I have always disliked Substack, but I’m beginning to see why people move to Substack, which handles all these problems for them. I would just say to the proponents of the open web: If you want more people to move onto the open web, you have to be more patient with them than you’ve been with me, and you have to be willing to provide more basic instruction than, so far, you’ve been willing to provide to me.
Changes Ahead by Alan Jacobs
Alan Jacob’s reflections on living on the open web reminds me of Doug Belshaw’s recent remark about enshittification:
@mrkrndvs If there *is* a post-2023 AI era I’d wager there’s also one before it from about 2017-2022 which has something to do with enclosure, authoritarianism, and what Doctorow eventually identified as enshittification.
TL;DR: the time when it became all but impossible impossible to avoid cloud services and Big Tech