EDIT: Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
2013 is too late, the machinations of the Cambridge Analytica scandal had already begun at that point.
I think about 2010 was when big tech peaked at being at least viewed as a predominantly utopian force (if not necessarily actually being one). Social media was still mostly social, rather than a side effect of an advertising business. Recommendation algorithms were relatively rudimentary, where they existed at all. Smartphones apps were not dopamine factories designed to be psychologically addictive.
After that was roughly the beginning of “disruptive” tech and a big expansion of surveillance tech.
Phones were still fun to mess with and hack back then. Now I just try to use my phone less overall. They’re all the same garbage gilded in fools gold.
I’d go even earlier I think, to pre-smartphone.
Around 2007, perhaps.
You could message your friends and family on your feature phone and keep in touch, but the Internet was still something you had to sit down at the computer for.
Social interactions were uninterrupted by apps, and it was still impossible to cheat on pub quizzes.
Capitalism hadn’t worked out yet how to make money from the Internet.
Forums and imageboards were in full swing, and the web was a glorious mess of bizarre small sites with niche content. IRC was the peak of online chat.
It was the best of times.
I agree with the date of 2010. That is when Web 2.0 started and the internet really started to be shitty. Now they are talking about Web 3.0, whatever that means.
Yeah, Web 2.0 was when they started walling everything off and displaying only a few posts or lines of text at a time. They already viewed your posts and info as theirs and were actively trying to make CTRL+F and CTRL+C useless for the average non-technical person. This war on copying and pasting led to all sharing being pushed towards their sharing frameworks on Android and iOS. No longer were we sharing links, but rather apps and info inside of apps. Comments were only shown few lines at a time, or collapsed entirely to make it harder to find info.
People will look back at this time in 20 years and think that we were all morons.
I think I agree. Still in the period when facebook’s userbase was mostly teenagers, and before smartphones became ubiquitous.
In my opinion it was facebook buying instagram in early 2012 that signalled the beginning of the end. Of course they were only following in the footsteps of google and yahoo before them, but it was the first domino in the enshittification of social media specifically.
For me it started in 2006 when OLGA went offline. OLGA was a community of people who transcribed how they played songs on guitar, and the music industry decided that they held the rights to that and sent a takedown request.