If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Never let them tell you that enshittification was a mystery. Enshittification isn't downstream of the "iron laws of economics" or an unrealistic demand by "consumers" to get stuff for free.
Enshittification comes from specific policy choices, made by named individuals, that had the foreseeable and foreseen result of making the web worse:
Like, there was once a time when an ever-increasing proportion of web users kept tabs on what was going on with RSS. RSS is a simple, powerful way for websites to publish "feeds" of their articles, and for readers to subscribe to those feeds and get notified when something new was posted, and even read that new material right there in your RSS reader tab or app.
RSS is simple and versatile. It's the backbone of podcasts (though Apple and Spotify have done their best to kill it, along with public broadcasters like the BBC, all of whom want you to switch to proprietary apps that spy on you and control you). It's how many automated processes communicate with one another, untouched by human hands. But above all, it's a way to find out when something new has been published on the web.
RSS's liftoff was driven by Google, who released a great RSS reader called "Google Reader" in 2007. Reader was free and reliable, and other RSS readers struggled to compete with it, with the effect that most of us just ended up using Google's product, which made it even harder to launch a competitor.
But in 2013, Google quietly knifed Reader. I've always found the timing suspicious: it came right in the middle of Google's desperate scramble to become Facebook, by means of a product called Google Plus (G+). Famously, Google product managers' bonuses depended on how much G+ engagement they drove, with the effect that every Google product suddenly sprouted G+ buttons that either did something stupid, or something that confusingly duplicated existing functionality (like commenting on Youtube videos).
Google treated G+ as an existential priority, and for good reason. Google was running out of growth potential, having comprehensively conquered Search, and having repeatedly demonstrated that Search was a one-off success, with nearly every other made-in-Google product dying off. What successes Google could claim were far more modest, like Gmail, Google's Hotmail clone. Google augmented its growth by buying other peoples' companies (Blogger, YouTube, Maps, ad-tech, Docs, Android, etc), but its internal initiatives were turkeys.
Eventually, Wall Street was going to conclude that Google had reached the end of its growth period, and Google's shares would fall to a fraction of their value, with a price-to-earnings ratio commensurate with a "mature" company.
Google needed a new growth story, and "Google will conquer Facebook's market" was a pretty good one. After all, investors didn't have to speculate about whether Facebook was profitable, they could just look at Facebook's income statements, which Google proposed to transfer to its own balance sheet. The G+ full-court press was as much a narrative strategy as a business strategy: by tying product managers' bonuses to a metric that demonstrated G+'s rise, Google could convince Wall Street that they had a lot of growth on their horizon.
Of course, tying individual executives' bonuses to making a number go up has a predictably perverse outcome. As Goodhart's law has it, "Any metric becomes a target, and then ceases to be a useful metric." As soon as key decision-makers' personal net worth depending on making the G+ number go up, they crammed G+ everywhere and started to sneak in ways to trigger unintentional G+ sessions. This still happens today ā think of how often you accidentally invoke an unbanishable AI feature while using Google's products (and products from rival giant, moribund companies relying on an AI narrative to convince investors that they will continue to grow):
Like I said, Google Reader died at the peak of Google's scramble to make the G+ number go up. I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at Google realized that Reader's core functionality (helping users discover, share and discuss interesting new web pages) was exactly the kind of thing Google wanted us to use G+ for, and so they killed Reader in a bid to drive us to the stalled-out service they'd bet the company on.
If Google killed Reader in a bid to push users to discover and consume web pages using a proprietary social media service, they succeeded. Unfortunately, the social media service they pushed users into was Facebook ā and G+ died shortly thereafter.
For more than a decade, RSS has lain dormant. Many, many websites still emit RSS feeds. It's a default behavior for WordPress sites, for Ghost and Substack sites, for Tumblr and Medium, for Bluesky and Mastodon. You can follow edits to Wikipedia pages by RSS, and also updates to parcels that have been shipped to you through major couriers. Web builders like Jason Kottke continue to surface RSS feeds for elaborate, delightful blogrolls:
https://kottke.org/rolodex/
There are many good RSS readers. I've been paying for Newsblur since 2011, and consider the $36 I send them every year to be a very good investment:
https://newsblur.com/
But RSS continues to be a power user-coded niche, despite the fact that RSS readers are really easy to set up and ā crucially ā make using the web much easier. Last week, Caroline Crampton (co-editor of The Browser) wrote about her experiences using RSS:
As Crampton points out, much of the web (including some of the cruftiest, most enshittified websites) publish full-text RSS feeds, meaning that you can read their articles right there in your RSS reader, with no ads, no popups, no nag-screens asking you to sign up for a newsletter, verify your age, or submit to their terms of service.
