The problem:

The web has obviously reached a high level of #enshitification. Paywalls, exclusive walled gardens, #Cloudflare, popups, CAPTCHAs, tor-blockades, dark patterns (esp. w/cookies), javascript that makes the website an app (not a doc), etc.

Status quo solution (failure):

#Lemmy & the #threadiverse were designed to inherently trust humans to only post links to non-shit websites, and to only upvote content that has no links or links to non-shit venues.

It’s not working. The social approach is a systemic failure.

The fix:

  • stage 1 (metrics collection): There needs to be shitification metrics for every link. Readers should be able to click a “this link is shit” button on a per-link basis & there should be tick boxes to indicate the particular variety of shit that it is.

  • stage 2 (metrics usage): If many links with the same hostname show a pattern of matching enshitification factors, the Lemmy server should automatically tag all those links with a warning of some kind (e.g. ⚠, 💩, 🌩).

  • stage 3 (inclusive alternative): A replacement link to a mirror is offered. E.g. youtube → (non-CF’d invidious instance), cloudflare → archive.org, medium.com → (random scribe.rip instance), etc.

  • stage 4 (onsite archive): good samaritans and over-achievers should have the option to provide the full text for a given link so others can read the article without even fighting the site.

  • stage 5 (search reranking): whenever a human post a link and talks about it, search crawlers notice and give that site a high ranking. This is why search results have gotten lousy – because the social approach has failed. Humans will post bad links. So links with a high enshitification score need to be obfuscated in some way (e.g. dots become asterisks) so search crawlers don’t overrate them going forward.

This needs to be recognized as a #LemmyBug.

  • mateomaui@reddthat.comEnglish
    101·
    9 months ago

    You just identified the fallacy yourself.

    Sometimes a paywalled source is the first to report on something. Calling that link a bad link is nonsense.

    90+% of the time, using reader mode will bypass paywalls anyway.

    Many people don’t know all the websites to redirect things through without that, so calling their contribution “bad” just because they posted that link isn’t the greatest.

    It’s not even like it’s that big an issue, because usually someone else comes along that provides an alt link in the replies, so saying that this is a social failure is also ridiculous, because both were provided between two people.

    Also, the notion that you or anyone else is socially filtering non-misinformation news sources from the rest of us, because you don’t see the value in it, or cannot figure out how to bypass the paywall yourself, isn’t all that great either.

    edit: it’s also worth pointing out that if some people contributing links happen to be subscribers to a news source, as a subscriber they won’t necessarily know that a certain article is paywalled for everyone else, until they share it and someone who isn’t a subscriber gets the notice.

    • activistPnkOP
      17·
      9 months ago

      You just identified the fallacy yourself.

      You’re going to have to name this fallacy you keep talking about because so far you’re not making sense.

      Sometimes a paywalled source is the first to report on something. Calling that link a bad link is nonsense.

      One man’s bad link is another man’s good link. It’s nonsense to prescribe for everyone one definition of “bad”. What’s bad weather? Rain? I love rain. Stop trying to speak for everyone and impose your idea of “bad” on people.

      Many people don’t know all the websites to redirect things through without that, so calling their contribution “bad” just because they posted that link isn’t the greatest.

      So because someone might not know their link is bad, it ceases to be bad? Nonsense.

      It’s not even like it’s that big an issue, because usually someone else comes along that provides an alt link in the replies,

      (emphasis mine) Usually that does not happen.

      so saying that this is a social failure is also ridiculous, because both were provided between two people.

      This based on the false premise that usually bad links are supplemented by an alternate from someone else.

      Also, the notion that you or anyone else is socially filtering non-misinformation news sources from the rest of us, because you don’t see the value in it, or cannot figure out how to bypass the paywall yourself, isn’t all that great either.

      (emphasis mine) Every user can define an enshitified site how they want. If you like paywalls, why not have your user-side config give you a personalized favorable presentation of such links?

      • mateomaui@reddthat.comEnglish
        51·
        9 months ago

        fallacy: all paywalled links are bad

        I’ll let someone else continue this, I’ve made my argument well enough already.

        • activistPnkOP
          18·
          9 months ago

          You don’t know what a logical fallacy is. Bob and Alice can disagree about whether the pizza tastes good or bad. There’s no fallacy there, just subjective disagreement.

      • mateomaui@reddthat.comEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        At the time I couldn’t be bothered to respond to most of this reply of yours, because your responses were too ignorant to take seriously, but since you’re still arguing about this, and that other moronic post where you complain about devs, someone should tell you that this line you replied with here

        Stop trying to speak for everyone and impose your idea of “bad” on people.

        is a hilarious example of a total lack of self awareness, as this entire post of yours is trying to speak for others and impose your definition of what a “bad” link is on everyone else.

        But keep on being an idiot. You apparently cannot code anything you want done, but feel like your contribution of providing criticism is somehow equal to the work of the devs who actually built the software before you came along. It’s just entitled stupidity to think they work for you or that you’re equal to them in any way.

        Not to mention that your arguments regarding fair use and letting archive.org lead the way should flag you as a potential very expensive liability for every instance admin who cannot afford a copyright battle. It’s easy to thumb your nose at potential problems when you’re not actually in charge of or responsible for anything.