Ey used the wrong word, but this in fact is correct. Once lemmy gets popular, bot farms will definitely will siege it, and the amount of “bots and shills” will rise
Comment on Lemmy is the best social media
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 5 months agoEnshittification isn’t what happens when something becomes popular, it’s what happens to disruptive tech and commodities that get increasingly fine-tuned for profit after competition inevitably floods in. It’s a product of monetization.
Lemmy is FOSS so that won’t happen, plus you can splinter off into your own walled garden instance like Beehaw if you want.
sukhmel@programming.dev 5 months ago
Distant_Foreground@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Maybe “dickheadification” instead?
awwwyissss@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Enshittification also happens because of government propaganda, like the authoritarian propaganda Lemmy.ml spreads for the CCP.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Aee you suggesting people on Lemmy.ml are paid by the Chinese government to spread propagands?
awwwyissss@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Some of them yes, absolutely.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Do you have any source for that? I would be curious to see.
sukhmel@programming.dev 5 months ago
I think, they are only paid indirectly in that the money are spent on propaganda to make them act like this
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That’s a single instance, they can be blocked and avoided. The FOSS community is way more resiliant to enshittification.
awwwyissss@lemm.ee 5 months ago
I blocked Hexbear and they made accounts on lemmy.ml. if I block lemmy.ml they’ll just make accounts somewhere else. We need to collectively become aware of the problem and deal with it together.
areyouevenreal@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Not really, their users make alts everywhere else too. It’s also quite easy just to keep setting up new instances too.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Deal with them just like regular trolls. You shouldn’t be like the Muskrat cultists who think content moderation is useless and thus should be given up on. I understand, I suffered from activism burnout on the regular (one was right in the middle of an election campaign), but one should not give up easily.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
You make it sound like monetization can’t happen on a FOSS platform. Bots are a form of monetization, it’s just not by the people who created and control the platform.
As it gets popular, bots will come for the purpose of creating an audience and monetizing them.
Shyfer@ttrpg.network 5 months ago
That’s true, but it’s just not enshittification. It’s a different word.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Hmmm interesting. I was under the impression that enshitification was “making something shittier in the pursuit of (eg) greed”, I didn’t realize that it only applies to when the creator (controller? owner?) of the thing does it.
Has it always been used for this specific case? If so, what is the word for the more general case I described?
Shyfer@ttrpg.network 5 months ago
The original use is specifically a service platform that’s made worse by the owners to get more money after first being good to everyone to collect a large user base, then by squeezing the end users, then by squeezing the business customers to collect value for themselves.
It sounds like a really specific definition, but you’d be surprised by how often it applies. He originally thought of it to apply to Tik Tok after noticing it following a similar pattern as Facebook, Amazon, and I think Google. Then the internet realized it could keep applying his term to so many more companies, like Spotify, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Reddit, Microsoft, Apple, all streaming companies, and physical product companies like car companies or John Deere, etc and it’s shot up in popularity and use since then.
Not sure of the general use case you describe, but the person who invented the term in that article I linked sounds like he doesn’t mind if it’s used in a more general case for things getting worse from greed, so feel free to go ahead and keep using it I guess lol. Although maybe we should come up with a different, more general term for that if there isn’t already one? I’ve got nothing, but if anyone has suggestions lol.