#coding platformer

[rocketsimp]

Stitched flowers featuring ermm, Septembers, Sunflower, Dandelion (wish form) and ones with petals on them :)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The specific process by which Google enshittified its search

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Which raises an important question: why do companies enshittify at a specific moment, after refraining from enshittifying before? After all, a company always has the potential to benefit by treating its business customers and end users worse, by giving them a worse deal. If you charge more for your product and pay your suppliers less, that leaves more money on the table for your investors.

Of course, it's not that simple. While cheating, price-gouging, and degrading your product can produce gains, these tactics also threaten losses. You might lose customers to a rival, or get punished by a regulator, or face mass resignations from your employees who really believe in your product.

Companies choose not to enshittify their products…until they choose to do so. One theory to explain this is that companies are engaged in a process of continuous assessment, gathering data about their competitive risks, their regulators' mettle, their employees' boldness. When these assessments indicate that the conditions are favorable to enshittification, the CEO walks over to the big "enshittification" lever on the wall and yanks it all the way to MAX.

Some companies have certainly done this – and paid the price. Think of Myspace or Yahoo: companies that made themselves worse by reducing quality and gouging on price (be it measured in dollars or attention – that is, ads) before sinking into obscure senescence. These companies made a bet that they could get richer while getting worse, and they were wrong, and they lost out.

But this model doesn't explain the Great Enshittening, in which all the tech companies are enshittifying at the same time. Maybe all these companies are subscribing to the same business newsletter (or, more likely, buying advice from the same management consultancy) (cough McKinsey cough) that is a kind of industry-wide starter pistol for enshittification.

I think it's something else. I think the main job of a CEO is to show up for work every morning and yank on the enshittification lever as hard as you can, in hopes that you can eke out some incremental gains in your company's cost-basis and/or income by shifting value away from your suppliers and customers to yourself.

We get good digital services when the enshittification lever doesn't budge – when it is constrained: by competition, by regulation, by interoperable mods and hacks that undo enshittification (like alternative clients and ad-blockers) and by workers who have bargaining power thanks to a tight labor market or a powerful union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

When Google ordered its staff to build a secret Chinese search engine that would censor search results and rat out dissidents to the Chinese secret police, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

When Google tried to win a US government contract to build AI for drones used to target and murder civilians far from the battlefield, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-pentagon-project-maven.html

What's happened since – what's behind all the tech companies enshittifying all at once – is that tech worker power has been smashed, especially at Google, where 12,000 workers were fired just months after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years. Likewise, competition has receded from tech bosses' worries, thanks to lax antitrust enforcement that saw most credible competitors merged into behemoths, or neutralized with predatory pricing schemes. Lax enforcement of other policies – privacy, labor and consumer protection – loosened up the enshittification lever even more. And the expansion of IP rights, which criminalize most kinds of reverse engineering and aftermarket modification, means that interoperability no longer applies friction to the enshittification lever.

Now that every tech boss has an enshittification lever that moves very freely, they can show up for work, yank the enshittification lever, and it goes all the way to MAX. When googlers protested the company's complicity in the genocide in Gaza, Google didn't kill the project – it mass-fired the workers:

https://medium.com/@notechforapartheid/statement-from-google-workers-with-the-no-tech-for-apartheid-campaign-on-googles-indiscriminate-28ba4c9b7ce8

Enshittification is a macroeconomic phenomenon, determined by the regulatory environment for competition, privacy, labor, consumer protection and IP. But enshittification is also a microeconomic phenomenon, the result of innumerable boardroom and product-planning fights within companies in which would-be enshittifiers try to do things that make the company's products and services shittier wrestle with rivals who want to keep things as they are, or make them better, whether out of principle or fear of the consequences.

Those microeconomic wrestling-matches are where we find enshittification's heroes and villains – the people who fight for the user or stand up for a fair deal, versus the people who want to cheat and wreck to make things better for the company and win bonuses and promotions for themselves:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

These microeconomic struggles are usually obscure, because companies are secretive institutions and our glimpses into their deliberations are normally limited to the odd leaked memo, whistleblower tell-all, or spectacular worker revolt. But when a company gets dragged into court, a new window opens into the company's internal operations. That's especially true when the plaintiff is the US government.

