Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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Well. Those corporations took their money and threw it in. Basically fusions of different services. Besides that you have a lot of clickbaits and cheap stuff like dropshops and so on.
You gotta be very picky on what services you use. Lemmy f.e. is amazing for me. It does not feel like someone wants to get money off me.
The internet basically became what the analog world was before and it's anything else than amazing.
Edit: in short terms: Capitalism took the internet from the people.
Well said. The Internet was certainly a lot more fun before anyone figured out how to make money on it. But it's insane that these companies make more money now than even the largest giants did when I was a kid, and it's still not enough for them. I'm just flabbergasted by their insatiable desire. They could keep a good product and still pull insane profits, but they're willing to burn it all down for another percentage point on their quarterly return. I guess that's a change to the world in general now too. There used to be a common wisdom that if you built a great product, and made your customers happy, you'd be successful. The prevailing attitude now is that the success that comes from that isn't enough anymore. You need to make the worst product that you're still able to sell, and then make sure you sell it to the same people multiple times. It's gross.
This is a lovely summary of modern capitalism. The carnival barkers would have you still believe that excellence rises to the top, but it doesn't. What wins is the appearance of excellence, as a facade for the least effort possible, like you said.
Share markets created this perverse incentive that rewards businesses for appearing successful even if they produce fuck all. I'm thinking of Jack Welch era GE or today's preeminent carbon credit trading firm, Tesla Motors.
It reminds me of the feedback loop engulfing the major LLMs as they consume more and more of their own content and start outputting lower and lower quality: the original goal of rewarding the best is long lost, replaced by making line go up at all costs.