Most all technology companies start with the very best of intentions. They want to fix something that they see as broken. So they launch their product sow, their goodwill, and start to chip away at fixing the thing they saw as broken. They get investor cash, and then some more investor cash. They start to ramp up a user base of people who also believe that the thing was broken and is now being fixed for the better. Maybe there’s no ads. Maybe there are ads, but they’re not intrusive. Maybe there are fees, but they’re reasonable for what you’re getting out of this new thing that has totally fixed the old thing.
Then the company either goes public or get bought out (or both). Things are ok for a little while. The company has fixed the thing and are turning a tidy profit, are well liked, and held up as an example of what kind of good tech can do. Then they have to start bending to investor pressure to make more money! More! No, not good enough, even more! Being profitable isn’t good enough anymore. They have to grow. And keep growing. Profits are now judged against last years profits. If they do even a penny less, then the company is seen as failing. So the company start to change. They start to remove useful features and add confusing features, especially cutting edge, buzzword features that other companies are using even if these features have nothing to do with the original something that was fixed.
The founder decides to leave having seen his vision through to this point and wants to spend more time being a normal, regular person just like you and me by, sailing around the world with his family. On his yacht. A new leader comes in, promises to increase shareholder value. There is a round of layoffs, mostly from the customer facing groups like support and service. Fees are raised and more fees are added and they start adopting business models they once said they were against. They start copying features from other companies (who were also fixing things). Maybe they buy another company so they don’t have to actually code a new feature; they’ll just shoehorn it right on in there after another round of layoffs because it’s more cost effective to hire offshore than it is local. Everything becomes third party, ad infested slop barricaded behind some kind of subscription based paywall. Either that or there is an offer of a free login, the only cost being that your contact info and whatever data you provide is then harvested and sold to the highest bidder. There is a data leak and a scandal of some sort thrown in for good measure.
Users start to complain. Users start leaving. Just a few at first. But the new CEO can’t stop saying stupid things and the new algorithm does nothing more than serve up hot garbage so more users leave taking their money and precious data to a new platform that has promised to fix what was broken.
The company is then sold to a firm like Blackstone who takes them private, fires three quarters of the employees so they can “realign with the original vision of the founders”, run up huge debts at the companies expense and run the whole thing into the ground. While the company may still exist, its now a shadow of its former self and little more than a footnote in everyone’s mind.
Now, that’s all overly dramatic but it kinda fits, doesn’t it? All you have to do is look around and see that there is a lot of shady shit going on. Right now, there are a good number of companies that are shitting the bed in one way or another bit are just too fucking big to budge (just yet anyway), but there are a more than a few mid-tier services that have become hostile to their user base like Etsy and Airbnb. You have DistroKid being assholes. Medium is little more than a virility promoter, among other things, that’s buried behind a “sign up” page. Substack is turning into a racist shithole.
For me a glaring example of all of this is DeviantArt. While I haven’t paid attention to DA in a few years, I do remember it fondly as a bastion of creativity. I had an account back in the day (think like 2001-2003) and loved sharing art and perusing other people’s work. DA crossed my mind the other day so I looked it up. Now it’s owned by Wix.com and is a fucking AI Slop generating hellhole, while working to hide anything that is said against them:
and promoting whatever the rancid fuck this is:
I mean yes, of course there were always issues with DeviantArt and copyright back in the day, but this? An AI Generator? Wow. I’m not even going to explain why an AI Generator on DeviantArt is slimy. As the kids say, if you know, you know.
In short, nearly everywhere I turn on the Internet, things suck at a level of hostile suck I never believed was possible.
I’d like to think that people are starting to wise up to the bullshit these companies are forcing us to eat, but I’m not so sure. I mean, most of the solutions to shit companies are new copycat companies pop up promising that they’re better. And maybe they are … for now. Give it time, those companies will either turn into their own version of high level suck, or they’ll die out because they’re not making money.
Look, I don’t have solutions. I’m not that smart. While I feel that the “social” platforms we’re using now are in the beginning stages of a death throw, I honestly can’t envision what the next big thing will be. I do know that unless we take a good hard, honest look at what the current issues are, the forthcoming Next Big Thing will just be more of the same which is “Wow! This is neat. It has the potential to change the world. Now how can we monetize the hell out of it?”
But you know one thing that’s still around? Blogs. There are people out there who are writing in their blogs. Not some weird ass writing platform created by some weird ass company, but like a simple WordPress install running on a small server somewhere. Maybe they’re making a little money by sending out a monthly newsletter, or maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re just writing for the sake of it. What they’re not doing is fighting for whatever scraps an algorithm is handing out. They’re not beholden to overly onerous license agreements. They’re not hustling every second of the day. Sure the hosting provider is probably trying to sell them dumb features (the hosting company I’m with constantly wants me to upgrade my plan), but you don’t have to buy SEO packages or make use of the AI Website Generator. Hell, you don’t even have to use WordPress if you don’t want to. What I think a lot of people forget (or just don’t know) is that the Internet is, at its very base, nothing more than text files running on computers that you can connect to. Yes, we give these files fancy names like HTML, PHP, JavaScript, etc. But they’re really all just shit people have typed into Notepad. And HTML isn’t even difficult. Just write something up in a plain, old HTML file, name it index.html and stick it on the web somewhere 1.
Like I said, I don’t know where any of this is going and I don’t have answers. But this doesn’t mean I have to play along. I do know that I have my own little corner of the web, so here I’ll stay. I don’t want to be beholden to any platform that seeks only to enrich itself at the expense of those that use it. And if the time ever comes that WordPress decides to one hundred percent shit the bed then I’ll code a basic website using Notepad like I learned how to do twenty five years ago. No database. No scripting. Just plain, old HTML 2.
1: Free hosting exists and I’m currently investigating how good these are, especially the ad-free ones. While I’m lucky enough to be able to enjoy a paid service (albeit a very minimal service), I want to know what the free alternatives look like.
2: I fucking love the fact that this shit is still out there and, for the most part, still completely functional.