Which brings me back to Google, the poster-child for enshittification, a company that revolutionized the internet a quarter of a century ago with a search-engine that was so good that it felt like magic, which has decayed so badly and so rapidly that whole sections of the internet are disappearing from view for the 90% of users who rely on the search engine as their gateway to the internet.

Google is being sued by the DOJ's Antitrust Division, and that means we are getting a very deep look into the company, as its internal emails and memos come to light:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Google is a tech company, and tech companies have literary cultures – they run on email and other forms of written communication, even for casual speech, which is more likely to take place in a chat program than at a water-cooler. This means that tech companies have giant databases full of confessions to every crime they've ever committed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Large pieces of Google's database-of-crimes are now on display – so much, in fact, that it's hard for anyone to parse through it all and understand what it means. But some people are trying, and coming up with gold. One of those successful prospectors is Ed Zitron, who has produced a staggering account of the precise moment at which Google search tipped over into enshittification, which names the executives at the very heart of the rot:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Zitron tells the story of a boardroom struggle over search quality, in which Ben Gomes – a long-tenured googler who helped define the company during its best years – lost a fight with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist turned manager whose tactic for increasing the number of search queries (and thus the number of ads the company could show to searchers) was to decrease the quality of search. That way, searchers would have to spend more time on Google before they found what they were looking for.

Zitron contrasts the background of these two figures. Gomes, the hero, worked at Google for 19 years, solving fantastically hard technical scaling problems and eventually becoming the company's "search czar." Raghavan, the villain, "failed upwards" through his career, including a stint as Yahoo's head of search from 2005-12, a presiding over the collapse of Yahoo's search business. Under Raghavan's leadership, Yahoo's search market-share fell from 30.4% to 14%, and in the end, Yahoo jettisoned its search altogether and replaced it with Bing.

For Zitron, the memos show how Raghavan engineered the ouster of Gomes, with help from the company CEO, the ex-McKinseyite Sundar Pichai. It was a triumph for enshittification, a deliberate decision to make the product worse in order to make it more profitable, under the (correct) belief that the company's exclusivity deals to provide search everywhere from Iphones and Samsungs to Mozilla would mean that the business would face no consequences for doing so.

It a picture of a company that isn't just too big to fail – it's (as FTC Chair Lina Khan put it on The Daily Show) too big to care:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

Zitron's done excellent sleuthing through the court exhibits here, and his writeup is incandescently brilliant. But there's one point I quibble with him on. Zitron writes that "It’s because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it."

I think that gets it backwards. I think that there were always enshittifiers in the C-suites of these companies. When Page and Brin brought in the war criminal Eric Schmidt to run the company, he surely started every day with a ritual, ferocious tug at that enshittification lever. The difference wasn't who was in the C-suite – the difference was how freely the lever moved.

On Saturday, I wrote:

The platforms used to treat us well and now treat us badly. That's not because they were setting a patient trap, luring us in with good treatment in the expectation of locking us in and turning on us. Tech bosses do not have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

Someone on Hacker News called that "silly," adding that "tech bosses do in fact have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years. That's literally the business model of most startups":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114339

That's not quite right, though. The business-model of the startup is to yank on the enshittification lever every day. Tech bosses don't lie in wait for the perfect moment to claw away all the value from their employees, users, business customers, and suppliers – they're always trying to get that value. It's only when they become too big to care that they succeed. That's the definition of being too big to care.

In antitrust circles, they sometimes say that "the process is the punishment." No matter what happens to the DOJ's case against Google, its internal workers have been made visible to the public. The secrecy surrounding the Google trial when it was underway meant that a lot of this stuff flew under the radar when it first appeared. But as Zitron's work shows, there is plenty of treasure to be found in that trove of documents that is now permanently in the public domain.

When future scholars study the enshittocene, they will look to accounts like Zitron's to mark the turning points from the old, good internet to the enshitternet. Let's hope those future scholars have a new, good internet on which to publish their findings.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

[respectthepetty]

Queendom is giving me color-coded girls in love!

But it's doing it in the simplest yet smartest way!

Rey is the cold-coded character with her blacks and blues.

Print is the more warm-colored character with her pinks and reds.

But they get in trouble.

AND SWITCH BODIES!

And because they switch bodies, they take their colors with them!

