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Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don't agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram
(www.businessinsider.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Maybe enshittification is actually a good thing. Hear me out: the worse things get, the more motivated people are to ask questions, migrate to alternatives, build better platforms, and hopefully 1) enact well-informed legislation, and 2) prevent what appears to be this "necessity" of enshittification from continuing to happen in an endless cycle.
That's the basis for the theory behind the business life cycle. The theory goes that eventually companies mature and settle into a kind of coasting phase, where they maximise profit instead of continuing to innovate. This provides a large opening for competition, who inevitable eat the incumbent's lunch.
Indeed, on a long enough time scale, all companies eventually die. It's just that, living in that moment, it appears that these companies are so unbelievably large and powerful that they could never be unseated. I'm sure people thought that of the Dutch East India company at the time, yet it dissolved 224 years ago.
Eventually, Facebook will kill itself. It's already done such a great job.
I have a family member working at FB and they said by the end of this year they will have closed down allllll the fancy new office buildings they built in the last decade or so, and revert operations to just the main, original campus. So seems like they’re on the down-and-down for sure.
My current employer went from rigid 100% office attendance, a là Office Space and cubes and dress codes and Nina, to 0%, overnight, for COVID. They sold most of the space but for 2 permanent and 4 more hotel spots, they have meeting spaces and a revolving receiver assignment for packages, but the entirety of the staff is effectively remote since the state of emergency was declared. Transition was fast and furious and they survived with most of their sanity intact. They wrote remote-first into the union contract, and quietly mention it's from anywhere in the country.
Reduction in space doesn't mean reduction in staff nor mandate. We're only growing.
Just, look for other indicators.