One of the things that bothers me a little about modern discussions of social-media "enshittification", and whether it can be avoided, is that we're in such a Gilded Age situation that it can be hard to disentangle the effects of market capitalism from things that are just effects of scale, or of human nature.
I was thinking about this while poking around an archive of stuff I wrote on LIveJournal back around 2003 (which I later moved to Dreamwidth). I'd just started to post there more after a time when my primary online activity was on Usenet, which was clearly decaying. And I was very concerned with the question of why that was happening and how inevitable it was.
Usenet, of course, was resolutely noncommercial. And social media wasn't really big business yet. Friendster was a new thing. Facebook and even Myspace came into existence during this period; there was no Twitter. The blogosphere was big, and I'd seen some blogs grow and decay.
Some of the troublesome phenomena were already commercial: there was spam advertising, there were huge (for the time) wads of new users flooding onto Usenet through AOL, that kind of thing. But the discussion about this seemed to largely focus on scale problems, and sort of elitist ideas of too many riffraff coming in. There was no such thing as an engagement-optimizing feed algorithm yet. But there were already all these problems.
I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess just a broad skepticism of non-corporate social media as a panacea, though there's obviously a class of problems it helps.
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@mattmcirvin In the specific case of Usenet, user interface was a big factor. Usenet, not to put too fine a point on it, is complicated, hard to use, and hard to parse. Forums, on the other hand, are simpler to use, and arrange posts in simple chronological order. Likewise, blogs, as well as sites like Slashdot, Fark, and Digg, were all much easier than Usenet for people to get to grips with.
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@mattmcirvin Much of Usenet's use cases were replaced with the WWW because the web was simply better suited to those things.
But greed does tend to lead to a site's downfall. Reddit gobbled up Digg's userbase partly because Digg was enshittifying, but also because Reddit had the superior interface (and Reddit has gotten big enough that it's starting to go the way of Digg).
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@mattmcirvin Musk's rampage across Twitter is definitely helping BlueSky, but from my understanding, BlueSky might still have beaten Twitter eventually due to doing user interface better.
Likewise, even before the whole Musk thing, Mastodon was already the most popular Fediverse application because Rochko put so much effort into the user interface.
What I'm saying is, the most successful service is the one that's easiest to use.
Inspired by @Crazypedia: https://pagan.plus/@Crazypedia/113612775279129544
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@Infrapink @mattmcirvin I wouldn't use that as an argument in favor of Mastodon's user interface.
Eugene's refusal to alter or add controls and customization to the interface and make it accessible to other people has driven off more people than he's brought into the fediverse with those decisions 🙃
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