It's a smart way to remember that Print is in Rey's body and Rey is in Print's body because of the color.

So when their colors merge (a color exchange), it'll signify more than them just being in love, but that they are close to returning to their original bodies.

This shot is the perfect example of why I'm so excited! (I'm looking at the mirror since it has both of their colors, not her ass)

Well . . . maybe I am excited for several reasons.

[azulonso]

need to say that he's a bad dog in front of his face just to see the reaction

[solidwater-arts]

[ID: A digital doodle page of Impulse, drawn as a demon with small horns, a spaded tail, and small, underdeveloped wings. The rightmost drawing is a full body of his Hermitcraft 10 skin, it's mostly uncolored with some yellow and pink accents. A png of the skin is next to it

There's other two drawings: one with his normal outfit where he's facing away, showing his wings, and another where he's smiling nervous, yet triumphant. In this last drawing, he's fully human, and he's wearing a turtleneck and a jacket. /End ID]

I wasn't sure if I should draw full bodies, icons, or what, so I decided to just do whatever I felt like doing. Today, that's a doodle page! Featuring default, s10, and Phasmophobia Impulse.

[missiongd]

A newly established social media platform where you can earn cryptocurrency. The platform is still under development, keeping pace with modern technologies such as cryptocurrency exchange.

https://www.soc-web6.com/share/person/109023952345758776?code=AIHWWPDX

Invitation code: AIHWWPDX

You'll find plenty of explanations on YouTube.

[rainbow-journalist]

You are still short and always will be ☔🚬

Trust me, this really happened, Yuma having to put up with the jokes and comments about his height. Whenever he says "when I was little", someone will always remind him that he is STILL little, imagine when Yuma was a baby or a child, he was super short. (I was)

Aaaahh, I remember my old headcanon of him was 23 years old during the game, and that he would be short like that because he didn't take care of himself when he was young. 😌

Tw: spoiler ☔⚠️

Like, I think maybe he became a detective and Number One at a young age and was always a workaholic, making him not take care of his own growth and stay that way even after 18-21, Could it also just be family genetics that he is short, or something supernatural because of his Forte.

I know about the game design context, I'm talking within the game's story, In my head it would make sense that he was 20 years old when Makoto was created, he is clearly of minimum drinking age.

To be honest, I never cared about short characters, always having a negative view, but Yuma made me care because I'm short too, and putting my short problems on him is fun. Thanks Yuma, suffer more :3

I need to draw Yakou more often, he's cool, and I need to practice his and Vivia's hair too. I wonder what Yuma's beta visuals were like, if he was always short, Makoto had a tall design. I read a fanfic of Yuma being older and taller and it was fun and funny. (Guess who wrote it), doubt his look will change in the future, everyone loves the short king. And I think I've always liked the tall x short ship trope.

Everyone who is short, put your problems on Yuma. >:D

[the-most-humble-blog]

<!-- BEGIN TRANSMISSION --> <div style="white-space:pre-wrap"> <meta threat-level="literary-vendetta"> <script>ARCHIVE_TAG="TERWILLIGER_PROTOCOL_BATMANJOKER_001"</script>

🤡 TERWILLIGER FILES — ADDENDUM: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN BATMAN TURNS ROBIN INTO THE JOKER A Blacksite Literature™ Transmission

---

Let me be clear while I can still spell my own name and not get hypnotized by Bob's operatic baritone echoing through my skull:

You don't understand what Robert Terwilliger is.

You think he's just some Frasier-voiced criminal mastermind with clown trauma. But he's not.

Bob Terwilliger is what happens when you take a man with the voice of Shakespeare, the IQ of Lex Luthor, and the rage of a neglected theater kid—and force him to eat pies for a living under a nicotine-stained clown with a gambling addiction.

This man was reading Voltaire while getting shot out of a cannon. That’s not character building. That’s how you get an origin story.

⚠️ Krusty Didn’t Hire a Sidekick. He Created a Nemesis.

Imagine Batman making Robin dress like a chicken, publicly humiliating him for ratings, and then acting surprised when Robin joins the League of Shadows and starts quoting Nietzsche mid-murder spree.

That’s Bob.

He didn’t start evil. He was forged in a fire of seltzer bottles and unpaid therapy. He wasn’t born with a vendetta. He was given one… with a laugh track.