It's almost impossible to overstate how superior RSS is to the median web page. Imagine if the newsletters you followed were rendered with black, clear type on a plain white background (rather than the sadistically infinitesimal, greyed-out type that designers favor thanks to the unkillable urban legend that black type on a white screen causes eye-strain). Imagine reading the web without popups, without ads, without nag screens. Imagine reading the web without interruptors or "keep reading" links.
Now, not every website publishes a fulltext feed. Often, you will just get a teaser, and if you want to read the whole article, you have to click through. I have a few tips for making other websites ā even ones like Wired and The Intercept ā as easy to read as an RSS reader, at least for Firefox users.
Firefox has a built-in "Reader View" that re-renders the contents of a web-page as black type on a white background. Firefox does some kind of mysterious calculation to determine whether a page can be displayed in Reader View, but you can override this with the Activate Reader View, which adds a Reader View toggle for every page:
Lots of websites (like The Guardian) want you to login before you can read them, and even if you pay to subscribe to them, these sites often want you to re-login every time you visit them (especially if you're running a full suite of privacy blockers). You can skip this whole process by simply toggling Reader View as soon as you get the login pop up. On some websites (like The Verge and Wired), you'll only see the first couple paragraphs of the article in Reader View. But if you then hit reload, the whole article loads.
Activate Reader View puts a Reader View toggle on every page, but clicking that toggle sometimes throws up an error message, when the page is so cursed that Firefox can't figure out what part of it is the article. When this happens, you're stuck reading the page in the site's own default (and usually terrible) view. As you scroll down the page, you will often hit pop-ups that try to get you to sign up for a mailing list, agree to terms of service, or do something else you don't want to do. Rather than hunting for the button to close these pop-ups (or agree to objectionable terms of service), you can install "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that reaches into the page's layout files and deletes any element that isn't designed to scroll with the rest of the text:
https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky
Other websites (like Slashdot and Core77) load computer-destroying Javascript (often as part of an anti-adblock strategy). For these, I use the "Javascript Toggle On and Off" plugin, which lets you create a blacklist of websites that aren't allowed to run any scripts:
Some websites (like Yahoo) load so much crap that they defeat all of these countermeasures. For these websites, I use the "Element Blocker" plug-in, which lets you delete parts of the web-page, either for a single session, or permanently:
It's ridiculous that websites put so many barriers up to a pleasant reading experience. A slow-moving avalanche of enshittogenic phenomena got us here. There's corporate enshittification, like Google/Meta's monopolization of ads and Meta/Twitter's crushing of the open web. There's regulatory enshittification, like the EU's failure crack down on companies the pretend that forcing you to click an endless stream of "cookie consent" popups is the same as complying with the GDPR.
Those are real problems, but they don't have to be your problem, at least when you want to read the web. A couple years ago, I wrote a guide to using RSS to improve your web experience, evade lock-in and duck algorithmic recommendation systems:
Customizing your browser takes this to the next level, disenshittifying many websites ā even if they block or restrict RSS. Most of this stuff only applies to desktop browsers, though. Mobile browsers are far more locked down (even mobile Firefox ā remember, every iOS browser, including Firefox, is just a re-skinned version of Safari, thanks to Apple's ban rival browser engines). And of course, apps are the worst. An app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to improve it in any way:
And even if you do customize your mobile browser (Android Firefox lets you do some of this stuff), many apps (Twitter, Tumblr) open external links in their own browser (usually an in-app Chrome instance) with all the bullshit that entails.
