Taylor LorenzNov 19, 2023

“It is just over,” journalist @caseynewton told The Post.

“If you wouldn’t join Gab, or Parler, or Truth Social, there’s no reason you should be on X. I think it’s time for journalists and publishers, in particular, to acknowledge the new reality and to get the heck off that website.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/19/antisemiticism-interent-elon-musk-israwl-war/

Antisemitism was rising online. Then Elon Musk’s X supercharged it.

Antisemitism has long festered on the internet, but the Israel-Gaza war and the loosening of content moderation on X have propelled it to unprecedented levels.

The Washington Post
Show threadMichael J. OrlandoNov 19, 2023
@taylorlorenz @caseynewton The inertia to remain is the foundation of incentives for enshittification. And why a federated governance structure is the only compelling antidote, imo. ...
Show threadMichael J. OrlandoNov 19, 2023
@taylorlorenz @caseynewton ...Scale confers network effects - users value it and are reluctant to leave. For platform owners motivated by profit, growth eventually slows to a point at which the NPV of monetizing current scale exceeds the NPV of monetizing future greater scale. So traffic becomes dominated by accounts willing to pay for promotion - either b/c platform founders change operating policy, or the platform is sold to an owner for plans to thereby enshittefy. ...
Show threadMichael J. Orlando
@taylorlorenz @caseynewton ... Platforms federated through a greater network of platforms may experience disincentives for enshittification, to the extent that platform users experience sufficiently low-cost access (and hence assign high net-benefit) to content available throughout the greater network. (Owners of such a platform want to avoid their users being cut-off from content developed on other platforms.) ...
Nov 19, 2023 at 9:44pmWeb
Show threadMichael J. OrlandoNov 19, 2023
@taylorlorenz @caseynewton ...Thus, optimal federated structure (in the sense of minimizing individual platform-specific incentives to enshittify) is of platforms sufficiently small to assure user benefits from federation exceed those obtained from home platform scale. And as a result, users w/ sufficiently high disutility of enshittification face incentives to select smaller-but-federated platforms which (due to such scale) have least to gain by enshittifying at risk of banishment to autarky.