I understand the frustration, but this is everywhere. I went to McDonald's and saw that they were running their Monopoly game again. I peeled the sticker off of my fries nostalgically, but in order to even see what I may have won I need to download the app and manually enter the code. Why even print a physical Monopoly piece sticker? I'm definitely not installing your app. We used to just walk up to the counter and redeem the reward. This change you've made, it's not for me, is it?
The solution is the same as it has always been, stop spending time and money on things that are frustrating. If enough people do it in aggregate, then things will change; but I'll be damned if people aren't slow to catch on.
It's back to this modern business problem: shareholders demand multiple revenue streams now. You can't just sell food, now you also have to surveil your customers and sell their data, show them ads, and get them into a subscription.
I don't think shareholders really demand anything, most of the time. So much of the market is just passive 401k buckets.
This feels like a pathology of board/C-suite culture, something that they feel like they "have to" do, rather than actual angry letters from Joe Shareholder in Des Moines demanding more user data farming.
To be fair, I think McDonald's makes more money on real estate (renting franchise locations) than they do selling food, and the income from data mining customers would probably be a pittance in comparison to both.
Not that I'd put it past them, but I assume the entire point of the Monopoly campaign is advertising, playing on the nostalgia for the original, and that the app is just there because that's what you do now, you just have an app.
Would it work if we created a crowdsourced vision for each category of product/service, so that any given business would be incentivized to meet these requirements to be able to advertise a product or store is Anti-Enshitified Compliant™?
No more "savey-save fcky-fck" cards/clubs as Bill Burr used to joke. No more apps required just to get a fair price. Get the easily transferable PFAS/PFOA contaminants off of my receipts and food wrappers. The sky is the limit for what we could demand.
Companies/shareholders could choose to comply or not.
> We used to just walk up to the counter and redeem the reward.
That still works. Instant prizes will have a tiny QR code on them and you can still take them to the counter and let the person behind scan it. At least here in the UK.
I might try; assuming there is anyone at the counter to actually scan a QR code. I did some very basic research (US) and while you can still get pieces for free, it seemed to me that you need the app in order to do anything with them. Which seemed potentially illegal, but I guess since the app is free they can still say "no purchase necessary." I mean, a phone to run the app on isn't free...
Well, it's been 10 years since they ran the game because last time they did it there was a massive fraud ring. This time you have to register to play the game, and you register your codes with the app. The app reports how many prizes have been claimed, and which ones, so it's good for players too because last time they got mad thinking they were playing for $1M when it was never going to happen. I agree there are instances where an app isn't warranted, but I think for this game it's app or no game at all. We don't live in 2015 anymore.
I remember the fraud, it was insider theft and distribution of game pieces. I'm sure the new system doesn't make them immune to fraud. It now just takes a different skill set. I don't buy the "We don't live in 2015 anymore." take, do you remember the airport before 9/11? Is it okay to say, "Ah, but we don't live in 2011 anymore." There is a very clear trend of companies gaslighting everyone into thinking something is better when it's clearly only better for the company proposing it. I agree that it's cool to be able to see the remaining prize pool; it'd be really cool if I could see that on the menu, on the kiosk, on a dedicated Monopoly display in the store, etc. McDonald's can use their devices for their promotions, not mine.
Washington post has been becoming increasingly irrelevant. They went from 500-800k paid subscribers to less than 100k after Bezos started interfering editorially. Some of the most respected journalists left the paper. So I wouldn’t take WaPo as an indicator of anything; its a Bozos Vanity Project and nothing else.
Always happy for a new news source, I just took a look at the Atlantic. It doesn't seem to have any news, just articles about news. Interesting concept.
Does Powell make editorial decisions at The Atlantic ?
The problem I think is implied to be the choice to meddle with editorial not per se the choice for wealthy individuals to own such a publication.
I'd be interested with people who buy sports teams and interfere in running the team - does that go similarly poorly? Does it turn out that billionaires aren't great at choosing the team composition and strategy for NFL games ? Surprised Pikachu Face 'cos sure seems like Bezos doesn't understand how to write a great newspaper...
What do you mean? A source says wapo has 130K print and 2.5M online subs.[1] Compare NYT with 660K print and 9.7M online[2] which I imagine have fallen off proportionally in line with wapo.[3]
The wapo still has over a million paid subscribers.
“The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik”
Yeah, they preach about truth, but the ink ran dry,
Bought the headlines, thought clout could buy the sky.
