Pluralistic: Tiktok's enshittification (21 Jan 2023)

you can make lemonade out of the former, but you really shouldn't out of the latter

Own Your Web is a newsletter by Matthias Ott about designing, building, creating, and publishing for and on the Web. Every other week, I send out an exclusive email full of actionable insights, best practices, hacks, links, books, tools, and other high-quality insights I found or explored. Whether you want to get started with your own personal website or level up as a designer, developer, or independent creator working with the ever-changing material of the Web, this little email is for you. ❤✊ Free. No spam ever. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you consent to my use of your email address to stay in touch with you, as provided in my Privacy Policy.

A review of Liz Pelly's book Mood Machine, which looks at the rise of Spotify, its place and intended purpose.

This blogpost is mostly a rant. In a perfect opening note to this blog, as I was sitting down to write it, I was faced with this message in my terminal, right after typing the hugo new command: ❯ hugo new posts/software-will-get-more-fragile-over-time.md WARN deprecated: module.mounts.excludeFiles was deprecated in Hugo v0.153.0 and will be removed in a future release. Replaced by the simpler 'files' setting, see https://gohugo.io/configuration/module/#files Another warning I’ll have to fix. Throw it onto the pile. OK, let’s run the Hugo server, then?

This article interrogates the environmental consequences of our dependence on platforms, which increasingly includes higher education and the ways in which we share and disseminate scholarly research. We make a case for a minimal computing–inspired, back-to-basics approach to web design as a strategy to push back against the hegemony of big tech and adopt more reflexive, slow, and eco-conscious forms of knowledge production. At the same time, we are open about the trade-offs of deplatforming a scholarly project, using the authors’ experience creating the University of Alberta SpokenWeb website as a case study. The University of Alberta is part of the SpokenWeb Network, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)–funded network that aims, among other things, to showcase local collections of literary sound. The University of Alberta’s own archive, which dates back to 1957, features sound performances, interviews, lectures, and radio shows made by visiting authors and captured on reel-to-reel and cassette tape. When creating the project website, the team wanted to take a more hands-on approach, using a lightweight, static site design, which was inspired by the “needs-based” critical praxis of minimal computing (Risam and Gil 2022, 6). The challenge, as we found, was in how to negotiate sustainability in terms of carbon cost and the long-term maintenance and care of the archival materials, which for us meant finding ways to bridge between our digital project website and the existing University of Alberta library infrastructure. Along these lines, some of the key questions our article engages with are: How do you measure the carbon impact of a digital project? What practical steps can researchers take to design (or redesign) a website to minimize the energy cost? How might moving away from platforms to static sites change the labor distribution, in terms of how sites are maintained, updated, and preserved?

Online community platforms are assembly-kits for large, communal bonfires, designed to draw people towards the light and into the warm to...

Users are facing down the web forum's IPO plans, but Big Tech's attract-and-extract cycle can't be stopped.

Arcane curation from the IndieWeb, Fediverse and Cybersecurity realms

The Fediverse, especially through Mastodon, has been acknowledged by the major players as a threat —to be eliminated.

Cory Doctorow named it. You have lived it. Every platform begins by being useful, then monetises its users, then monetises its business customers, then dies.

So long, and thanks for all the fish. 🐬

What’s on your mind today? I want to make the argument that the coming innovations which AI will bring have already been “priced in” to the economic growth of the country and of the world. Like, the future productivity boosts from AI are already baked into the market’s expectations and growth forecasts? Yes, but in a deeper way than you suggest. It’s not that people today are looking at what AI might produce and pricing that into their forecasts. Instead, it’s something that’s been priced in for hundreds of years. Let’s go back to the 1700s, before the Industrial Revolution, when the GDP of the world was growing about 0.1% per year.”

