Lost and Found

A journey to the other side of the increasingly vast internet wastelands

Spent WAY too much time on the title for this week’s article. And, the picture. I was back and forth to LA last week, and possibly I listened to one too many podcasts or read one too many articles or made one too many websites or my Valentines Digest post threw off my publishing mojo or maybe LA just scrambled my brain? When I got back home my head was full of a lot of stuff and it took a few cranks to distill it down into a story.

The end of the story is a tweak to Wirepine’s business model, so stick around.

Get Lost

Getting lost can be liberating. If you ever went to the Lost and Found as a kid, you got a rush of excitement seeing all the treasure other kids had left and maybe a twinge of hope you’d find what you lost. Now you’re looking at all these toys - fuggedabout the lost sweatshirt your mom sent you after.

Lost and Found aren’t opposites, au contraire - one needs the other. I ran full tilt up a mountain to get my lost on¹. Corp detox lets goooo! So, get a little lost - unmoor and re-anchor to what matters.

Enshittification

Not my word! I would never be so crass. Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification late last year and it struck a nerve. It’s the American Dialect Society 2023 Word of the Year.

You know it. You’re checking what was once your favorite site or app, but now it makes you a bit sad. So much noise from ads or too much of what the Algorithm thinks you need to see today. A chunk of the internets have gotten lost and it’s coming to a head.

Cory’s definition:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Think of something you use for free on the Internet. First it was amazing, right? Maybe it was sharing pictures (yes Instagram), keeping up with faraway friends (yes Facebook), buying stuff (yes Amazon), searching for stuff (yes Google). Then over time what you loved got increasingly diluted until it is but a whisper of its former self.

These examples are all two-sided markets². A two-sided market isn’t as much a tech thing as economic model built on connecting buyers and sellers. The buyers come because the service is free and novel - and their friends are already there!³

Then the company switches from spending money making a great service to making money by targeting their users with ads. Profit motive drives a race to the bottom and eventually they provide the bare minimum to sustain both users and advertisers while maximizing profits for themselves/their shareholders.

Facebook is my favorite example of this.

1. At first it was amazing - join your friends from anywhere in the world. Rediscover the people you went to high school with. Share pictures of your kids. Write Happy Birthday on their walls.

2. Then FB started stuffing your feed with news sites; then they replaced that with ads and news content (effectively driving traditional print media out of business)

3. Then they sold your personal information and became a huge disseminator of misinformation and propaganda. Kind of mind blowing, but it happened.

I stopped using Facebook after the 2016 election. I was so mad. I went back this year because of the network affect - I still had friends there and I wanted to reconnect with them and share The Wirepine Weekly. It just keeps getting worse though. Every time I open the app I have to burrow through piles of reels, stories, ads flashing and scrolling every which way but loose - ugh so awful and where my friends at!?

When Facebook saw they were losing Millennials to Instagram they bought it and further enshittification⁴ ensued. 💩

Enshittification Mountain

Signs of Change

There’s a collective yearning for the weird and wonderful days when you could find stuff without ads, see pictures of your friends without hype videos, chat without haters. The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again

Maybe you came across one of those articles wondering why we’re all still paying $150 a year for Amazon prime. Maybe we don’t need to buy everything from Amazon now that we can leave the house again and now ads on streaming video? oh no bro

No way you escaped the spectacular collapse of Twitter. A multitude of cute baby microblogging platforms are sprouting from the ashes including Mastadon and Bluesky. Bluesky was in the news last week because they finally opened up to all comers without an invite. There’s something very cool in the way these new upstarts are wired (including Threads believe-it-or-not which is Meta’s entry). They are working on a set of interoperability standards so that their users can all interact regardless of home. Kind of how email works today and forever…

How about nearly every state in the union (42) suing Meta for messing with our kids? Zuck the robot went to the Senate and took quite a spectacular beating from Josh Hawley of all people who forced him to make a super awkward public apology. Quite the political theatre - change is afoot.

A brilliant bit of technology is regular cycles of disruption where old tech gets washed away by a tsunami of new tech and no it’s not blockchain.⁵ AI is definitely a tsunami and we’re at the stage where all the water in the harbor starts to disappear to build an ever-taller wall of water offshore,⁶ soon to be enroute to flatten the Enshittification Mountains⁷.

