FriendOfDeSoto

The Cory Doctorow cycle of enshitification starts with a focus on users, giving them exactly what they want. With a strong user base behind them they then pivot to business customers, advertisers, and the like. And then they turn in on themselves, only looking for shareholder value, and leave the tied up users and the B2B side in the lurch. It’s a business process, during which a social media site’s offerings would decrease in quality. But not every drop in quality is enshitification. A sudden burst of new users, an unforeseen bug in the software, a terrible event in the real world, a scandal behind the scenes can all affect the public’s opinion negatively.

I don’t think every social media platform is doomed to play through the e-cycle. The moment you remove the need for or drastically limit the patronage of B2B customers in the organization, you remove one crucial element from the equation. The same happens if you remove the need to create earnings growth, i.e. not become a corporation with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. That’s why federated social media can probably only turn to shit because of the people who use it and not because a boardroom somewhere decided to squeeze the last bit of juice out of that lemon. That’s just life then but not per se enshitification.

So I think Facebook and Insta are good examples of enshitification. Reddit to an extent also. Twitter I think was a different story. It never got beyond a point where it was just great for the users. They didn’t make enough money from advertisers. They didn’t then turn their attention solely to their share prices with any success. They saw a sucker who was gonna pay billions for it and parachuted out. Twitter then became shit but because of its new owner, not because of this business cycle.

We tend to look at everything with nostalgia. Was the past not more fun? We cannot be trusted to judge this dispassionately.

Tragisch ist bis heute, dass der Bindestrich es noch nicht über den Atlantik geschafft hat.

You probably don’t. Those tummy acids are strong. I would wipe the surface with soap. Maybe submerge them in water if you can immediately place them in direct sunlight afterwards to dry them out again. Wipe surface again and hope for the best. I would water an un-vomited-upon Birk along with the offender, maybe not in the same sink water, to wear them out equally.

You’re trying to apply conventional logic to the orange one. That doesn’t work. Stop doing that. It’s all about his frail ego, flooding the zone with bs, denying everything and never giving in, and blaming everybody else for stuff he’s done.

And just to give the poor, battered, beleaguered, ever-so-stable leader a break, there are sea lanes and flight routes available to the cartels as well. They didn’t have to go through the US (but probably did).

Yes. Europeans have been enjoying a bed that was made for them in this area as part of a security package that came into existence after WW2. They didn’t have to invest in intelligence as much because they had it delivered to their doors. If that delivery system stops, they will have to replace it. They can do that.

I wouldn’t be surprised if at EU level (+UK) we will see a lot of unified defense initiatives that mention in a subordinated clause that intelligence coordinating and sharing will be part of that as well.

The most famous fountain for coin tossing/wish making is Trevi in Rome (and I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole concept came from there). You are legally forbidden from taking money back out of it there. The moment the coin sinks into the water, it belongs to the municipality, so taking it back out constitutes theft. The municipality is allowed (and indeed forced) to clear the coins from the fountain (otherwise there would be no water left after a while) and AFAIK they donate the cash for a good cause.