Cory Doctorow Asks: Can Interoperability End 'Enshittification' and Fix Social Media? (pluralistic.net) 54
This weekend Cory Doctorow delved into "the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints."
If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit... Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.
Doctorow argues that "more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it." Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation. If Zuckerberg feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or illegal anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the "pivot to video"), he would treat his users better. But Facebook's rise to power took place during the second half of the neoliberal era, when the last shreds of regulatory muscle that survived the Reagan revolution were being devoured... But it's worse than that, because Zuckerberg and other tech monopolists figured out how to harness "IP" law to get the government to shut down third-party technology that might help users resist enshittification... [Doctorow says this is "why companies are so desperate to get you to use their apps rather than the open web"] IP law is why you can't make an alternative client that blocks algorithmic recommendations. IP law is why you can't leave Facebook for a new service and run a scraper that imports your waiting Facebook messages into a different inbox. IP law is why you can't scrape Facebook to catalog the paid political disinformation the company allows on the platform...
But then Doctorow argues that "Legacy social media is at a turning point," citing as "a credible threat" new systems built on open standards like Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto): I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That's because my goal isn't the success of the Fediverse — it's the defeat of enshtitification. My answer to "why spend money fixing Bluesky?" is "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?" If you care about a better internet — and not just the Fediverse — then you should share this goal, too... Mastodon has one feature that Bluesky sorely lacks — the federation that imposes antienshittificatory discipline on companies and offers an enshittification fire-exit for users if the discipline fails. It's long past time that someone copied that feature over to Bluesky.
Doctorow argues that federated and "federatable" social media "disciplines enshittifiers" by freeing social media's captive audiences.
"Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else."
Doctorow argues that "more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it." Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation. If Zuckerberg feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or illegal anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the "pivot to video"), he would treat his users better. But Facebook's rise to power took place during the second half of the neoliberal era, when the last shreds of regulatory muscle that survived the Reagan revolution were being devoured... But it's worse than that, because Zuckerberg and other tech monopolists figured out how to harness "IP" law to get the government to shut down third-party technology that might help users resist enshittification... [Doctorow says this is "why companies are so desperate to get you to use their apps rather than the open web"] IP law is why you can't make an alternative client that blocks algorithmic recommendations. IP law is why you can't leave Facebook for a new service and run a scraper that imports your waiting Facebook messages into a different inbox. IP law is why you can't scrape Facebook to catalog the paid political disinformation the company allows on the platform...
But then Doctorow argues that "Legacy social media is at a turning point," citing as "a credible threat" new systems built on open standards like Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto): I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That's because my goal isn't the success of the Fediverse — it's the defeat of enshtitification. My answer to "why spend money fixing Bluesky?" is "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?" If you care about a better internet — and not just the Fediverse — then you should share this goal, too... Mastodon has one feature that Bluesky sorely lacks — the federation that imposes antienshittificatory discipline on companies and offers an enshittification fire-exit for users if the discipline fails. It's long past time that someone copied that feature over to Bluesky.
Doctorow argues that federated and "federatable" social media "disciplines enshittifiers" by freeing social media's captive audiences.
"Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else."
"No" (Score:3, Insightful)
Betteridge's law of headlines would say "no" and I would back the "no" as a wager for this question ninety nine times out of a hundred.
Enshittification is more a deliberate feature than a bug.
Re:"No" [But better financial models could?] (Score:4, Insightful)
You beat me to it and had a nice emphasis. Maybe you couldn't carry the ball farther because of the rush to FP?
I think solutions should be considered in terms of changes that are possible and which create better situations. Without solutions it's just shikata ga nai. (Japanese expression that's harder to translate than it seems... Sort of like "You can't get there from here" in this context?) Without better financial models things are going to keep going the same way. I personally favor a different tax system in favor of freedom over greed--but the greedy people with lots of money are really good at bribing the cheapest politicians to rig the rules and refs for more profits for them...
My mind is already wandering again to fixing journalism. Slashdot is a pretty good illustrator of that problem? Or relevant reading? Right now the two most relevant that come to mind are Antifragile by Taleb and The Anxious Generation by Haidt...
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe that is correct. I didn't bother reading the whole article, though I did skim read it, but I didn't really think that I could add more to that "no" response without really diving deep into what Cory wrote, and then mull it over. I have Cory in my RSS feeds, but I haven't caught up on my backlog of his writings.
Maybe respond after a few days. Not because I want to come off as intellectual, but more from a fear of not looking like an idiot.
IMO there is too much inertia for people ("users" or "the produc
Re:"No" [But better financial models could?] (Score:5, Informative)
Another factor he misses: you have to actually have something that replaces the value. He's only halfway there with his bit about people being in rare-disease support groups, neighborhood chats, etc.
