offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

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

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.

Actually, let me use this as an example of how everything has gone wrong with web development in the last decade or so.

Dan Abramov is a very brilliant guy who is part of the Facebook's React team. He has been the most important name in the team working on React for years. And now, they are pushing for changes in React that would make it consume streams of data that updates the UI before the entire data request is completed, instead of just requesting the data and then 'painting' it once they get the reply for that request.

This is nuts. This is a micro optimization. 95% of the users won't ever notice, and those who do (people using extremely bad connections) would be much better if the site wasn't using React at all. At the same time, I'm sure half of the websites in the World who currently uses react will jump to implement this, making their code way more complex, brittle, sucking their productivity down, and in the long term, being worse for the users. Just for absolutely not even a short-term gain at all in their products.



Then why these kind of things keep happening? Because Facebook is too big. And somehow they ended being the ones in control of the most popular web-app framework used by most of the sites nowadays.



The state of the current Javascript ecosystem is what happens when you get companies with hundreds, thousands of engineers, to build sites that 15 years ago would have been built by 1/10th of that number of people. What you get is a lot of people working on a product that's actually mature already, and whose job end being going after that extra 1%, that last micro optimization that could make your site better in a very narrow set of cases. And they don't care about the complexity, because they are part of an engineering organization with literally thousands of hands to throw at any problem. Setting up your code bundler now takes hundreds of lines of code that need constant maintenance to achieve just a 5% improvement over gzipped plain JavaScript? No big deal, they have 6 people working full time on that. React switching to a different programming paradigm each two versions? Nice, now the 900 devs working in the web version has something to do for a few months.

But then small to medium teams adopt these tools. And suddenly you have a 5, 20, 50 devs team having to do the same work the Facebook web team does. Without any of the problems Facebook has to solve.

What's worse: a big share of the current JavaScript ecosystem exists just to solve problems introduced by the previous iterations. Think about it from a user perspective: does the web work any better, does Netflix, Facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc load faster, perform better than they did ten years ago? On the contrary, most of us have more powerful computers, phones. We have significantly faster internet connections. But sites are, at best, as fast as they used to ten years ago. In most cases they are even slower.

And from the engineer perspective it's not better: web development is significantly harder, more complex, slower nowadays that what it was ten years ago. Things that were trivial are now complex. Things that were complex still are. Product-wise, we are not doing anything more complex than what we were doing in early to mid 10s. But somehow now everything is harder, involves more code, everything is now orders of magnitude more complex. And it's not even making the web a better experience.

We made this mess. We made the web worse for everyone. We made our jobs harder for ourselves. It's so stupid.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9qyaoxpilruusopk

Besides all the damage control Automattic is trying to do about selling user data to openAi and Midjourney, I don't think they realize how much they have jumped the shark for some of us.

See, I worked for the company for a long time. I was really proud of being part of Automattic: For years, there was a clear push to be 'the odd silicon valley company', one that actually respected user privacy, gets its money from the users themselves and not from stealing their privacy, etc.

When Automattic bought tumblr, I remember Matt saying on an interview that his plan was to try to show the world that there was a different way to do social media, one that was not based in selling user personal data: he wanted tumblr to be funded by its own users. I remember actually defending him in tumblr itself: People was skeptical, but my reply to them was always that even if I not always agreed with Matt in everything, believed he was really serious about protecting user privacy (even if it was only to protect his own reputation of being, somehow, a champion of the open internet).

Well.

Now this has been proved as bullshit. Automattic signed a deal with the two more prominent AI companies to sell user data, and didn't announce it until the first data delivery was already done. What's worse, if you read the announcement they posted, it's clear they intended to gaslight the userbase: They talk about a new profile setting to protect your blog from AI scrappers. They are trying to sell it as an extra layer of protection against data scrappers, when they know very well that they only think they can do to prevent that is politely request the scrappers to not take this or that blog data (spoilers: AI companies couldn't care less about those requests). And of course, what is worse: at no moment it's mentioned that Automattic has reached an agreement with the people behind those scrappers to proactively send the data on their own, without even needing to scrape the web to get it. In exchange for (what I assume) is a hefty amount of money.

Not only Automattic has sold your data behind your back, but on top of that, they are trying to gaslight you about it.

The AI data selling is a punch in the gut. It's horrifying, but at least it's not surprising: Matt Mullenweg has been hyper-bullish about AI since last year, so he probably doesn't even see this is a the huge betrayal of user trust that it is. But the way they intended to communicate it to the end-user, the sneaky, shady way to talk about it in the official posts... that feels like an entire battering.

For me, the trust is absolutely broken. I can't trust automattic more than I trust Meta: Yeah, there's this 'don't share my data with AI thieves' checkbox in tumblr and WordPress now, but they haven't even communicated clearly what the 404 media article is telling us: That the data is already in OpenAi hands, and that the only thing the toggle does is kindly requesting them to not use the data they already have from your blog. And that they are not even contractually obliged to comply.

Even if they actually comply and don't use that data, I can't trust Automattic to not change their approach and remove that checkbox in the future (It's not the first time I see the company doing these kind of changes, but I always lied myself thinking that in the end it was minor issues with less impact than the overall stance of the company). I can't trust Automattic to not start doing these kind of things behind our backs (since they have clearly tried to do it this time and got caught only because some brave soul leaked an internal doc to 404 media).

How could I trust Automattic anymore, when they even tried to keep which kind of data they were selling to OpenAI in secret from its own engineering team? I feel terrible for my ex-coworkers still in Automattic, because I know a big share of them are mortified and aghast for everything that has happened in the past week. But it's their job and they are powerless against greedy and evil executives ('evil' as in "couldn't care less about the users or their employees")

When I was laid off last summer, the reason I got from HR was that 'I wasn't aligned with the direction the company needed to take'. And holy shit, wasn't that true.

As I said, I can't trust Automattic more than I trust Facebook, Google, or Twitter. And it breaks my heart and I can't believe I've just wrote that.