TL;DR: enshittification works because people let it and companies make money off of it.
It’s simple, really. Our entire life is dictated by commercialism. Tracking, ads, personalisation… The only reason they’re taking over the Internet, is because it works. As long as it is profitable to destroy the Internet, companies will just keep on doing it.
There are still plenty of spaces on the Internet, but they are difficult to find because large search engines take money to prefer certain results. And the sites that don’t pay to appear higher are among useless sites, malware infused sites, just plain oversaturation.
So, what are our options? Also simple: make ads/tracking etc not work. Block as much ads as possible, block trackers, never click on sponsored content. The problem is that this will only work if a critical mass starts doing this. People being more aware of ad culture online will take decades.
Now, this is different for the music industry. On platforms like Spotify, it’s impossible to find which results appear higher because the algorithm was greased financially to yield certain artists. Ever find music and have nobody really listening to it, yet it keeps appearing everywhere? This is a symptom of the same problem: people are not aware they listen to overpromoted crap. They only like it because they think they should, because something is popular. Anyone taking their time to dig a little deeper for the music they listen to it’s considered either weird or a music nerd.
In any event, the world will keep devolving (i.e. enshittification) so long as it’s profitable. Companies have to bet big on it because if they don’t, their competitors will and they will lose business.
someone just make google like it was 20 years ago with different name and different colors, like call it wuubro and have black bg and blue buttons or so. and don’t ever change it. never add something to “improve search” and never sell it. this will fix the internet slowly.
The algorithm - entering an ongoing war between SEO, content bots, AI, and search machines - is probably the easy part. Keeping your operation afloat and providing the resources for a smooth service is the hard part.
The original Google pagerank algo is completly broken as there are no homepages anymore. Backlinks from other sites used to be something, but now normal people are on Facebook, Insta or Reddit, where you can’t get your links from and commercial sites are doing their own linking game, which is not really useful for establishing the quality of a site. The internet changed
Yeah. The internet is not the same anymore. There’s no way to “just do it”.
I still sometimes find homepages. Often it’s devs having a little personal blog of their holiday photos, cons they visited and links to their various projects on github etc… The last one in my history is https://richardwong.io for example. I was looking up stuff about the Sway WM when I got there.
