FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.

A car driver who purposefully drove 80+ mph on a street with a speed limit of 25 mph and killed a man walking in the crosswalk got the following, unacceptable sentence:

1️⃣ A few months in jail
2️⃣ Diversion program
3️⃣ $58,000 in restitution

And the street still isn’t redesigned.

my fellow americans. today i have signed a massive package of lethal aid to facebook to defend against bytedance's unacceptable war of aggression. these artillery shells send a clear message that the united states will not stand idly by while our social media giants are attacked

WAP and MMS will revolutionise the way we live

tired: 5G with Edge Computing
inspired: 2G with EDGE computing

Remembering those times as a kid when I'd see a non 7-segment-number component on a liquid crystal display, and I'd wonder if it was even legal.

:(

“Maybe we should try poly” is the “i know, I’ll use regex” of relationships

You matter and are important.

I have found it… the next evolution of curl | sudo sh

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/pdsadmin.sh

Shell script that takes a subcommand, downloads a script by the name of the subcommand from github, then executes it as root

Computer schedule this sentence to be posted to tech dot lgbt on 04/20/2024 at 13:12 CET

Aye you could spend a hundred grand on Elon Musk's thing, or you could get a Suzuki Carry and ninety grand's worth of cider and drive around calling yourself the CiderTruck, and we'll see who has more fun

TRYING TO GET A BANK LOAN TO BUILD A LASER STRONG ENOUGH TO KILL GOD.

"I want to make my own resistor": get a piece of wire. you are now done. this will perform perfectly well.

"I want to make my own inductor": get a piece of wire. wrap it round a stick. you are now done. this will perform perfectly well.

"I want to make my own capacitor": here is a twenty page essay on building a foil capacitor. follow these steps. it will perform like dogshit.