This constant push for a return on investment and the mindset that we must grow forever has the vast majority of internet users churning between centralised services that promised an unsustainable level of service at an equally unsustainable price point.
It's a shame to watch the slow death of yet another service that was making people's lives easier. Can't really say I'm surprised, though. I have to imagine that it's incredibly, incredibly difficult to resist the urge to sell. The key differentiator seems to be whether you get to walk away with your reputation intact among the sort of people who take a hardline stance on this.
Thing is, most of those people probably wouldn't gamble a life-changing sum of money for yourself and the people they love on principles - and ironically, we can't really judge them for it with the world we live in and its incentives.
VC-funded blitzscaling is just the latest meta, and it's no fun for anyone. So much useful potential squandered while everyone has to watch the centralised, closed source, S/PAAS tools they rely on becoming more encumbered, limiting and expensive.
As Tom Toro so famously put it, "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." If people will make that choice when it comes to the land we live on and the air we breathe, you can see why they'd find it a lot easier to do exactly the same thing for some code tearing its way through a lump of silicon.
Shouganai. Someone will just make another Dropbox. The cycle continues.
It's a shame to watch the slow death of yet another service that was making people's lives easier. Can't really say I'm surprised, though. I have to imagine that it's incredibly, incredibly difficult to resist the urge to sell. The key differentiator seems to be whether you get to walk away with your reputation intact among the sort of people who take a hardline stance on this.
Thing is, most of those people probably wouldn't gamble a life-changing sum of money for yourself and the people they love on principles - and ironically, we can't really judge them for it with the world we live in and its incentives.
VC-funded blitzscaling is just the latest meta, and it's no fun for anyone. So much useful potential squandered while everyone has to watch the centralised, closed source, S/PAAS tools they rely on becoming more encumbered, limiting and expensive.
As Tom Toro so famously put it, "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." If people will make that choice when it comes to the land we live on and the air we breathe, you can see why they'd find it a lot easier to do exactly the same thing for some code tearing its way through a lump of silicon.
Shouganai. Someone will just make another Dropbox. The cycle continues.
https://kottke.org/23/01/the-enshittification-lifecycle-of-o...