Jorge Saturno @jorge@red.niboe.info

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.

La universidad pública se defiende en Chile, en Argentina y en todo el continente :)

Campaña y concurso regional

Wiki por los Derechos Humanos 2024

🗓️ 15 de abril al 15 de junio de 2024
🔗 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event:Wiki_por_los_Derechos_Humanos_2024

El objetivo es mejorar la información sobre #ambiente, #CambioClimático y #sustentabilidad en los proyectos Wikimedia.

#WikiPorLosDerechosHumanos

«La presión por “publicar o morir” es un obstáculo para la ciencia»

La ciencia “fake”: soluciones
https://microbioblog.es/la-ciencia-fake-soluciones

[ES] Hoy por fin lanzamos la web de veenk.org, una plataforma para encontrar e impulsar proyectos de software libre 🚀

Échale un ojo 🔎, dinos qué te parece y anímate a ser parte de Veenk.

[EN] Today we finally launch the veenk.org website, a platform to find and boost libre software projects 🚀

Check it 🔎, give us some feedback and become a part of Veenk.

➡️ https://veenk.org

​​ ​:veenk_logo:​ ​​ ​:veenk_logo:​ ​​ ​:veenk_logo:​

The end of a succesful launch day, the start of working together towards open research information as the new norm.

We encourage all organizations that perform, fund and evaluate research to join the #BarcelonaDeclaration

See what our signatories say 👇

#openscience

@Shine_McShine Yo caí ayer. Cuenta suspendida permanentemente, prohibición de abrir nuevas cuentas y lectura limitada (no me deja ni leer el TL).

Sin razón alguna (hace días que apenas entraba). Y las peticiones de revisión de la decisión son respondidas negativamente de forma inmediata (un bot).

Todo bien. 😂😂

Me despierto y descubro que la red social de Elmo está bloqueando en masa perfiles de divulgadoras científicas sin dar ninguna explicación. Por si no bastaba con amplificar al máximo a los negacionistas, ahora esto.

Qué agile todo. Qué kaizen.

Tomorrow at 10:00 CEST! Launch of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information

https://barcelona-declaration.org

#barcelonadeclaration #openscience

Se reporta transmisión a humanos de vacas infectadas con el mortal virus #H5N1.
Lo venimos avisando por años, el futuro de la humanidad está en riesgo por el maldito negocio de la ganadería. #PorComerAnimales #GlobalExposome #SaludPública
https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2024/han00506.asp

La verdad sobre el uso de plasmas (gases ionizados) en medicina. Que no os vendan motos: https://theconversation.com/toda-la-verdad-sobre-las-terapias-con-plasmas-frios-227078