I am under the impression that the term was popularized, if not invented, by Cory Doctorow. See his many writings on his ad & tracker-free website; https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/

All of this is true, but I wanted to relate a similar phenomenon that I observed some 30 years ago that might be of interest, or at least entertaining, to everyone here.

In my formative years, I spent a lot of time reading Usenet, which, briefly, is a text-only forum not dissimilar to bulletin boards or subreddits or Lemmy communities.

I frequented one group in particular called alt.sysadmin.recovery. Most Usenet groups began with alt. by archaic convention, and the rest of the name is simply descriptive or categorical. There were groups like alt.hobbies.baking and so on. Again, not dissimilar from (and likely inspiration for) these modern web-based communities.

This group was for system administrators (or "sysadmins") to generally gripe with one another about the difficulties of their jobs, dealing with users on their systems or networks, and similar. One of the rules of the group was that no advice was ever to be requested, nor given. It was strictly for sysadmins to vent. The key point here is that everyone in the group was in some technical role.

What was unique about alt.sysadmin.recovery was that you couldn't post to it. At least, it seemed that you couldn't, because the group was set to be moderated, but had no moderators. If you posted a message to a moderated group, the message would be emailed to all of the moderators on record, who would either delete or ignore them, or apply their stamp of approval for the message to be posted in the group. alt.sysadmin.recovery had no moderator emails configured.

The trick is a little bit technical. Usenet posts are quite similar to emails: they have some "header" fields (like the title of the post, its author, and so forth) and a body. Most of the headers are not displayed directly (which is also true for email), such as what Usenet software sent the message, and so on.

When a moderator approved a message in a Usenet group, their client would append an Approved: header line with some value, like their name, or the date, or something. As long as the Approved: header was there and had any value at all, the message would be distributed to the group.

So the trick was to simply append that header when you posted the message. Since there were no moderators anyway, nobody could ever accuse you of bypassing the system. Bypassing the moderation system was, in fact, the entire point. You had to know enough about how moderation worked in Usenet to post a message to the group.

One of the lasting results was that alt.sysadmin.recovery was never overrun by bots and spam, even as the rest of Usenet became an absolute cesspool through the '80s.

Which brings me back to my point. A few hoops to jump through and a few initial challenges to adoption can go a long way as a filter for who can show up and interact. Of course we would want Lemmy to be welcoming to anyone who will make the community better, brighter, more fun, and more useful... But we can take our time cracking open the floodgates. Maybe that's for the best.

Reddit was dead from the day Conde Nast bought it. Every day since then was a roll of the dice as to whether they'd attempt to seize more profits and ruin it, or not. This happens to essentially every public or aspiring public company eventually. The need for perpetual growth warps decisions and guts the original mission in the end.

We call it "autosarcophagy" or "self-cannibalism."

As I understand it, Reddit also took on a lot of external capital investment, which only makes the pressure to perform financially even greater. I can't fault them for making the decisions they have to make to keep their jobs, keep their executive salaries, and so on.

Long live the sustainable, community-driven, community-funded future! Nobody can screw this up for us if we are the ones footing the bill.

Can we also have a moment of silence for all the other great link sites that have died?

Stumbleupon, kuro5hin, digg, fark (still exists technically but as a shell of its former self)

What was your favorite before reddit?

Yessss! Just got a sewing machine and finished my first bag (it took me like two months on and off) and I'm never going to toss torn clothing again.

I ordered this cool graphic t-shirt and it was way too big, so I complained to the retailer and they sent a smaller one and told me to keep it. So I took a stab at taking it in, and, well, it went terribly (I need a walking foot for stretchy fabrics), but it still worked out and it's totally wearable.

Once you start to realize that it's not that hard to mend things... It's like a super power.

I have a couple of really nice REI camp chairs and one of them got several holes burned through it by flying embers around the fire one night, so I patched them. I didn't even try to make it match, I full-on chose a totally different color patch, and bright red heavy duty thread, and it looks badass.

If you're interested, I wrote about some of the things I moved to self-host on my blog; https://blog.aaronbieber.com/2022/11/20/the-rise-of-the-indie-web.html

I recommend checking out https://indieweb.org/ as well!

That’s only true when you use a generally accepted definition of the word “improving.”

When you use the capitalist robber baron definition, he’s spot on!

Slashdot isn't really dead though is it? Still very active, just, not as popular perhaps.

I'm struggling with a conflict here, and I hope we can have an open conversation about it.

I just started a monthly donation to Beehaw via OpenCollective, and I love what Beehaw stands for and the "be(e) nice" policy. It looks like Beehaw is gaining traction, and there are topics and people here that I want to engage with.

At the same time, I see things like this: https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379 describing very specific ways in which the creators of the Lemmy platform are perpetuating pretty gross ideas about what the world should be like.

