Perhaps you heard the news that Reddit will be blocking new search engine results who don’t pay up. This is of course just the latest in a long tail of Enshittification that Reddit has aggressively embarked upon in recent years, all tailored to making their IPO appealing to shareholders. It’s a familiar trend in what Ed Zitron has eloquently termed “The Rot Economy”: growth-above-all, making your product worse for users directly correlated to making it’s stock number higher.
Reddit realizes that it’s actual value is the data it holds, which is why they’re so desperate to monetize it. In this they hold the same view as every other online “service”: what you put on their platform is theirs, not yours. Even though the data that Reddit is monetizing wasn’t produced by them (they supplied the distribution), they nevertheless are locking it behind paywalls, of which the actual creators of that data will see no compensation. We work for free, to the benefit of the shareholders. Google, of course, after having intentionally sabotaged it’s own search and recognizing that Reddit is the defacto search engine for many people, are happy to pony up. Generative AI is a hungry ghost and needs feeding.
I suspect this in part inspired one of my favourite online folks (I loathe the term “Content Creator”), Veronica of Veronica Explains to post on their Mastodon feed:
There will come a point where you ask internet-oracle-of-choice “how do I self-host a Netflix alternative” and they will intentionally give you bad advice in order to discourage you.
That point is coming sooner rather than later, and we need to train *an entire generation* of internet users how to get out of this trap.
That’s *our* work to do, RIGHT NOW.
I found this very thought provoking because I’ve had the creeping sensation of the same sort of thing. There was a time when we couldn’t imagine the arc of Enshittification advancing to the extremes we have today, and yet every day there seems to be some new barrier, some new restriction, some new way to squeeze us for every conceivable usable resource. The Google of today bears no resemblance the “Don’t Be Evil” upstarts who built an empire on providing fast and accurate search results. In the future we will see more & more paywalls and restrictions to things we once took for granted.
Over the past year or so I’ve started self-hosting a number of things that I use on a daily basis, embarking on a process of de-Google-ing and de-Microsoft-ing my life as much as possible. It’s not been easy, but it has been worth every bit of effort. I’m only barely functional with Linux, and yet it’s now at a place where an enthusiastic amateur like me can make it work.
In the very near future, those of us on budgets or just who don’t want to be milked like the Mugwumps at the end of Naked Lunch will need to reckon with this. For our own self protection we need to take control of our online lives as much as we can. To quote Dr Timothy Leary: “If you don’t control what’s on your screen, you will be controlled by those who do”.
A lot of what I will be covering in this blog are my experiences in self hosting and de-corporatizing by ditigal life. We’re looking at the Mad Max online future, where there are only two choices: Are you a fighter, or are you food?