The Enshittification Myth

Why The Internet Does Not ‘Suck’

I have noticed something. There are a lot of sound bites that people just love to repeat in the comments as if people, upon hearing these profound words, will have an epiphany. It used to happen a lot with the phrase ‘Wherever you go there you are’. There are a lot of reddit comments I read that are solely this phrase. The problem is there are many interpretations of what this means and people may not even agree with it. I wrote my interpretation here.

It’s the false consensus effect. It’s like how if something has a good rotten tomatoes score it means it’s all of a sudden a good movie and the opposite means it’s a bad movie.

Sidenote: How does Dead Reckoning have a 96 on Rotten Tomatoes‽ Can people not see how it’s everyone’s least favourite part of MI3 (The Rabbit’s Foot) just for the entire movie‽ It is the dumbest AI movie I’ve ever seen. It makes me so mad.

It actually reminds me of a story I heard once:

A man goes to prison and the first night while he’s laying in bed contemplating his situation, he hears someone yell out, “44!” Followed by laughter from the other prisoners.

He thought that was pretty odd, then he heard someone else yell out, “72!” Followed by even more laughter.

“What’s going on?” he asked his cellmate.

“Well, we’ve all heard every joke so many times, we’ve given them each a number to make it easier.”

“Oh,” he says, “can I try?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

So, he yells out “102!” and the place goes nuts. People are whooping and laughing in a hysteria. He looks at his cellmate rolling on the ground with tears in his eyes from laughing so hard.

“Wow, good joke huh?” “Yeah! We ain’t never heard that one before!”

…

Anyways there is another phrase, or should it be word that gets thrown around a lot. The word is ‘enshittification’. Now if you haven’t heard of this word before it might be worth reading the original article that talks about it.

And there have been a lot of posts talking about similar themes. Like this one and this one from The Verge.

Now this post was originally supposed to be called “Want To Know Why The Internet Sucks? Look In A Mirror.” And maybe I will still write that post. There are some titles too good not to publish. But when I started writing that post I realized something: I don’t agree with the premise. I don’t agree with enshittification. And the internet does not ‘suck’.

Business 101

First of all most companies do not start profitable. They operate at a loss to gain users relying on external funding. Then when they have a captive audience they turn the monetization on.

Some people may view this as enshittification. But is this really a bad thing? All companies have high initial upfront costs which leads to a period of burning cash. This is not sustainable. It’s as if someone was handing out bags of money and then one day they suddenly stopped and people started complaining.

And it’s not exclusive to online companies. In the real world the phenomenon is known as ‘predatory pricing’. And there are many examples. However there is some controversy of predatory pricing’s effectiveness. One argument against it is if you force a competitor into bankruptcy can’t someone just buy up their assets and compete later?

Now, in the real world, there are significant costs to scaling up a business but not as much in the digital world. So I do wonder if this can even happen online. Like Netflix, famously, has like a bazillion competitors. As does Spotify. Amazon is big, but they do deliver a good service. Of course this comes at the expense of their employees and profitability. I looked at their financials. Despite AWS bringing in significantly less than retail it makes significantly more in profit. And they have to put the pedal to the metal at all times because they know that BestBuy and Walmart are

to eating their lunch. Internet companies just have much lower barriers to entry. If one company can survive so too can a hundred others. So predatory pricing is considerably less effective.

The one exception is Social Media companies like Twitter. Despite Elon Musk’s best attempts to run it into the ground it looks like it’s still going to survive. This is due to network effects. I was thinking of writing an entire post about it. But even here I still don’t think Twitter or Reddit is that bad yet. Oh, Elon Musk changed the logo to a unicode character, the sky is falling. Puh-lease. People are not going to go because of that. But if Twitter did get really bad like in the days of the Twitter Fail Whale people will leave, there are plenty of alternatives.

The Internet Is In A Golden Age

Predatory pricing is not a convincing argument that the internet is getting worse. In fact I think it’s getting better. A lot better. In the last few years we’ve seen companies like Uber, AirBnB, DoorDash, Roblox, TikTok, and who could forget everyone’s favourite fintech Stripe.

Plus the amount of interaction you can do on the internet has gone way up. The internet was based on simple HTML.

But now we have Javascript and we can do way more with it. We are entering a new age of web apps and single page applications. Maybe from a technical standpoint you could argue that this ‘sucks’. You need a ridiculous amount of code to render these sites and that does chew through battery life. So much so that it’s more efficient to watch HD video than browse the web.

And yes, this is probably the most convincing argument for why the internet sucks. But this is not what people say when they say that the internet ‘sucks’. And it’s improving. We now have ways of bypassing HTML and Javascript entirely like with Flutter and technologies like Web Assembly allow more efficient logic.

Final Thoughts

From a technical standpoint the internet might suck. Of course that’s relative. You can do a lot with the internet so maybe it’s worth it. But from a user perspective does the internet suck? No, it doesn’t. So why do people keep saying that it does?

It’s probably mostly nostalgia. And I think it’s more the people that are on the internet suck. But you have a choice if you want to interact with them. When the internet was a niche thing not many people used it you were mostly siloed in your own little filter bubble. You could only see the things you subscribed to and the people you followed.

But as the internet grew you could see more. The good, and the bad. And a lot of the people on the internet are… not great. But companies wouldn’t give us this if it didn’t work. Like this study. From Facebook.

We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. [emphasis mine]

So maybe that original article I was going to write has merit. And it should be written. Because we do have solutions to this. Like RSS and the Fediverse.

You don’t have to mindlessly doomscroll and take in everything you see. You can follow individual creators that you like and you can also block creators you don’t like (please don’t block me).

And there are many different places you can get the same information. So if one place is too negative go to another. Even I have stopped participating in some comment sections that have been extremely negative or downvote my jokes for no reason.

And you can to. The easiest way is with RSS. In my article footer I have a link to my RSS reader. With it you can subscribe to sources of information that you enjoy reading. The internet does not have to be a negative place. And if you still think it is… maybe look in a mirror.

This post was supposed to come out later but I moved it up due to learning of Cory Doctorow’s new book on enshittification. Obviously I don’t agree with it but we don’t all share the same opinions. So what do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments. I do read them. Eventually.

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