Category: blogs Rick reads

‘Enshittification’ of the Internet

On By Rick McIn blogs Rick reads, economics, ethics, Facebook, Google, internet, TwitterLeave a comment

Cory Doctorow is without question one of the smartest and most eloquent of Tech pundits.

… an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics. …

HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. …

I call this enshittification, …

Amazon, Facebook, Tiktok. All of them.

The Google search engine app on my phone is totally ‘enshittified’ — nobody could appreciate so many inappropriate advertisements.

Wikipedia is not enshittified.

Why?

It’s not based on advertising. Ads are the main reason the internet is getting enshittified.

I don’t suffer much because I have every ad blocker known to man working in the Chrome browser. I rarely see ads, except on my phone.

Facebook ads are hardest to avoid.

I pay for YouTube Premium to avoid ads in the middle of my videos.

Click through to read the article for yourself:

The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok

trusted News sites

On By Rick McIn blogs Rick reads, ethics, product endorsementsLeave a comment

Sites trusted by WikiTribune include

Reuters, Associated Press, BBC News

New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Axios, Quartz, BuzzFeed Investigations, New Yorker, Guardian, Politico, Bloomberg, Nature

I like Economist, BBC, Guardian, Axios and Politico best. CBC is pretty good too.

don’t be a #FakeNews victim

in praise of bloggers

On By Rick McIn Apple, audiocasts, blogs, blogs Rick reads, economics, gymnastics, internet, product endorsements, things getting better1 Comment

My second and third favourite sources of information in 2011 are audio:

• Audiocasts
• Audio books

I pretty much always have an audio book or two in progress, buying most of those from Audible.com. … Sadly not every book I want is available in audio.

Audio podcasts are still quite crude. The most evolved, however, are superb: RadioLab, This American Life, CBC Spark, Economist Editor’s Highlights, and On The Media. Almost all audio podcasts are still free.

But my main sources of information … my most trusted … my most detailed and nuanced … are blogs.

The best are labours of love by passionate, often amateur writers. Most bloggers are unpaid, spending thousands of hours focused on a specific topic simply because they love that topic.

more photos of bloggers

For example, the best Apple blog is Daring Fireball. I don’t pay much attention to any other.

I do whatever I’m told by Michael Geist when it comes to Canadian government regulation of the internet. A big election issue right now.

There are 4-5 essential blogs on gymnastics, but if I only was allowed to read one blogger it would be Blythe Lawrence.

If you read Kraig Becker, you’ll know more about outdoor adventure than you’ll ever need to know for one lifetime.

… Those are just a few examples. Leave a comment if you’ve got a blog that I should follow.

(blogger photos via Spark)