The struggle I have is that Beehaw is independent and aligned with my values, but it uses the Lemmy platform and therefore provides traction to the existence of Lemmy, attention to the Lemmy project, and the downstream benefits derived therefrom to its creators and maintainers.

In general, I think that the creator of something should remain separate from their work. You can appreciate Harry Potter without supporting TERF ideas. But Lemmy creators are taking their contributions and funneling them into running an instance that reads like a tankie troll farm (at best) and that creates real-world harm.

Mainly I'm curious to hear from Beehaw founder(s) how you imagine this could play out? Have we given consideration to how much our efforts here might inadvertently contribute in some very small way to forwarding those negative social agendas? What is to be done?

Throughout history, people have always been driven to create, and others have always sought out creative works. For that reason, I don't think we'll necessarily "stagnate culturally" in a broad sense.

However, at least in the US, we're already standing at the precipice of making creative work practically impossible. Our extremely weak (by peer nation standards) labor protection laws and social support systems tends to strip life of everything but the obligation to work.

Our last bastion of hope for structural protection for creativity is the possibility that anyone could both create, and profit from it. Copyright law was, originally, intended to amplify that potential.

I usually point to stock photography as an area where people used to be able to make at least modest money, but nowadays you'd be lucky to make poverty wages. The market was flooded by cheap, high-quality cameras, and thus cheap, high-quality images. AI will do the same thing for many other mediums.

What has me really concerned is that the majority of really cool makers and creators I watch on YouTube are Canadian. I've convinced myself that this is because someone living in Canada can take the very real risk of sinking their life's energy into starting a YouTube channel because at least they know that if they get cancer, they have somewhere to go.

Not so here in America. If you aren't working for an established employer, or sitting on quite a bit of cash for independent health insurance, you're taking substantial risk in being unemployed for any length of time (assuming you have the choice). Even if you do "make it," the costs of self-insurance for sole proprietors is no joke!

So the only people taking their life in their own hands to create works of real cultural value are 1) the few percent who manage to get paid for it, 2) the independently wealthy and/or retired, and 3) the poor and desperate who would be just as precarious in either case.

It's not our finest hour here, if I do say so. I hope the rise of AI helps amplify this conversation. I am truly concerned about it.

Nobody has mentioned one of the top purely technical reasons companies are reluctant to open source things: support.

I worked for a company that opened a UI design framework and people loved it, but the moment you have an outside audience, you can't just make breaking changes or pivot the direction. You have to be sure your thing is completely stable before you open it up.

They felt they couldn't move fast enough while supporting the open one, so they forked it and just maintained the public one so the private one could change faster.

There are costs to support. I'm not saying companies shouldn't do it (Google does, all the time), bit smaller companies may not be able to afford it.

I, too, miss Usenet.

The moment "Don't Be So Serious" starts playing on your first delivery will live rent-free in my head for the rest of my natural life.

For sync a la Dropbox, check out Syncthing! I run it in Windows, Linux, Mac, my Synology NAS, and Android. Works amazingly well.

I've just put some clover seed down in the dead/grassless areas of my lawn and it's starting to come up. I also went with white clover because I'm in New England and that species was recommended as best for our climate.

All of our community grass areas in town are a mix of grass and white clover, including the park at the center of town where they hold the farmer's market and people are always walking and playing. The clover seems to thrive there and isn't bothered by the foot traffic, mowing, or never being watered.

My reason for trying it was to fill dead areas without wasting a ton of water keeping grass alive.

I'm at like 60 hours of Dead Cells now and I still haven't beaten the thing. Can't get past the Hand of the King, but dang is that game satisfying to play.

I was never a roguelike fan until I played Hades and now I guess I'm an addict.

I appreciate the response. I don't feel strongly about it at this point, but I did want to make sure that y'all were at least aware of some of what is going on. Fedi.Tips, which seems like a quite popular resource for newcomers, is strongly discouraging Lemmy as a whole for this reason. I don't know how much of a headwind that presents for Beehaw, but it's worth knowing.

Still love Beehaw and the mission and the values!

Investment usually ultimately ruins everything. In reddit's case it's an even tighter needle to thread because the platform itself produces little value. To be attractive to investors and to produce returns on that investment (perpetually), they have to make operational decisions that prioritize monetization (like all public companies).

u/spez wants his big exit and he'll burn some of it to the ground to get it. But he'll probably get rich, so good for him.

That is a spectacular definition though! Spot on!

(Apparently the UI allows you to edit your own deleted comment, but saving it doesn't un-delete it, you just lose what you wrote... Bummer!)

In the conversation on Github, it looks like they considered a trigger and some other options based on DB query analyses, and arrived at a solution. It requires code refactoring, though, so I wouldn't expect it to be out in the wild right away.