One of the biggest reasons Meta has been able to enshittify so quickly is that it does things no other current social media does.
No other social media (Instagram, twitter/x, the CCP tiktok/douyin/rednote/etc...) does calendaring events with invites. This was one of Facebook's big advantages when it came to performing artists and venues. Now, it's enshittifying fast - 80% of the people you invite from your friendlist, follows, groups, etc. don't ever get notified - but NOBODY ELSE IS EVEN TRYING TO COMPETE on this front. The last one that did was Google Plus.
No other social media has consistent internal groupings like Facebook does. The only thing close is Nextdoor and that's geography-specific.
Instagram is easy to leave. Twitter/X was easy to leave, or even ignore, for the same reason. They don't provide anything persistent. Facebook has the unique position of literally being the only platform that implements certain functions, right now. And that in turn is helping Facebook to enshittify faster. Facebook is well below the Trust Thermocline but, well... where are people going to go?
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty much false. The reason FB is still here is it's 'the place everyone is' - that's literally it's only 'feature' at this point.
Moving services is chicken and the egg; nobody leaves b/c everybody else is still there. And nobody is going to *fund* a competitor for the same reason.
Twitter STILL is the biggest micro blog platform and will be for some time. Bluesky is a silo-wolf in federated-sheeps clothing...but if it does actually federate that's better. The problem is they are delaying the feder
No: Airlines (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think you've got it backwards on airlines. Consumers sent a loud and clear signal by selecting Frontier, Spirit, Norwegian, Ryanair, etc., that they preferred the crappy experience at the cheapest possible cost over the more pleasant experience at a higher price. Legacy carriers responded to that expressed preference and started following suit.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My mind is already wandering again to fixing journalism. Slashdot is a pretty good illustrator of that problem? Or relevant reading? Right now the two most relevant that come to mind are Antifragile by Taleb and The Anxious Generation by Haidt...
It's been a while since I read Antifragile. IIRC, Taleb was a fan of hormesis.
When Slashdot presents actual summaries of news stories (rather than just copying the entire story), maybe reading it is an hormetic process? That has a good side and a bad side. The former is that we can stay aware of what's going on in the (tech?) world without overdosing. The latter is that we become desensitized to the point of uncaring jadedness.
I think Taleb also stressed resilience, but again my memory of the book is not gr
Re: (Score:2)
The point is: If you design your service irrevocably such that users can move to the competition, you shouldn't enshittify it or the users will move to the competition. Which provides an incentive for each participant in the federated network to provide the best service and claim a niche that is desired by a certain target demographic instead of trying to trap users into the service even though they hate it. Ask any Facebook user is they really like Facebook or would prefer a another service, if only their
Re: (Score:2)
> ... you shouldn't enshittify it or the users will move to the competition. Which provides an incentive for each participant in the federated network to provide the best service ...
Until collusion happens. Yes, this is supposed to be illegal but good luck trying to pin THAT on companies. They have more expensive lawyers.
Re: "No" (Score:2)
You make a good argument for more political parties, not against social media competition.
Marketing is as marketing does (Score:2)
Define 'fix' (Score:4)
In theory - but probably not in practice over the long term - you could enact legislation to control the worst aspects of social media.
But realistically, people are going to be people and social media's existence is primarily powered by gossip, one-upping, and the herd mentality. It's a huge target for exploitation by advertisers and propaganda campaigns that will not be ignored.
Re:Define 'fix' (Score:5, Insightful)
This wouldn't fix "the worst aspects" of social media, it'd do the opposite, kill the best aspect, which is that people from countries with poor freedom of speech rules are able to get the word out about abuses, etc. For all the faults of Twitter, I recall one major event in 2009 where it postponed a maintenance update to ensure people in Iran [france24.com], which was undergoing major political changes at the time, had an outlet. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the only time either. (I miss Twitter, the worst legacy of the Straightened Swastika is killing it.)
Again, what are you trying to achieve here? The worst shit I've seen on social media was from accounts associated with named people. People who post anonymously or pseudonymously don't seem to be any worse than... well, you can insert a list here, any names I mention will probably result in "How dare you!"s from half the crowd here. But restricting pseudonymous speech to people who trust social media companies and courts not to leak their information (What? Let's hope T-Mobile doesn't buy any social media companies) seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater on the basis of a prejudiced view of pseudonyminity.
Difficult without implementing your second option, which seems bad. Maybe just encourage parents to parent?
I have no problem with that one, but does it need to be legislated?