The parallel between GenAI Slop and Infinite Jest's The Entertainment

Click to view full size image Caption: No thanks Cory Doctorow wrote a book recently called The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, which I like and think everyone should read. At …

For-profit social media must die so we can live

Americans have always had a strained relationship with factual reality. From early efforts to redefine genocide as the justified expression of deity-sanctioned exceptionalism, to generations of marketing designed to cultivate inadequacy, Americans have been conditioned to conflate artifice and reality. While the internet has been a democratizing force, the attention economy has also exploited our

I need to break up with Discord, but he's friends with all of my friends.

This piece by Cory Doctorow on TikTok’s enshittification (also available at Wired) contains some of the best and simplest descriptions of how online platforms l

As of late it has become rather fashionable for established tech orgs running established platforms to attempt to make their platforms profitable. While the exact underlying reasons for this in each case varies, the end result is the same: Whatever the secret sauce was, the org manages to forever taint the platform with the changes they end up making. Who are we talking about? Today we’ll be discussing Reddit, Twitch, StackOverflow and Twitter.

The fourth and final keynote for Everything Open 2023 was given by Professor Rebecca Giblin of [...]

The personal homepage of The Doctor.

With Twitter’s stability looking less and less assured, and other social networks making decisions so unpopular as to cause overt user rebellion, many Web users are wondering how they are goi…

Do you know de wey? Lemme show you de wey!

It isn’t a new phenomenon, but it seems to matter more

The 2010s was a period of the internet colonized by platforms, which caused 'enshittification' of web products. Users and developers both suffered, but are fighting back now through the decentralized web.

Enshittification is when your product degrades over time because the company has spent more time squeezing out of the competition and curbing regulation. The product is gradually becoming less self-service and the employees no longer care about the product better.

How to think about the arrival of commercial offerings in the Fediverse

An up close and personal look into why we should be extremely careful when sharing about ourselves online, no matter how shiny an app or network might be.

I had a lengthy pretext, but decided to cut the chase and jump right into the main part. I am experimenting with this new writing format that I enjoyed and would love to hear some feedback if you liked or not. Please, no praises for the sake of it. I would like to improve my writing, false confidence does more harm than good for my goals. Thanks (: Bob is a very busy man, travels a lot for work, has very little time to pack things up.

An anticapitalist tech blog. Embrace the technology that liberates us. Smash that which does not.

An anticapitalist tech blog. Embrace the technology that liberates us. Smash that which does not.

A few months ago, Cory Doctorow1 wrote a very memorable blog post about the enshittification of social-media platforms, focused on TikTok. I've been thinking since then about how prevalent this trend is and how much it makes me worry for our future.It's mentioned...

A guide for Lemmy, Kbin and general Reddit off-ramping. Inclues lists of threadiverse platforms, mobile clients, interesting instances, and other related communities.

My site is my (digital) home. It's where I put all my e-stuff. It's a comfortable space for me to hang out and for friends to gather.

Why I moved back from a big blogging platform to a static-site generator and joined the Small Web.

Raphael Kabo's personal website and writing on programming, poetry, and academia.

Celebrating 20 years of writing about culture and design on the We Made This blog

Yet another brief and partial attempt to make sense of the current AI debate

The web was supposed to be read/write. Platforms took over instead.

My love of RSS is something I’m not shy about. I think it’s a pretty excellent one-to-many communication tool. But what’s interesting is if you look at its history, it had one major flaw (that’s also partly why I love it). And in many people’s minds, RSS is a dead technology. This blog post came directly from a slack discussion with the local tech scene that went a little something like this:

I recently switched to a

Thinking about the smaller more personal web, and making this site my home

Based on my talk for PragueJS meetup from February 2024

This issue includes bits of philosophy, AI, tools, software development, performance, diagnostics, security, architecture and of course .NET and .NET Internals.

<p>So, Bandcamp’s new bosses are caught <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-bargaining-union-layoffs-songtradr-18432047.php">union-busti

<p>Owncast is an ethical, community-run, open-source alternative to streaming platforms like Twitch. It’s a welcoming, growing community of lovely weirdos

Enshittification is when an online platform becomes more monetized and less user-oriented the longer it lasts. The term was theorized by Canadian writer an

Minimal styling, zero tracking or ads, and really fast. I’ve spent hundreds of hours designing this blog. It’s my best attempt to represent my soul. After I die, this project will still float in the vast space of the Internet. Text matters most on this website. I wanted to ensure no visitor felt the need to turn on reader mode. I experimented with various background colors, font colors, content width, navigation menus, and font sizes to embody my love for the books like these.