The promise of locked-down mobile platforms was that they were going to "just work," without any of the confusing customization options of desktop OSes. It turns out that taking away those confusing customization options was an invitation to every enshittifier to turn the web into an unreadable, extractive, nagging mess. This was the foreseeable ā and foreseen ā consequence of a new kind of technology where everything that isn't mandatory is prohibited:
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
ā Live Streamingā Interactive Chatā Private Showsā HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ā¢ No registration required ā¢ HD streaming
I need to yell about something, so feel free to scroll on past. ADHD brain revelation incoming.
So, I had a minor epiphany today. One of those āoh no, this explainsĀ everythingĀ about the last year of my lifeā moments. And Iām spiraling a little bit, so congratulations to everyone following me for being dragged along on this psychological field trip. š
For context: I started ADHD meds late last winter. Iāve made a couple posts about that journey already, but this one isā¦ different.
Before meds, one of my biggest struggles with writing was getting my thoughts onto the page. Iād be excited about an idea, start writing it, then my brain would jump ahead and mentally finish the whole story before I actually finished writing it. And once my brain was ādone,ā Iād get bored and drop the project. Thatās why I had so many abandoned fics.
But once I started meds and finallyĀ couldĀ write again, I also stopped being able to read the way I used to.
Iāve always been a voracious reader. Like āteachers side-eyeing me because I finished a whole book during silent reading timeā levels of voracious. I haven't stopped reading entirely, but it suddenly got so much harder. I chalked it up to this idea that I had a āwriter mode brainā and a āreader mode brain.ā When I was writing, Iād notice everything: comma placement, sentence rhythm, crutch words, structure. And it made reading slower. I thought I just couldnāt do both modes at once. I assumed it was a skill-shift thing.
Fast forward: over the last year of writing, Iāve gotten way better at technical stuff. Betas pointed things out (comma splices! repeated words!) and I started catching more on my own. I figured the improvement was just practice and feedback.
And then today it hit me like a truck:
My brain used to move too fast toĀ seeĀ the technical details.
It wasnāt that I didnāt know them. It wasnāt that I wasnāt paying attention. My brain literally did not slow down enough to register them. I wasnāt catching my own repeated words or sloppy punctuation because my thoughts were already several sentences ahead of what I was typing or reading.
The medication helps me focus and it slowed my brain enough toĀ notice these things when I read and write. I can put thoughts in order instead of sprinting to the ending and getting bored.
Itās not āwriter modeā vs āreader modeā like I thought.
ItāsĀ medicated brainĀ vsĀ unmedicated brain.
During the day, on meds, my brain slows down enough to catch technical stuff, so I write better, but reading takes more effort because Iām actuallyĀ processingĀ every detail. But at night, when the meds wear off? I can suddenly read fast again because my brain is back in absorption mode, skimming over details instead of registering them.
So now Iām sitting here going: holy shit. I have been misinterpreting my own creative process for an entire year.
Itās not that I couldn't read at the speed I used to.
Itās not that writing turned me into a picky reader.
Itās not that my āmodesā were incompatible.
Itās just chemistry.
Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk while I completely reframe my understanding of how my ADHD brain works. š¤Æ
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
ā Live Streamingā Interactive Chatā Private Showsā HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ā¢ No registration required ā¢ HD streaming
How to Request a Desktop View of a Webpage on iPhone
Viewing the desktop version of a website can sometimes help you find something unavailable on the mobile version. Of course, the iPhone always defaults to the mobile site, but there is a way to force Safari to load the desktop version.
RAYMOND OGLESBY @RaymondOglesby2May 21, 2024
Viewing the desktop version of a website can sometimes help you find something unavailable on the mobile version. Of course, the iPhone always defaults to the mobile site, but there is a way to force Safari to load the desktop version. Letās check out how toĀ request a desktop site on iPhone.
This is for the iPhone running iOS 17+. Screenshots areā¦
Most web browsers have a built-in āReader Modeā that converts web pages into a more reader-friendly view. Strangely, Google Chrome does not have this feature; unless you know how to find it
RAYMOND OGLESBY @RaymondOglesby2May 23, 2023
Most web browsers have a built-in āReader Modeā that converts web pages into a more reader-friendly view. Strangely, Google Chrome does not have this feature; unless you know how to find it. Letās find out where it is.
This is for devices running Google Chrome. Screenshots are from Windows 10
Google Chrome has included a hidden Reader Mode all theā¦
