Shitter
So I’ve already had a little rant about Twitter and how it’s much worse than it used to be, and how incidentally that’s part of the reason for starting up this website, but it’s sadly not the only one of these former “Web 2.0” type sites that have become much less appealing than they once were. This is a noted problem known as enshittification, ie the process of becoming shit (or perhaps more politely, platform decay).
It was always held as a kind of cliché that if you aren’t paying for a product, you yourself are the product, and this has come in most cases to prove correct. Either through contributing your own content to the site, or through your personal data being productised either to sell on, or analysing in order to serve you increasingly intrusive ads, these formerly utopian (or if not utopian exactly, at least somewhat pleasant and rewarding to use) websites have been sold off by their initially idealistic founders and become driven, if not only then predominantly, by a profit motive.
This has only got worse in recent times with the second Trump presidency, the installation of Elon Musk as “first buddy”, and the unedifying spectable of seeing many of these big tech companies bending the knee and “obeying in advance” in the most ugly and craven ways, removing the rights and protections from vulnerable people and minorities, amplifying the voices of the far right even further, on top of generally providing a worse experience for the average user.
Some of the key cornerstones of the web experience have been enshittified, and I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say, given the important role the internet plays in all our lives now — even excepting the political issues I’ve just mentioned — that it has had a material impact on the quality of life of almost everybody. We are all just accustomed now to accepting that stuff is basically shit, and there will always be a significant drawback to any experience.
Let’s look at a few more examples of things we used to love in the 2000s and maybe 2010s and how I have either replaced them, abandoned them, or made them bearable again…
Facebook used to be a website for organising the social lives of college/university students. It was genuinely useful, that was a time when I certainly had a lot more friends and social potential than I do now! And having a tool to keep up with everything was good. I actually remember waiting for it to become available in the UK and encouraging my friends to join it, which is hard to imagine now.
Of course, I was naive, the mission of Facebook was always to hoover up as much data about its users as possible. To that end, the site became geared towards getting users to spend more time and energy on the site, and signing up to join more and more “groups”. What was once a feature that allowed you to join a group of friends to organise an event, or share a common interest, became full of “meme” content and it became normal to join groups administered by people or organisations you don’t know. Most people don’t realise that anyone who runs a group that you join get access to your friends list and much more data about you, in order to use however they see fit.
For me the downturn started in 2006, coincidentally the year I graduated, when Facebook began to accept users who had no association with a university. The student party stops pretty quickly, it turns out, when your parents are invited to join in. As time went on, the site became dominated by “boomers” (now generally accepted to mean anyone over the age of 30) and the demographics are now very different to what they once were.
The predominant demographic would one have been students aged between 18 and 21, with perhaps a few postgrads skewing the average a little higher, but now only 18% of its users are in the 18-24 age bracket. Compare this with the over 37% of users who are over 45, a cohort who (given that 2006 graduates are now just entering their 40s) were never in the original user base. Naturally the content that gets posted there has changed accordingly, and Facebook is now more likely to be involved in the subversion of democracy through carefully targeted disinformation campaigns, spread by credulous conservatives (those older entryists), identified algorithmically by the data that has been harvested from them, than it is to be used to innocently “poke” someone whose attention you want to attract.
As it happens, Twitter was probably the primary replacement for Facebook and where a bunch of the original cohort of users migrated to, and we all know what happened to that…
Under the “Meta” umbrella along with Facebook also comes Instagram, since it was acquired in 2012. What was once a fun photo sharing social network is now infested with, you guessed it, ads, but also has changed its focus in the Vine and latterly TikTok era. The experience of scrolling down your Instagram feed is now almost entirely made up of video clips, most of which were probably not posted by people you know. Quite apart from the typical trawling of personal data, it’s now just a completely different, and worse, experience.