Searching

Unfortunately, Google with their monopoly on internet search continues to build an ever higher Enshittification Mountain. Back in the day I was transfixed with this new thing called AltaVista. A hardware company (Digital Equipment) made it to show off its new SPARC chip. Early volley in the Chip Wars. AltaVista indexed 20 million sites which was an order of magnitude more than had ever been done before.

AltaVista took off but Digital had no clue what to do with it. It became the seeds for what is now Google. Queue the ads. I love ChatGPT and the like because you get answers rather than a numbing scroll of ads and sites trying to game the algorithm in the scramble to the top of the mountain. AI is a foundational threat to Google’s search cash cow and they are scrambling big time to shore up for the building AI tsunami. 💩💩

Get Found

How will Wirepine help in the coming internets renaissance? Everyone should have a spot of their own on the internets. Anyone remember Geocities? Free sites for anyone who wanted to claim a home on the internets. Users were called ‘homesteaders’ and you picked a web address in virtual cities like Hollywood or Paris. At its peak Geocities was the #3 website worldwide with millions of users. It was particularly popular in Japan, for reasons I don’t understand⁸. Neocities⁹ picked up the pieces after Yahoo jettisoned the business.

If you’re running any kind of business, you need to be online¹⁰. The Yellow Pages have been replaced by the world wide web. You gotta have a place online and a way for your customers to find that place.

Right now, all my customer sites are hosted on other platforms (except for the one I just did!). Some sites are with existing hosters and I did updates in place. For the ones I created from scratch, it didn’t sit well with me that my customer had to fork up an additional $40/50 bucks a month to the hoster for their site and basics like email. No more - Wirepine’s now setup to host sites direct.

I can host as many sites as I can build at a fraction of what mainstream site builders like Wix charge. I’ve revived my love affair with Wordpress which is open source so I can build basic sites for little and fancy sites for less.

There’s a concept in software development that’s a useful lens if you know you need to get online but don’t know where to start. It’s called MVP or Minimum Viable Product. What’s the least you need to get online? Your site can be as basic as a digital business card. Professional but minimal design with a proper domain name ending in .com. It needs to have keywords under the covers (SEO) that correspond to how people search online for your products or services.

If you have a physical business, make sure it’s published on Google Maps and Apple Maps. Easy peasy lemon squeezy - also free. Google Maps especially gives you free mojo showing up in Google searches.

There are more tricks to get you found but enough for now. Til next time and be careful out there - it gets slippery on Enshittification Mountain! 💩💩💩

best, Andrew

1. Working title was ‘All those who wander are not lost’ which I saw on the back of a camper van and was kind of the credo for our year of roaming the earth. It’s from a Tolkien poem about Aragorn:

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

2. I had a buddy on my final tour at Microsoft that was my go-to for interviewing people. We were building up teams and hiring was ever the challenge. His go to question was ‘give me an example of a two-sided market.’ In retrospect it’s pretty simple but damn if that didn’t trip up the best candidates.

3. This is called the network effect and it’s super effective in both getting people to join a thing (because all their friends are there) and getting them to stick with a thing (but wait all my friends are here). The value/stickiness of platform increases significantly with each connection. That’s why Instagram, FB, pick your poison is constantly nagging you to access your contacts or suggesting new friends or posts you should follow.

4. This is the most readable of the Enshittification articles but it’s on Financial Times so you might hit a paywall 🙄 Just open in a private browser to read or wait for the book.

5. Blockchain/Crypto were cited as the foundation of the next evolution of the web (Web3) but you know how that story went.

6. AI is the disruption we’ve been waiting for, and progress is impressive and occasionally unpredictable. Have you seen Sora?! When I was playing with my initial title, I was using Microsoft’s new Copilot App. It marries up ChatGPT, the large language model, with DALL-E, the image generator, to create the pictures. Images are editable both in different styles and photo effects - super cool. But Copilot got sick of my shenanigans to make a change and decided some lovely ASCII art would do me fine complete with mocking smiley :-)

7. AI did NOT want to draw Enshittification Mountain for me. No matter how I tried to sneak in the poop emoji, it would start to render it and then the danger danger layer would trigger and tell me my prompt was verboten. Ended up getting it to go with ‘smiling brown mountain-shaped emojis’💩

8. Scott?

9. yah sure you betcha

10. Stats!

1. Nearly one out of three businesses still don’t have a website

2. Over 25% of business is conducted online

3. Over three-quarters of shoppers visit a business’s website before its physical location

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Check out last weeks article!