Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don’t agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram::Meta is considering offering ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram for $14 a month – but only in Europe.

  • HiramFromTheChi@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Maybe enshittification is actually a good thing. Hear me out: the worse things get, the more motivated people are to ask questions, migrate to alternatives, build better platforms, and hopefully 1) enact well-informed legislation, and 2) prevent what appears to be this “necessity” of enshittification from continuing to happen in an endless cycle.

    • JasSmith@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      That’s the basis for the theory behind the business life cycle. The theory goes that eventually companies mature and settle into a kind of coasting phase, where they maximise profit instead of continuing to innovate. This provides a large opening for competition, who inevitable eat the incumbent’s lunch.

      Indeed, on a long enough time scale, all companies eventually die. It’s just that, living in that moment, it appears that these companies are so unbelievably large and powerful that they could never be unseated. I’m sure people thought that of the Dutch East India company at the time, yet it dissolved 224 years ago.

      Eventually, Facebook will kill itself. It’s already done such a great job.

      • Kiosade@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I have a family member working at FB and they said by the end of this year they will have closed down allllll the fancy new office buildings they built in the last decade or so, and revert operations to just the main, original campus. So seems like they’re on the down-and-down for sure.

      • Dultas@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The problem is their ability to gobble up new companies that could threaten them and use any innovative patients they may hold to either enrich themselves or stifle competition or both.

        • JasSmith@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          That is the premise used to argue that one day a zombie company will emerge which will live forever. In millennia, it has never happened. I’m fairly confident it’s unlikely. These companies eventually allow their culture and focus to settle into complacency. Buying other companies can’t solve that. In fact, it hastens their demise, as they spend large sums of money on companies they’re incapable of properly utilising.

      • Flambo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s just that, living in that moment, it appears that these companies are so unbelievably large and powerful that they could never be unseated

        It’s also that the U.S. has shown repeatedly that it’ll prop up companies with ongoing subsidies, or even bail them out as in the 2008 crisis.

        • JasSmith@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I have to concur with the concern. It’s not a free market if we don’t let bad businesses fail. What’s that saying? Privatised profits and socialised losses? Less of that please.

      • Test_Tickles@lemmynsfw.com
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        1 year ago

        That’s true, but it also took 200 years for it to die. 200 years is “forever” for all those people who were born and died while it existed. Even if we assume that people waited to the ripe old age of 25 to have kids That means that there could have been 7 generations of a given family that were born and died while it existed.

      • HiramFromTheChi@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Sometimes you gotta (knowingly) be a little crazy, a little delusional, juuust enough to keep going… otherwise, if it feels like a lost cause, then there’s no motivation.

        As I got older, I was like damn… Some people work so hard to make things worse, I gotta work at least as hard to combat it lol