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Saturday, January 11, 2025
Why does everything on the internet seem to end up trying to exploit users in horrible ways?
My reply to a comment on the previous post got so long, I decided to turn it into a post. So mbp was asking, "Why does everything on the internet seem to end up trying to exploit users in horrible ways?". To which the short answer would be "Capitalism". But the long answer is considerably more complicated.
First of all, a small objection: This blog doesn't try to exploit users in horrible ways, or in any other way. And that is just one example of what is certainly a part of the internet: Amateurs, from the latin word "amare", to love; a person who engages in a pursuit on an unpaid rather than a professional basis, out of love for that activity. While the word "amateur" also has a connotation of somebody less competent than a professional, content creation on the internet frequently enough falls into the category where the amateur ends up creating the better product, because the gain in quality of having somebody "professional" create the same content is small, while the loss of quality due to monetization is large.
In the early days of the internet, amateurs were the rule rather than the exception. The biggest negative force back then was considered anonymity, because some people under the guise of anonymity behaved pretty badly. Fast forward 30 years, and anonymity has become less of a problem, because everybody has created a personal "brand" now, and anonymity doesn't work well with monetization. Instead the monetization has become the problem: A large percentage of content creators these days does so not out of love, but for profit. "Influencer" has become a dream job many people aspire to, although the reality of that job for the average person is pretty dreary.
So now the next player arrives on the scene: The algorithm. It started with the algorithm of Google, which determined what pages you would see first if you searched for a term like "MMORPG blog". As content moved away from the written word to more photo and video content on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok, it was the algorithm of those platforms that determined how many people would see any given content, which then of course directly correlates to the amount of money that content makes. Thus we went from search engine optimization (SEO) to photo and video content optimized towards the algorithm.
There are actually people out there who believe that algorithms have a deliberate bias, programmed on purpose by people with such bias in order to spread their world view. They observe that for example on Instagram people who conform to certain beauty standards are much more successful and promoted by the algorithm than people who are, let's say "alternatively beautiful"; their conclusion is that some evil, heterosexual, white, male software engineer programmed the algorithm like that. The much sadder reality is that the algorithm is originally neutral, but learning, and reflects the clicking behavior, and by that the ingrained beauty standards of the collective of the users. Algorithms are biased because humans are biased, and any machine learning algorithm ends up reflecting the conventional beauty standards of the user base.
Many things that work to increase profit on social media platforms, like clickbait, is obviously bad. But because it works, the algorithm learns to promote it. And the content creators with a profit motive learn what makes the algorithm send users and thus money their way. That leads to a downward spiral, between the algorithm learning to promote bad stuff, and content creators learning that this bad stuff is what is "needed" to be successful.
And the story is similar for other areas of the internet, from gaming to virtual girlfriends. Game companies make horrible live service games not because of some underlying belief in a design philosophy, but because of trial and error over the years has resulted in data about what type of gaming content produces the best profit margins. If the collective user base of gamers would have refused to buy skins and similar cosmetic content, we wouldn't have so many games offering those now. And I am pretty certain that it was the demand from lonely young man to chat with models that led to this becoming so profitable.
The rest is industrialization. Private chat, unlike many other forms of content creation, doesn't scale well. While much has been said about social media platforms reducing content moderation out of political motivations, the people who took those decisions also certainly were aware that content moderation also doesn't scale well. Thus many of these badly scaling activities first get outsourced to third world countries, until that cheap labor still becomes too expensive, and the activity is moved to generative artificial intelligence software. While I don't know any details, I consider it likely that services like BetterHelp started out with the best of intentions, until scaling up the operation led to standards sliding, and customers started to perceive the platform as a scam.
I am old enough to remember a time before the internet existed. And the time where we all thought, "oh, wow, this internet thing looks really useful!". The combination of growth, an increasing profit motive, algorithms that reflect human imperfection, and enshittification has gotten us to the point where many people like mbp have a very different impression of the internet. It now appears a lot less helpful, and more like a dangerous source of various scams and exploitative methods to us. The question now is, how this will evolve further. The more wary we will become of internet services, the less likely we will become to use them. It is possible that the time of the internet as a source of endless business growth is coming to a close.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:45 PM Permanent Link
Comments:
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Thank you for the thoughtful response Tobold. If we accept that this enshitification is a consequence of rational market forces responding to human behaviour then I am led to wonder about other forms of human interaction that have managed to avoided that downward spiral. Think about your neighborhood shop or barber or restaurant. I am sure they would like to make as much money out of you as possible can and they probably try to entice you to buy things you don't really need. In the long run though they know that if they abuse you too much you will stop coming back and they will lose more than they gain. What is so special about internet services that they are able to exploit and abuse users so easily and get away with it. Is it because internet technology advances so rapidly that there is no long run? But the big players have been around for many years at this stage. Is it because so much stuff on the internet is "free" that we are more willing to put up with low quality? But Only Fans bots and gacha games are not free. They cost the victims a lot of money. What is the special property of the internet that makes it such a hive of scum and villainy?
The neighborhood shop or barber or restaurant doesn’t have the option to grow that much, because of physical limitations. The internet allows for a much bigger scale. And it is that potential scale that led to this unsustainable business model of first going for growth with something good and free, and then turning it worse and increasingly costly once the desired scale was reached. Scale is the special property of the internet that ultimately leads to these bad outcomes.
Good point. I guess the the real issue is what can we do about it. I am too old to still believe I can change the world but I will settle for changing my own experience of it. I guess I need to make more of an effort to resist the flood of ever lower quality content and actively seek out better stuff. Easier said than done.
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