I'm not disagreeing here... but plenty on Slashdot will. Why limit this to social media though?
In the end I disagree with most of your legislative actions. I think a better option is just stop giving control of social media to corporations whose primary concern is profit. And that's where TFA comes in, because Doctorow is arguing for federation, for people to be able to set up their own social media servers without having to go elsewhere to talk to friends. That removes probably the single biggest problem with social media being shit.
Yes, this means nothing centralized can stop hate speech and misinformation. But it's pretty hard to get it into your feed unless you follow those who promote it. And if you intentionally follow "@killtranspeople" or "@womenstayhome", well, that's on you, not society at large. Those people will always exist. It's just Musk and Zuckerberg have made a conscious effort to push those assholes in your feed, the first because he believes it, the latter because it makes people angry and improves engagement. Neither would have that power if you weren't forced to use Facebook to talk to your friends on Facebook.
(To give Zuck credit, at least Threads is supporting federation now.)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting comment and it's been an interesting discussion so far. Without any AC dross? Has Slashdot implemented some change?
With regarding your comment, there are parts I agree with but you aren't offering any solution approaches. If it can't be fixed, then it is even reasonable to call it a problem? What changes can you conceive of that might make things less bad?
I do disagree with you on one point. I think the biggest lies start with nameless trolls. It is only AFTER they are retweeted or otherwise pro
Re: (Score:2)
>I think the biggest lies start with nameless trolls. It is only AFTER they are retweeted or otherwise promoted by "influential" accounts that the vicious lies and conspiracy theories become part of the public discourse.
That's deliberate. They love to insulate themselves from consequences with the disclaimer, "people are saying". They repeat the lie, but aren't taking credit as the source of it.
Re: (Score:3)
I like Doctorow's funny word antienshittificatory, as in a penalty. But I think a lot of this could be resolved by legally recognizing that a person owns all rights to his or her information, including the list of their followers, posts, calendar events, etc. and has the right to access them via API, to import/export/share them as desired. It seems like the EU is probably halfway there. And that a social media or other company is morally and legally obligated to allow people to freely associate and to leave
Re: (Score:2)
And here I thought FB is ensh*d because I see all these postings on groups I have not interest in, and all of them quite specifically in the same specific genre and even with the same content (how many Calvin and Hobbes fan groups can there be?). I.e., a major waste of time. And meanwhile, I hardly see any postings from the people on my friends list. FB has become very non-social (in the friends sense), and pushing a lot of (non-propaganda) bot content for which I am too dense to understand the monetization
Re:Define 'fix' (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
"Apply standard (non-American) limits to free speech: No hate speech, no misinformation likely to cause harm (like anti-vax nonsense), no libel"
So you would suggest implementing everywhere else except the USA?
I think you'd still need to be careful with that eccentric moron we currently have a leader. Foreign citizens and corporations may have their income tax doubled:
https://www.ft.com/content/44610d06-5e20-4b3a-8faf-4d745770d43f
Re: (Score:2)
>So you would suggest implementing everywhere else except the USA?
Pretty much. It's a non-starter in the US, everyone's trained to respond with "FREE SPEECH!". I'm surprised it isn't legal in the US to yell 'fire!' in a theatre.
Re: (Score:2)
>*sigh* that red herring is so tiresome. The internet is not a theater building. If it starts on fire, pull the plug.
Are you being deliberately obtuse, or are you just stupid? Given you posted as AC, I'm going to assume the former. You know your response requires misunderstanding my post, you don't care.
>The US is the only country on the planet with free speech written into law.
And that's an outright lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Really, Slashdot ought to ban AC posting.
E N T R O P Y !! (Score:3)
Of course there will be ensh^C -- look around you, what product/service has not degraded over time (after invention)? Part of this is the difficulty measuring quality compared to volumes or profits. And the strong incentives for the latter. But part is also the democratization and optimization of quality.
Remember MySpace? Competition still works. AFAICS, fazebuch is stagnating.
You can always leave (Score:3)
I think it's only 4Chan that says "Remember. You're here forever."
Re: (Score:3)
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
Re: (Score:1)
4chan? They have the least lock in. They have no accounts, not even user handles. If people want to jump ship, they do. And they did quite a few time, have a look at the list of other *chan. For example 8chan was a site made for 4chan users who left because they felt overmoderated. 4chan does not even try to cater different languages, instead people run other boards for their native language. Things can seamlessly move from one of the chans to another, as people just jump into a thread and participate, poss
No for lots of reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
And second the people in control of social media aren't going to let you break their monopolies.
This is a classic catch 22. If you had the political power to fix social media you wouldn't need to fix social media. And make no mistake it's a political problem not a social one let alone an economic one.