The podcast industry has long relied on the open nature of RSS to sustain a variety of small businesses. But that could all disappear if YouTube wins.

computers i guess

After weeks of burning through users’ goodwill, Reddit is facing a moderator strike and an exodus of its most important users. It’s the latest example of a social media site making a critical mistake: users aren’t there for the services, they’re there for the community. Building barriers to access...

I have had to make some behind-the-scenes changes to this website. In the process, I am planning to make it more interoperable with the fediverse and indieweb standards — and I am sticking with WordPress.

Recently I had to intensively research a couple of topics involving potential purchase decisions. My experience was utterly miserable.

How I make my photo gallery in XML and what's lovely about it

Do you know de wey? Lemme show you de wey!

The CTO of my company appeared in a recent Wired article about Local-First Software. Gotta say, it is pretty exciting to be in the pages of Wired. “LoFi” is something Fission is trying to enable wi…

Hi All! Welcome to Own Your Web! 🎉 First of all, I’d like to thank you again for signing up! 🤗 When I shared the link to the newsletter last weekend, I did...

Hi All! 🤗 At the beginning of this year, I wrote in a blog post which I titled The Year of the Personal Website: In the search for a permanent home on the...

Lots of TV, but not much else.

In 2023, the world of online technology has truly changed. In around a decade, the landscape has really shifted from one of techno-optimism to one of profit-grabbing and “enshittificationR…

I remember a time when the social internet wasn’t just five endless scrolling websites. Not a day went by when there wasn’t something new and exciting just around the corner. Today, it seems like that internet is but a distant memory fading away. What we’re left with is something inherently harmful to the way people foster connections.

Restarting this blog after 10 years of no posts, 20 years of owning it. Decided to start completely fresh. Thanks for checking it out.

Attention conservation notice: 5,500 words about a conference you didn’t attend in a city where you probably don’t live by a person who is manifestly unqualified to opine on either. As …

Why Twitter and Reddit are increasing the cost to use their APIs.

Our company recently announced a fundraise. We were grateful for all the community support, but the Internet also raised a few of its colle...

Digital sovereignty has a bad reputation. In internet governance circles, sovereignty is considered awkward enough to be referred to by as the "s-word." It is often associated with misguided attempts at returning to the era of national champions, like building a French search engine or a European Google, or worse with the eternal boogeyman that is the "splinternet." It doesn't have to be this way!

Hi All! Welcome to Own Your Web! 🎉 First of all, I’d like to thank you again for signing up! 🤗 When I shared the link to the newsletter last weekend, I did...

Hi All! 🤗 At the beginning of this year, I wrote in a blog post which I titled The Year of the Personal Website: In the search for a permanent home on the...

Note: This is cross-posted from my newsletter, to which you can subscribe here. x Here are some thoughts that have been kicking around my head for some time. They’re most definitively related…

The froth has subsided. And in its wake, organizations have found some truly short-sighted approaches to labour.

I spent seven years at Snapchat. I thought things would be different.

Internet grew out of a non-commercial academic network with free resources for everyone. Can one get back to this dream of free Internet and build a lifestyle out of it? Well yeah I guess so, kinda worked for me.

Given the hype around artificial intelligence, we wrote down our positions on the technology. Here’s a few ideas we’ll bring to the table.

Why we keep buying bad products—and worse narratives

Opinion: It's not just you – things really are getting worse

Realizing that I wasn't polishing things in the way I always said, I think I can put my ruminations to rest.

Reflections on the arcane art of making good, ethical websites

A blog about CSS, front-end development, the web, and beyond.

A blog about CSS, front-end development, the web, and beyond.