Toaster ovens? I’ve been working in offices since 1989. I’ve never seen a toaster oven, only microwave ovens.
Yep! In the main break room we have two microwaves, an air fryer, and I think there’s still a small toaster oven.
This could well cost Twitter more in user loss (and corresponding advertising loss) than what it gains in additional income.
Yeah, that seems short sighted
If you start from the idea that any revenue made by others in your “ecosystem” is revenue that you should be capturing for yourself, then raiding that ecosystem for successful ideas followed killing / starving what’s left makes eminent sense.
In essence it’s what YouTube did to small content creators. The minnows aren’t worth the cost to service them. They may have been essential to carry you from start-up to behemoth, but now they can be jettisoned just like tycoons jettison their college-era wife for their I’m rich now trophy wife.
it’s all about monopolist behavior and the closely related ego-centrism.
The establishment of a captive user pool through attractive service which is then bled for money has been labeled “enshittification” in this excellent article. It’s specifically about TikTok but the premise is eminently portable.
It’s the old vulture-capitalist playbook adapted for the service economy. The vulture extracts maximum profit from every valuable asset. A user base is just another asset to exploit until it’s valueless.
The Chief Twit has made the calculation that there’s no getting back the initial investment, so extracting maximum value is the goal.
Pure genius in every sentence. Thank you; you’ve made my day in terms of learning.
Now to figure out how to avoid killing myself (j/k) over the evident enshittification of US politics via a very similar bi-directional co-dependent mechanism where the middleman/men are cleaning up monetarily while rapidly filling the stables with shit piled to the rafters.
That is indeed an excellent article: I learned a lot, enjoyed it, and want to cry all at the same time.
I had the same reaction. I was surprised to see it was by Cory Doctorow, a futurist I respect.
+1 on the article … very insightful and entertaining read.
Here’s a link to the original
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Wired is reprinting it under a creative Commons license, but wired says I’ve read too many articles this month, and wine let me read this one. If anyone else is having that problem, this link ought to work.
In an interesting coincidence, Doctorow’s blog post for today is also on enshittification: Netflix wants to chop down your family tree (02 Feb 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Well worth a read even though it has nothing directly to do with Musk / Twitter.
Except to discuss where all tech entrepreneurs / businesses currently want to go: Walled gardens where they can be the price-gouging toll booth for anyone or anything that goes in or out. And where they can prevent other walled gardens from springing up in the same product space.
Musk might be failing / flailing right now in his attempt to turn Twitter into one such walled garden. But I have little doubt he’s imagining some variation on that theme.
Excellent article, as was the original one. One example is how Netflix has hundreds of millions to buy and make content, but not $20 to replace broken DVDs in their increasingly laughable collection. I like old movies that don’t stream, not on Netflix at least, but my queue got to be 100% movies that were on their list but would obviously never be available.
Hundreds of millions is a bit low:
Bringing together engineers and advisers, Musk asked his team why his account, which has “more than 100 million followers,” would only be getting “tens of thousands of impressions.” “This is ridiculous,” Musk said, according to multiple sources. A principal engineer stepped forward to explain that the decline may be due to easily chartable waning public interest in Musk…None of this seemed to satisfy Musk, whose immediate response was to remove the employee who suggested that since Musk’s move to purchase Twitter last April, people have been increasingly uninterested in following all of Musk’s moves online…“You’re fired,” Musk told the engineer…
Obviously that engineer didn’t understand the concept of “shooting the messenger”
The emperor was clearly not interested in hearing he was buck-nekked.
But in an interesting take on the fairy tale, the emperor had fleeced himself. There were no mendacious tailors to blame.
Apparently if you give a man enough rope dollars, he’ll hang himself.
The fired engineer is just part of it. That Ars Technica story reports that Twitter went down for a while on Wednesday, and that there is an upcoming audit from the FTC, and it’s an issue whether Musk will comply.
Well Elon has fixed the problem: