks like that.
The incentive is privilege. It’s a very old mechanism, not really making any sense for economics as known today.
That is, it makes some sense - before IP and patents people would have trade secrets. A secret technology of making some dye or some material or some kind of steel. Patents allowed for faster modernization - you don’t have to keep it a secret anymore, which allows to scale production.
With things hard to cover by IP and patents they use the network effect instead.
The only way to change this is to vote with your money. I know that easier said than done, because these companies have driven down their cost with criminally low wages or by selling user data. Pay for domestically made goods from local businesses. Use ride-sharing or public transportation, ride a bike, or walk when possible. Pay artists directly through their website, or fair compensation sites like
Bandcampor Patreon.Any other suggestions on services that support the manufacturer/artist/creator?
It’s impossible to do that.
You’ve even mentioned Bandcamp, who sold out a couple years ago
Did they? Bummer. They were great to a band my friends were in, but that was 7-8 years ago now.
They’re good… for now. Nothing terrible has happened since their acquisition, Bandcamp Fridays are still going on and fees haven’t raised, but I feel like it’s only a matter of time. The only new feature I can think of that was added was allowing payments natively without PayPal.
After the workers tried to unionize, Epic sold it off to another company
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-layoffs-oakland-songtradr-epic-18429463.php
Despite bandcamp being profitable at the time, the new owner said “the financial state of Bandcamp has not been healthy”
So I wouldn’t expect that for now to continue
Self host all the things. Don’t use Google drive, self host nextcloud. Run your own VPN from a VPS, since the Google one is shutting down anyway. Oracle offers always free servers.
Solid advice!
Glad he linked Cory Doctorow at the end. His recent works like the internet con cover this topic well.
He does offer solutions but as you could guess these things aren’t easy to fix.
The venture capital samba:
- Make free service (it’ll pan out, trust me bro).
- 1 years passes… trust me bro
- 3 years passes… look at all this user data we can sell - trust me bro
- 2 more year passes… look, we’re going to have to fire some people…
- 1 year passes… we’re not really making any money, so trust me bro - we’re only going to increase subscription fees a little…
- 1 year later, increase subscription fees…
- 1 year later, increase subscription fees…
- 1 year later, increase subscription fees…
- Listen, Mr Creditor - I have liquidity. So much liquidity. I’m rife with the stuff… increase subscription fees
And so forth, and so on…
Can’t help but think that the all-too prevalent (here, at least) attitude that one shouldn’t have to pay anything, or very, very little, for quality content has a lot to do with it.
I honestly think that philosophy is fine. Before the major social media sites all came about, the Internet was filled with much smaller communities that didn’t need to be profitable or scalable - they could be run by an individual as a hobby project. I think returning to that (possibly with the use of federation so these small communities still have a good amount of content) could keep things free, ad free, and privacy conscious
Do the journalists (and researchers, editors, verifying staff, etc.) all work for free?
Nah. Netflix used to be a reasonable price and a very decent alternative to the rip off prices of cable and satellite TV.
Then of course every other media company wanted to charge the same price each time splitting off shows that used to be on Netflix.
It’s reached the point that it would cost the same ripoff prices to get all the services needed for most people to watch what they’d like to watch.
This is just too much to pay per household per month for entertainment.
Bring back one service that provides all the TV (not even movies) for less than 30usd/25 gbp and I’m there. But I’m not subscribing to them all. It’s ridiculous.
