[poulsbohemian]

My partner works in corporate communications and so we frequently lament the enshitification, specifically the way social media as a concept destroyed so many things and now is experiencing its own gotterdammerung. It feels like at the moment we are in a middle place, waiting for the next trend. Perhaps it will be a return to the super personalization of the 1990s, where everyone was making content of their own and expressing themselves online with their own flavors before the "platformization" came along. Post-Covid there appears to be a resurgence in community, in "authenticity" so logically it follows that our online engagement might follow a similar pattern.

[actionfromafar]

Yeah, can't wait to monetize that! Oh, darn...

[poulsbohemian]

I mean, your skepticism isn't wrong as it's a definite catch-22... people want tools to share and create their own content, but those tools cost money which means someone has to get paid, at which point the vendors start thinking in terms of greater lock-in and embrace-and-extend opportunities, and the cycle repeats itself.

[shiroiuma]

This was supposed to be the promise of open-source software: people making tools to share with everyone for free, so people don't need to pay vendors just to do something simple.

However, while software can be made free and open-source, someone still has to pay for servers to run for any of this stuff to work. These things were easier back in the good ol' days when everyone just used university computer resources. Nowadays, university tuition has skyrocketed, while universities are no longer freely hosting internet resources like before, I guess because they need to pay their deans millions and build really fancy new dorms.