I now want you to go on Facebook, scroll down, and see how quickly you hit an advertisement. In my case, after one post from a friend, I was immediately hit with an advertisement for some sort of food supplement, then a series of reels, then a suggested group called "Walt Disney Magic," followed by an ad, followed by a post from a friend.
This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for "catching up with your friends," because that's no longer what they do. These platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of "content discovery," a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are "good for you."
On some level, it's hard to even suggest we use these apps. The term "use" suggests a level of user control that Meta has spent over a decade destroying, turning Instagram and Facebook into tubes to funnel human beings in front of those who either pay for the privilege of visibility or have found ways to trick the algorithms into showing you their stuff.
It's the direct result of The Rot Economy, a growth-at-all-costs mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies where tech companies profitably punish users as a means of showing the markets eternal growth. In practice, this means twisting platforms from offering a service to driving engagement, which, in Facebook and Instagram's case, meant finding the maximum amount of interruptions that a user will tolerate before they close the app. (...)
Tech companies have found every imaginable way to monetize every imaginable thing we do, all based on the idea that they're providing us with something in return. And when you really think about it, they haven't provided a service at all. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google are platforms that only have as much utility as the content they host, which is created by billions of (mostly) unsupported and unpaid users. The tradeoff was meant to be that these platforms would make creating and hosting this content easier, and help either surface it to a wider audience or to quickly get it to the people we cared about , all while making sure the conditions we created and posted it under were both interesting and safe for the user.
Yet the state of the internet is now far simpler: the cost of using free platforms is a constant war with the incentives and intentions of the platforms themselves. We negotiate with Instagram or Facebook to see content from the people we chose to follow, because these platforms are no longer built to show us things that we want to see. We no longer "search" Google, but barter with a seedy search box to try and coax out a result that isn't either a search engine-optimized half-answer or an attempt to trick us into clicking an ad. Twitter, in its prime, succeeded by connecting real people to real things at a time when the internet actively manufactures our experience and interactions with others.
On some level, it's hard to even suggest we use these apps. The term "use" suggests a level of user control that Meta has spent over a decade destroying, turning Instagram and Facebook into tubes to funnel human beings in front of those who either pay for the privilege of visibility or have found ways to trick the algorithms into showing you their stuff.
It's the direct result of The Rot Economy, a growth-at-all-costs mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies where tech companies profitably punish users as a means of showing the markets eternal growth. In practice, this means twisting platforms from offering a service to driving engagement, which, in Facebook and Instagram's case, meant finding the maximum amount of interruptions that a user will tolerate before they close the app. (...)
Tech companies have found every imaginable way to monetize every imaginable thing we do, all based on the idea that they're providing us with something in return. And when you really think about it, they haven't provided a service at all. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google are platforms that only have as much utility as the content they host, which is created by billions of (mostly) unsupported and unpaid users. The tradeoff was meant to be that these platforms would make creating and hosting this content easier, and help either surface it to a wider audience or to quickly get it to the people we cared about , all while making sure the conditions we created and posted it under were both interesting and safe for the user.
Yet the state of the internet is now far simpler: the cost of using free platforms is a constant war with the incentives and intentions of the platforms themselves. We negotiate with Instagram or Facebook to see content from the people we chose to follow, because these platforms are no longer built to show us things that we want to see. We no longer "search" Google, but barter with a seedy search box to try and coax out a result that isn't either a search engine-optimized half-answer or an attempt to trick us into clicking an ad. Twitter, in its prime, succeeded by connecting real people to real things at a time when the internet actively manufactures our experience and interactions with others.
The core problem lies in the fact that these platforms don't really create anything, and their only value exists in making an internet of billions of people small enough to comprehend. Like seemingly every problem with a capitalist society, the internet has become dominated by powerful forces that don't contribute to the product that enriches them. As a result, they have either no concept of nor interest in "quality," just "more," making them extremely poor arbiters of what "good" looks like. This inevitably leads to products that suck more as they become more profitable, because the machine they've built is a profit excavator dressed as a service.
by Edward Zitron, Where's Your Ed At | Read more:
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[ed. Links galore. The problem has gotten so big so fast that it's almost impossible to comprehend. I'm so glad I got off of all social media over a decade ago (although I do continue to use YouTube for instruction videos, and of course Google, but trying to give DuckDuckGo a go). And it's only going to get worse: Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI (Intrinsic Perspective).]
