Shareholder Blight?

What term would you prefer?

What thing are you referring to?

Yes, it’s unfortunate it didn’t have a positive effect long term due to being coopted. :(

As people are going to continue to use twitter style websites until they fall out of fashion, I figure its best if that twitter-like is at least not controlled by people who can go rogue and do severe damage to society, such as what happened with twitter.

We realistically can’t ban them, we can only mitigate the bad. Personally I don’t use twitter style social media, only Lemmy.

Enshittification is specifically how something inevitably gets worse and more anti-user due to pressures from capitalism/shareholders/profit incentive.

Rot, at least in my mind, is not that specific. It could mean the codebase is not well maintained and slowly failing, as an example.

It’s unlikely it’ll go back in the bottle, and that style of social media is capable of facilitating positive social change (Arab spring as one example) that may not have been possible without it.

There’s a quote from Eric S. Raymond about the issue of getting people to switch to something better (in this case the OS Plan 9) if there’s already something that’s fulfilling the need just enough that it becomes difficult to get anyone to move.

it looks like Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.

The fear now is that people will just switch to Bluesky until it becomes like Twitter, and it’s not a guarantee that Mastodon will be next in line. It could be another closed service that’s primed to take its place, and thus, the cycle continues.

A deeply unfortunate choice of sponsor.

I think it’s more for the neat factor than anything. It’d be a cool spice rack if mounted on a wall in a pantry.