World News

54755 readers

2919 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world

Recommendations

How to spot Misinformation and Propaganda

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

NewsAutoMod@lemmy.world

Tenthrow@lemmy.world

little_cow@lemmy.world

lemmyAtom@lemmy.world

jordanlund@lemmy.world

936

‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’ (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 15 hours ago by HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to c/world@lemmy.world

67 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”

The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.

“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”

Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 points 4 hours ago

As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue.

I'd say its one step worse than that. If you just wanted to return value to shareholders, the 2010s Facebook model of selling a few ads in between pictures of people's pets and graduation photos would work just fine. They could have churned this for decades unimpeded. And the less they fucked with the model, the more money they'd have made long term.

It isn't merely shareholder value that these companies crave, but perpetual double-digit growth in valuation. And, to that end, they're gutting the golden goose for a sudden spike in quarterly profits.

It isn't enough for Zuckerberg's company be valued at $100B. They needed to go for that fourth comma. So they started coming up with crazy - apparently impossible - ideas to reinvent themselves into... the Metaverse, where your whole OS is in VR! Diem (formerly Libra), the Killer Stablecoin! Whateverthefuck AI thing they're doing, to make human labor irrelevant!

Because they've bought into a notion of perpetual high speed growth through financialization. They cannot conceive of any kind of economic boundary or closed system. Like a deadly virus that spreads too quickly, they cannot see the edges of their population space or curb their basic impulse to consume.

There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose.

So much of the drive towards AI is an insane quest to create a financial market without human customers. Just a big machine that sucks in investment capital and reports back a higher earnings figure.

It's increasingly divorced from any kind of material condition. And increasingly predicated on unfettered access to an unlimited pool of natural resources backed by an unchallenged Petrodollar.