Amikke @Amikke@qoto.org
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Software developer, open-source enthusiast, wannabe software architect. I like learning and comparing different technologies. Also general STEM nerd.
Joined May 2021
Amikke
boosted
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.
@icedquinn @Hyolobrika these are direct quotes tho. Looks like I misunderstood and you're not actually defending conspiracy theorists but rather talking about a specific way that term is used to attack people who are more of whistleblowers or investigative journalists? But you're phrasing it in the exact same way as actual conspiracy nuts defending their siege mentality and trying to downplay the term "conspiracy theorists" itself.
@Hyolobrika @icedquinn "crying about conspiracy theories" for a start. Combined with "they don't care about the fake ones" suggests that every conspiracy theory publicly opposed is true, which is ridiculous.
@icedquinn not really tho, there's a lot of conspiracy theories that are both extremely unlikely to be true and harmful enough to be fought against. Off the top of my head because it's a bit of my pet peeve, the holokaust deniers are one of the most retarded conspiracy movements I've seen, and obviously they're being fought because never forgetting what people are capable of doing to other people in a totalitarian enough setting is most of its historical value, not Jewish oppression olympics.
@icedquinn 100 conspiracy theories are created, 50 conspiracy theories are propagated as surely true, 2 of them end up being true, "look guys we were right all along, conspiraciez r realz", the rest is either disproved enough to change the narrative to "uhh we didn't actually believe in them, they were planted by the feds to make us seem insane" or get covered up in embarrassment, or it's not and each stays propagated as surely true until it too collapses into true or disproven enough.
It's like with the Alex Jones was right meme, it's funny but it obviously works on a broken clock basis.
@hyolo that evolved mostly by itself, no less! Probably the earliest known example of a memetic parasite. Though depending on the case it might be more of a symbiont with things like forbidding disease-ridden pork or helping govern a community to be stronger against outside aggressors.
Amikke
boosted
Question: Why do most programmers/developers use a dark theme while writing software/code?
Answer: Because light attracts bugs.
@enigmatico is that when you try to decide how much time and effort to commit to an open source project before you know how well it does relative to its multiple forks/alternatives?
@icedquinn Slime Rancher
maybe there's a mod
rant about the English language
@tkk13909 same
rant about the English language
@tkk13909 love the idea, know it will never catch on. Unless computer translation reaches the level of completely seamless translation, which happens to be the same moment when international languages become pointless.
re: rant about the English language
@Coyote the whole point of an alphabet since its inception, as opposed to logogram systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, is to write down phonemes so that you don't have to wonder how to write something you hear or pronounce something you read. A unification of spoken and written language. English experienced some kind of devolution where they essentially went back to words being logograms, except using latin characters as components, that for historical reasons vaguely suggest the pronunciation. Worst of both worlds.
@icedquinn wut, how?
@puppygirlhornypost Steve Wilhite would've liked this
re: rant about the English language
@Coyote accents and dialects develop over time, sure, but these are still small differences in certain words or in pronouncing the language overall, not wildly different pronunciations of the same sequences of letters depending on what sequences they're next to, where they are located within the word, what language did English take the word from, and the alignment of planets on March 15th 1386.
Neither Spanish nor French have the problem where an adult native speaker looks at how a word is written and isn't sure which one of multiple possible pronunciations to pick. It's a solved problem.
re: rant about the English language
@icedquinn @Coyote tbh it would've probably failed anyway, the inertia of something like the alphabet is insane. Even in the case of something more immediately useful like a measurement system there's a certain English-speaking country that refuses to switch from medieval units like the rest of the world did, no chance of switching out the alphabet.
re: rant about the English language
@Coyote it's a solved problem for most existing languages.
- lang
- pl, en
Software developer, open-source enthusiast, wannabe software architect. I like learning and comparing different technologies. Also general STEM nerd.
Joined May 2021
