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All of us. Anyone who believes in democracy.

this is an excellent piece, thank you for writing it.

Excited to read this. My friend made a film on this same topic you may be interested in theendoftheinternetfilm.com

Read the beginning of the article.

Huh? We're talking about the article here: www.liberalism.org/p/enshittifi... The first graf references a photo. The second graf references a second photo. The third graf references "these two images." I'm not sure what else you're talking about.

(on mobile, that is)

As I reflect more on what you wrote, it's not that spaces can't necessarily HAVE algorithms, it's that recommendation algorithms when present should be like I tried to develop when I was at reddit that are "wide to wide" or "narrow to wide" rather than "wide to narrow" or worse, "narrow to narrower"

Thanks for this piece. Well framed lifecycle of the social media ecosystem. I was excited by the breakdown of barriers that the early internet provided. This has devolved into an abject desire to become a Luddite. You have provided hope that there is a roadmap to a better future.

Thank you. Look forward to reading this after my meeting. Thank you for thoughts, effort, work

looking forward to making some time to sit down and read. cheers. congrats.

The renewable era allows for more decentralized energy and hopefully a similar change in other areas of society. I recently heard a theory that we are due in the US for a shakeup in the political system which usually happens about every 60 years ands the energy system shift would dovetail nicely.

Magnificent piece, Mike. Thanks for taking the time to write it.

Thanks, good read, crucial debate Enshittification is selling democracy (for tax breaks)

It always makes me sad to think how much different things would be now if the original dream of migrating the Twitter bird to the open-protocol "blue sky" came to fruition

Interestingly enough, in a tech world mindset, I read 'despot'ification as 'de-spotiy'cation! and was a bit befuddled! ;)

See also the change of science grants being approved by political flunkies not peer review. Peer review isn’t perfect, but what gets funded based on greed is not ‘pure’ science. What needs to be researched won’t be. Bureaucracy is not in itself evil.

@masnick.com I really valued this piece, Mike. Very insightful, thanks for the word Despotification. Yet, its easy to imagine that the pursuit of an economic model for decentralized protocols and apos could again bend us toward surveillance ad tech. Rather than one big Facebook, a thousand […]

Anyway, I put a lot of effort into this piece and am really proud of it. Thanks to @liberalism.org for publishing it and @jkuznicki.bsky.social for doing a great job editing the piece. www.liberalism.org/p/enshittifi...

Thanks for writing this. It helps me see the next step.

Fantastic piece! Enjoyed reading and I'm a fan of Doctorow. 'Locked open' concept is great and I get the benefits of pushing power to the users to prevent enshit'n. How does this work in practice? Who gets funding to start these ventures? What mechanisms ensure their survival? Who's doing it now?

Crypto is tainted, but something akin to its founding ideas. Attempts to build a “global co-op” network haven’t succeeded but something like that seems to be needed for an open internet to truly re-emerge imo.

pain….

I was a little puzzled until I worked out that "despotification" was rooted in "despot", rather than "despotify" (de-spotify), which sounded like a positive step in the opposite direction.

The debates over the default moderation policies of bluesky are really indicative of this.

I'm kicking around the idea that AI could actually help a lot with this - among a lot of other things the AI tools are already at or near a point where they could provide a good "algorithm" matching your preferences replacing the discover feed, to use the bluesky example.

I have ideas about that too, which in large part involves smarter clients and more efficient indexes so it's practical. Stuff like more practical "multi homing", and there's already some partial view + backfill appviews which can do much of this as a kind of censorship resistance technique

Solid article Mike! It really does feel like we're at a fork in the road. One that non-technical people are noticing as well.