🎭 You’re Laughing, but He’s Monologuing.

Bob doesn’t just try to kill people. He plans it like a composer writing a symphony in blood. He leaves clues. He drops literary references. He recites entire Gilbert and Sullivan operas mid-murder attempt.

That’s not a killer. That’s a thesis paper with a vendetta and good diction.

🚨 Bart Isn’t Just a Victim. He’s the Catalyst.

Bart didn’t just ruin Bob’s schemes. He validated them.

Every time Bob got close to peace, the universe served him another slice of Simpson-brand chaos.

You think Bob hates Bart? No. Bob became Bob because of Bart.

He is what happens when Batman forgets to save Robin from the dark.

📚 Terwilliger Lore Is Basically Shakespeare with Blood and Rakes

You ever watch a man step on one rake? Funny.

You ever watch him step on sixteen rakes in a row while monologuing about revenge and democracy? That’s not a gag. That’s a Greek tragedy in clown shoes.

Bob is Othello in clown makeup. He’s Hamlet with a vendetta and a blowtorch. He’s the only villain in history who could quote Whitman, attempt murder, win an Emmy, and still get mispronounced by Ralph Wiggum.

🧠 You Want Redemption? Bob Gave You Redemption… and You Threw It Back

The man literally tried to settle down in Italy.

Crushed grapes. Ran for mayor. Found love. Raised a child.

Then the Simpsons showed up.

And like clockwork, Bob was reminded: > "Oh right, I’m not allowed to heal. I’m a punchline."

So he relapsed.

Because healing is hard. But falling into villainy with flair? That’s opera, baby.

🎤 Final Analysis:

Robert Terwilliger isn’t a villain. He’s the result of what happens when you break a gifted mind for laughs. When you hand a prodigy a banana cream pie and tell him, “Be funny, or be forgotten.”

He’s what happens when Batman turns Robin into the Joker… …then gets mad when the Joker starts writing sonnets about vengeance.

And Bart? Bart’s just the spotlight.

He didn’t make the monster. He just made sure we all saw it.

🍷 FIELD-TOAST STATUS: RAISED

To Robert Terwilliger: The thespian, the warlock, the academic with a vendetta. A man whose crimes were crimes of passion—and pronunciation.

And to Bart: The chaos engine who turned a pie-splattered intellectual into a blood-soaked aria.

God bless Springfield. And God help anyone who underestimates a villain with a library card.

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[glowbfan457]

As a present for my mutual @soundleer's birthday, I present this Minecraft avatar I made of their Sprunkisona, Toki!

This was a really fun avatar to work on, as Toki isn't exactly the kind of character I'd come up with myself- Either way, all I need to do now is find a way to send his zip file over!

[phoenixtherobot]

Hermittober Day 7: Fall!

I like to imagine Joel tripped a little when he got shot so he could fit the theme of all of the Bread Boys Falling

[rocketsimp]

Logging back on.

[asavt]

I finished a little reference sheet for Blake! I find it funny how much he has changed in his time existing, he didn't have his hair that long or voluminous(?

I'm trying to take this a little more seriously now, for portafolio purposes and stuff~ I would like to do character designing in the future...

[consistantly-changing]

Happy pride to the Carmines + Octavia, all my headcanons (Trans monsterfucker Odette, aromantic bisexual Clara, asexual biromantic Octavia, bisexual Zestial and Carmilla but they don't know it)

[red-dyed-sarumane]

u all know voisona + chisei is free right. & that theres a mobile app thats also free. & if u do happen to pay for any u can use them on both ur puter & ur phone/tablet right. be the vocaP u always wanted

[missiongd]

Invitation code: missiongd

Today you can participate with us in mining information - Earn crypto tokens without paying money according to the words of this platform cPen Network. Their account on the X platform: https://x.com/cpencoreteam

The content of the words of this platform cPen Network builds a professional network to be a platform that benefits people in exchanging currency or value ( I mean where the benefit is reflected in human life ) .

I mean they are striving towards that.

Of course, it is your duty to search and read because each person is responsible for his own decision.

A simple method. There are many explanations on this topic - Online like YouTube.

[spectrumspace]

spotify is absolutely useless, it doesn't even have Rainbow Factory