Most people don't mind enough to put in any effort to move to something less sucky.
Some do, and you get things like that one paid search engine that a few people here like to praise, or the various replacements for the big "social" sites.
Rather than turning to shit, I think the internet may be getting more diverse stuff in general. More good stuff and more shit.
As an example of anti-shit I watched Veritasium "The Biggest Misconception in Physics" https://youtu.be/lcjdwSY2AzM yesterday and thought wow this is good. Much better than the physics lectures I had at Cambridge Uni.
Everything is turning to shit due to short term extraction of profit. An incredibly stupid and incompetent management class are burning companies for fuel. It's crazy. Creative working people are seeing their futures and works destroyed by insane people who seem to have no proper oversight from their shareholders. Management has become a cult run by dodgy preachers grifting their way to bigger bonuses. Where is the critical thinking?
Then there is the ridiculous non-productive speculation class looking to get rich off the misery of others, stealing their wealth whether it be AI, crypto, gambling, financial scams, investment scams. Its all dodgy as hell and shame on everyone who knows better for pumping that rubbish and defending it (sure to be a controversial take with the get-rich-quick techbro crowd)
He claims Google, Facebook, Amazon used to be great but are now shit. What's stopping anyone from recreating what Google, Facebook, and Amazon used to be? If the 2010 equivalent versions of those companies were online, wouldn't you switch to them?
I find kind of funny that the article mentions the AI book ripoffs being sold on Amazon when they share so much about the book contents that now I don’t feel like I need to read it at all.
Greed ... Shareholder value became more important than anything else, and this is nothing wait until AI and robotics deliver on what they're promising.
The introduction of monetization and smartphones turned the internet to shit.
Doctorow's writings are good, and this book summary is excellent.
One of his recommendations is unlikely to go far: tech worker unions. Most comments on HN underscore the extent to which techies have bought into capitalist propaganda, which we slavishly repeat. We dream of becoming the next multimillionaire, but it's far more likely we'll get laid off at some point(s) in our career by the enshittification machine. A worker's union isn't communism, it represents the workers who build the systems. Germany, a social democracy, provides for a worker's representative on company boards. This isn't communism!
BTW, it's the reviewer who suggested abolishing companies, not Doctorow. Now that is communism. What we do need is some regulation of companies that have become information utilities. Same as regulations for the water company or the power company.
I see everything turning to shit. It's the collapse of society. We've seen that no one is out there protecting us and "fighting the good fight".
We had a good run.
*Turned to Shit
in my niche (korean entertainment) i now have to compete with 200 indian slop scammers when before it was 10 malaysian scammers, then everyone else was mixed race.
really sad what google has done.
you can see it really obvious on some of these korean queries for singers, eg, google "taehyung" and look at the news tab and give it a count.
it's not.
but peoples' "navigation" or "traversal" skills are.
it's the fault of the upper classes, starting at journalists and psychologists, if you care for some help with your research. they've been sucking for a while; at their jobs, understanding their true desires, fulfilling them, obviously, too, and they've been really really really (don't use this word as a scalar) bad in general, at developing their ability to get closer to what they want, and what they want to get on the way. they all submitted to shit.
and because journalism submitted to shit, it was very very very very ( don't use this word as a scalar) easy for ads people and ads divisions to trash peoples' "traversal" or navigation skills via ... well, shit.
> But it was a necessary investment, because when I Google synonyms for a word, I can no longer trust that the results I get will be accurate or useful
Why would you use Google as a thesaurus in the first place? Why not go directly to the Cambridge or Merriam-Webster thesaurus (the article even links to Merriam-Webster):
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/
The internet may well be turning to shit but people also need to take responsibility for their own abdication of thinking.
> "Instead of better-regulated companies, why shouldn’t the solution be no more companies?"
This is a very weird, even quite childish, criticism.
There's an outside chance that some of the stuff Doctorow wants can be implemented. There's literally zero chance that companies in general are abolished (in favor of what, exactly?) just because a few megacorps, given perverse incentives, have become bad actors.
Besides, large firms are, effectively, the most unkillable human-derived things that exist. If you "abolish" them in one place, they'll nevertheless still exist in another, or they'll simply pick up move somewhere else, like high-net-worth individuals. "Headquarters" are often merely a formality.