But that's tech nerds for you. When you're only tool is a hammer every problem is a nail and when you are a tech nerd every problem has some sort of open source solution.
Every time I see one of these I think of that old comic about the guy so proud of his encryption and then in the last panel is the real world where two guys are talking about beating the password out of him with a wrench
Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
Enshittification is part of the business model.
Facebook started off as a communitly driven, 'make your own apps and share with your friends', ad-free platform, until it's ad-supported competitors went under.
They even did shitty things like encouraging users to enter their email passwords, so they could send invites to your contacts (and collect data on them without their permission), under the guise of 'making it easier to add your friends'
Facebook was open to everyone, without having to log in.
Until they got bigger and bigger, and more and more information got posted exclusively to Facebook. Want to know if your local cafe is open on this public holiday? They don't have their own website, you don't know if their Google Maps hours have been updated, it's all on Facebook posts.
You can't view that information now without being a logged in user.
The business model is to grow, any way you can, become to biggest platform, use that power to lock everyone in and extract as much as possible from the userbase.
Ethics are collateral damage.
Privacy violations and lawsuits are just a cost of doing business, no doubt budgeted for.
It's why they have their own legal department full of lawyers. Fighting a lawsuit is already paid for in the lawyers wages, no need to hire a law firm if you need one, they've already planned and budgeted for it.
The powers that be (Score:3)
Just like email? (Score:4, Interesting)
Email is decentralized and interoperable. Nobody "owns" it. You can set up your own server if you want to.
Did interoperability fix email? Hardly.
Advertisers and trackers will find their way into this new decentralized social media effort, if it succeeds at all.
So in short, no, not at all.
Re: (Score:3)
enshitification isn't limited to ads being included or increased in a given thing.
it's about the company producing the product or service, treating the desire of their investors above those of their customers to the detriment of the long term survival of the company and/or degradation of existing features and functionality of the products or services in question.
the idea here is by taking the product or service out of one company's hands, they can't deliver what their investors want while degrading their pr
Re: Just like email? (Score:2)
I think the idea of self regulating communities is either what we have with Reddit for instance. It's a natural way to organize. Perhaps like the early days of newsgroups. So you will still have porn and abusive uses.. because its open... but a model of much smaller social groups vs. Global Reach.
Re: (Score:2)
I get your point that the spamification of email isn't exactly the same, but my point is not to be precisely on point, but to say that even if you decentralize, there will be those who abuse the system.
but a serial media type of service has to store data
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Social media doesn't have to store anything more than an email server such as an IMAP server has to store.
MS Office in the 90s (Score:2)
We already complained about "bells and whistles" / bloatware in the 90s.
Remember Clippy? Every release of Office was more complex than the last one. And other productivity software outside the Microsoft sphere also kept getting nore obnoxious. As far back as the move from CorelDraw 2 to CorelDraw 3 I have heard people complain about increasing complexity and that was 1991-92.
Fuck that. (Score:2)
They could do this but I would block the do what I did with threads and just block the whole domain. I don't need Twitter Nazis as well as Meta boomers spewing garbage all over my nice calm Mastodon and Bluesky accounts.
Inevitable (Score:2)
Every service, it seems, falls to enshitification. And in the case of sites like Facebook, it isn't just enshitification. It's more like enshitification infested with worms and norovirus with some blood mixed in from a ruptured hemorrhoid.
Not anti-monopoly, but pro-interoperability. (Score:2)
I like that. The hard part is 'when' though, right? When must a company add or maintain competitor interoperability? Who defines it, and controls it? And who pays for that work?
Would the first mover on a new industry have additional work or costs? (like working with government to define the 'competitor external interface' they'd want to work with) Would this prevent people from 'innovating' since they don't want to be first?
I'm just spitballing at arguments people who don't want it will mention. An
What is social media actually? (Score:2)
It's not media, in the sense that it does not inform or entertain. Unless spreading anti-social misery is entertaining?
I don't think we're going back to a hypothetical golden age before social media dominated a billion lives. But I think we can survive and grow past this plague. Maybe not into some enlightened state, but perhaps one where we have a less toxic relationship with the technology around us.
Digital Culture is the problem. (Score:2)
It's a little weird that Doctrorow misses out on this, because he himself writes about this in his novel "Little Brother" and even builds narratives around this classic cyberpunk trope in "Walkaway" (good books btw.). In "Little Brother" the books "counter culture" uses some fictional version of the XBox and an alternative open source operating system for it (some Linux variant) as the basis for a citizens network. In "Walkaway" a citizen-driven de-centralized network is a main driver in a conclusive revolu