I’ve written a bit about Bluesky and that has now added a “trending videos” section which pretty adequately replaces TikTok (at least technically, if not in terms of the mass of content), and others are building on the ATProtocol that Bluesky uses to add Instagram-like functionality. I haven’t used any yet (I’m not particularly interested in the product anymore personally) but Flashes looks a promising candidate.
Maybe the most transformative example here when they first started out, the “don’t be evil” motto rings a bit hollow these days, and indeed it has been quietly done away with. Like Facebook, Google make their money from selling advertising opportunities and pretty much everything they do is geared towards that, and collecting the data they need to do that.
The search engine itself is very easy to replace. Of course, many of their competititors in that area also support themselves with advertising revenue, but they are much smaller concerns than Google and able to sustain themselves without selling their souls. I personally use DuckDuckGo, whose entire ethos is built around respecting the privacy of users and not collecting the same quantity of data, but there are other equally valid alternatives. Any of them work essentially as a drop-in replacement for Google Search, and in fact, because Google Search is now infested with “value added” features, are generally a much better experience if you just want to see your search results.
If you want to (and are able to) host something yourself, Searchxng seems like a good option, allowing you to amalgamate results from different search engines, all while protecting your privacy.
Gmail
Also under the Google brand of course, Gmail (or Googlemail), like Google Search, was revolutionary when it first arrived on the scene. No more having to worry about running out of space in your inbox with a whole gigabyte of capacity! Curiously although that has continued to increase since, and been merged with Google Drive (I now have 15GB of available space), I find myself spending more time tidying up and trying to free up space than at any time I can remember.
Although I switched from Google Search years ago, Gmail has taken me a bit longer to get away from. To be fair, it does still work very well, but concerns about what they’re doing with all my data and the increasing latency in downloading messages using my iPhone’s Mail app (which I believe was introduced deliberately) has forced me to recently move to using Apple’s iCloud Mail.
Yes, Apple are another giant corporation and not without their ethical problems, but they don’t depend on advertising revenue to sustain themselves and I am inclined to believe their focus on privacy (as evidenced by the iCloud Mail website linked above) is worth more to them in selling devices and services, than selling out on that principle would be. I also subscribe to Apple Music (in preference to Spotify, another company that could have been included on this list) and the Apple One subscription is not significantly more than the family plan for music, and includes iCloud+, giving me enough space for my emails (and more significantly, photos) and the ability to use a custom domain.
As an aside, Apple Arcade has been useful in finding child-safe games free from in-app purchases and the constant upselling that comes with them, since my daughter has got old enough to discover the unlimited joys of the iPad… I have my own concerns about hosting all our photos of said daughter and everything else in iCloud, but it is a pretty flawless user experience. I will probably explore alternatives in future…
So far my experience with iCloud Mail is that the product is frankly not as good as Gmail (particularly in the filtering area), but it is good enough, and it’s nice to receive emails immediately and not have to wait for them to download at a snail’s pace anymore. I’m still in the process of migrating over so we’ll see how that goes (it has given me an opportunity to click a lot of unsubscribe links).
Google Reader
I used to love Google Reader, I think it was the first (or the first that I knew about) RSS reader that kept track of your feeds remotely, so it facilitated reading across different devices (syncing what you’d read and so on), before the reliable syncing of iCloud et al came along. It also had an API so you could use whatever client app you liked to consume the feeds. But it didn’t last long, seeing as it didn’t make them any money. I’ve covered RSS readers in my last post so suffice it to say open source clone FreshRSS is an excellent replacement that I host on my own home server, so (as long as I am around to maintain it) it will never go away! I’ll probably talk more about how you can use it in future. It also features an API, modelled on the Google Reader API I believe, so you can still use the venerable NewNewsWire or whatever to make reading a nice experience.
Etc
There are inumerable examples I could have included here and I’m already planning a second part to this, so check back soon (although given my posting frequency not that soon) for more along these lines. If you have a partocular example you’d like me to explore, let me know
I may even write about self-hosting options…