Comment by WarmWash
8 hours ago
The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads, or if it does have ads/tracking, that you are trivially capable of blocking them while still totally enjoying the service/product.
xcancel, archive, whatever are all tools almost solely meant to access monetized content without having to contribute to the monetize part. Then those companies are told they "suck" when they don't like it.
Most importantly, the competitors that the internet endlessly cries for to show up to dethrone these giants, see what is going on and say "lol, nope".
> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads.
> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free
Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.
This vision is ripe for the picking:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
>Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.
What rubs me the wrong way about statements like this, is that it is almost always said by people who totally miss that they are advocating for things that are personally profitable for them.
A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. That same end user, who detests the idea of having to spend money, then complains loudly that corporations just want their money. And it is completely lost on them they are playing the exact same game as corporations.
The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. But that overwhelming is not what we see. Instead it is just two entities fighting over money, because they both have the same root motivation to maximize money.
How does one not engage with the corporate product at all?
Im typing a comment on a website of a corporation whose goal is to grow companies into corporations, via a computer manufactured by a corporation on a keyboard produced by a corporation, staring at a screen produced by a corporation, while connecting to an internet service offered by a corporation. Never mind that im also employed by a corporation, dressed by a corporation, drive a car manufactured by a corporation that takes fuel from a corporate gas station that is extracted and proccessed by a corporation.
What is the alternative exactly
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>The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all.
This is difficult to do when corporations control elements of the public sphere and the proceed to run them in such a way as to maximize profits but to the disadvantage of the public.
In its infancy, I recall frequent descriptions of Twitter as the "new public square". A company doesn't get to have its cake and eat it, too. If something that is a public good is operated to maximize private profits instead of the public good, there's going to be conflict with the public.
Perhaps what we need is a broader classification of utilities, and then run them for public benefit rather than private profit, so the citizenry truly can choose to live their lives as something other than rural hermits without engaging with for-profit corporations.
I do not "immensely" benefit from free access to servers that will relay public microposts. I don't think my accesses even cost X a dollar per year. I would happily step in with my own server to replace 10x or even 100x the server resources I consume if it was possible. And if it was actually expensive they should be jumping at a way to make it possible.
Advocating for demonetization of a service is not the same as trying to maximize personal profits. Maybe not everything in the world is about money.
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profitable? whats the revenue and whats the expense? give an example of real money somebody makes by seeing a bad meme on twitter through xcancel
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Well, to be fair, time is more valuable than money. You can't make more time.
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You neglect to consider that these social media websites were giant bait & switches - they were open-access to trick people into going there and making them popular, and only when they got enough network-effect lock-in, did they turn hostile. Morally equivalent to fraud.
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I’m personally upset that the modern day companies have decided only extracting profit matters and not building a better product that makes people willing to pay.
At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don’t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it’s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~50% of the time and its notifications page not registering my clicks and instead clicking on the page behind it. Or like Microsoft breaking pasting in fucking Excel and managing to ship that to consumers as another article today showed. Or the fact that activities in Windows that used to be lightning fast like searching or opening an application now take seconds to 10s of seconds.
We’ve reached a point where companies are too entrenched in their monopolies and are currently in a mode of just figuring out how to extract as much rent as possible.
The only companies I know of still in heavy competition are AI companies but they are doing the tried and true method of heavily subsidizing their business until they kill their competition and I have no doubt that whoever wins will switch over to rent extraction as well.
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> A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user.
login wall != paywall
As for your apples:oranges comparison about maximizing money, which group do you suppose has an unfair advantage these days?
Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...
(https://archive.is/wSmtd)
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> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
Or in the case of X, how about just let me browse without creating an account? Likewise with meta/FB, IG, etc. The reality is businesses and other services post here, share status updates, etc. often before their main pages. I'd like to read those, and yet I have no desire to actually post or interact with any of the content, just read it. I should not need an account for that.
Then the correct action is to either create a competitor, or point money/ad views at a competitor.
But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this. You won't make a competitor that is a charity, and the internet at large won't point dollars and ad-views at a nascent start-up in the space.
Did you know that Facebook got started by scraping MySpace using people's real accounts they provided the passwords for, and Reddit got started by anonymously copying popular posts from Slashdot and Digg? Were these correct actions?
the issue is consistently network effects.
large social media companies arent there because theyre good or that there are no competitors, its that switching cost is high.
you should be pointing at the government to enforce interoperability standards such that logins and so on are not locked to one place.
None of that has to do with blocking the content behind a login wall. X can still serve ads just fine to non-logged in users. I'm against the site running ads, at all, I'm against mandatory account creation. The internet ran ad supported without mandatory accounts for years.
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> But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this
Sorry, what? The internet is unwilling to create twitter clones?
Bluesky, mastodon, pleroma, misskey, diaspora, threads, fucking truth social… there is no shortage of twitter alternatives.
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> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads
I don't think we always need to broaden this out to industry wide levels. We can talk about things specifically. In this case, X/Twitter has put a login wall in front of posts to boost signups. It never used to. That's a meaningful difference that people seek alternatives to.
They went login only in the wake of Hi-Q vs LinkedIn, which established that scraping a login-free site is legal.
Sure, it definitely didn't happen in the wake of its new owner feeling like it in one of his first major changes to the platform because of his "concerns" with bot traffic.
Luckily, he won that fight, and nowadays nobody thinks of bots when thinking of X, The Everything App.
> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
I feel like way too many people forget that there was a great middle ground for the longest time, in the form of Google AdWords. Text only, no animations, flash, iframes serving malware, or any of the other bullshit that had already taken over banner ad networks like Doubleclick at the time. I recall at the time one of the early adblock plugins even had the ability to allowlist AdWords while still blocking the shitware providers with the intent of encouraging the use of "good" ad networks instead of the bad ones.
It's a perfectly sustainable business model, it just requires people who actually care about not being annoying more than they care about maximizing profits, and at some point Google lost those people.
That's pretty much the general problem with our society as a whole, when given the choice between "profitable and sustainable" or "profitable and high quality" versus "more profitable now but will cause problems in a few years" the incentives of capitalism are all in favor of getting all the profits now and getting out before the consequences catch up.
Your comment seems to implicitly assume that X has some ethical claim to the content they're monetizing, when in fact they're trying to monetize _others'_ content.