Bezos in the lobby, pullin’ strings, that’s the show,
Turned the Post into a post nobody wants to know.
Five hundred K deep, now it’s tumbleweed clicks,
Writers jump ship while the suits play tricks.
Never trust the press when it’s built on a throne,
Every page now reads like a PR zone.
Ad Homeminem, I don’t bow, I expose,
I talk numbers, they talk prose.
Media’s a mirror, cracked and vain,
You can’t buy truth with billionaire pain.
This is just the bundling of one product with another. Personally I get the Financial Times as a benefit of another service I pay for. It’s worth it to me, but I don’t really interpret a newspaper as being the arbiter of democracy in the first place.
But if we interpreted the headline as if the article was actually about the idea: I do think there is an interesting idea (which I first read in Byung-Chul Han‘a The Transparency Society) which is that trust and transparency are functionally opposites. We tend to treat transparency as an automatically good thing in democratic systems, but I think you can make the argument that the call for transparency only comes after trust has already been lost.
So it’s not really a solution to a more democratic system that results in more trust between constituents and representatives, but rather just a way to deal with the loss of trust in an ostensibly practical way.
Thanks for mentioning Byung-Chul Han and The Transparency Society. I previously worked for an organization that promoted government transparency. Here, I'd like to share my take in the hopes of it being useful and/or getting feedback. Here's the first paragraph from [1]:
> Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. ...
The core argument for why transparency is crucial for democracy is can be framed as a question. How can people be sufficiently informed to govern themselves without information? This leads to follow-up questions like: (1) How much will it "cost" to get X more units of transparency? (2) How much will this help? (3) Who will "pay" for it (in terms of political capital and issue prioritization)?
> ... Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything—and everyone—has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world.
I take Han's meaning, but there are major limits to this. Practically, various byzantine corporate ownership structures can make it very resource-intensive -- sometimes nearly impossible given a time deadline -- to make sense of who controls what.
Information has the potential to move way faster than our ability to vet it.
> A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. [2]
Back to Han, second paragraph from [1]:
> Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust.
Speaking in terms of statistical association, sure. Transparency may co-occur with the negatives listed above. But -- YIKES -- the quote above muddles the issue! We should not confuse causality: transparency does not cause a lack of trust once you include the other relevant factors. [3] Transparency promotes trust in the long run, even as it highlights scandals and corruption in the short-run.
Don't shoot the messenger. Don't blame transparency. The deeper problems tend to involve human nature (e.g. greed, power-seeking, tribalism), misaligned incentives, ineffective institutions, and eroded norms. [4]
Too much of anything can be a problem, but in aggregate, I doubt we have too much transparency in government and corporate affairs.
Of course transparency is not free; we want to spend our political capital strategically on the better kinds of transparency. Nuance matters. For example, effective negotiation requires that leaders can speak candidly and off the record when working out deals. However, once a proposal is hammered out, there should be a sufficiently-long public comment period so the public and interested parties have time to make sense of whatever has been proposed and get involved.
[2]: Who originally said this? Twain? Churchill? Not according to the analysis at https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ which suggests the core idea can be traced to Jonathan Swift in 1710.
[3]: I'm a huge proponent of promoting clear and direct statements of causality, rather than burying one's assumptions. See Judea Pearl's "The Book of Why" as well as his more technical work on causality.
[4]: One can divide this up in different ways, but I think this four-way split is reasonably useful.
The first two paragraphs of the book aren’t a thesis statement. He explores the idea of transparency and trust in various contexts, so I don’t really think you can provide much of a counter argument without reading the whole thing. Or at least the particular section / chapter that he discusses different manifestations of transparency.
Trust/faith in "democracy" is a fools religion. 100% transparency is the only way out of the pit of feces we find ourselves in election after election.
I have a hard time believing that you can build a truly democratic culture without a level of shared trust and values. In the sense of it being “rule of the people” rather than rule of the elite, monarchy, etc.
In a properly functioning democracy, I think you’d want leaders to want to be a part of the political process. The more hostile and demanding that becomes, the less likely you’ll get those people in positions of power.
We’re going to see a bigger rise up of independent media, and that means that Substack, Patreon, and other platforms that exist to spread a message to paid subscribers are vulnerable to the same buy and squash tactics as traditional media.
We certainly need a more P2P, version of this type of platform and a way to fund and scale it such that it can’t be messed with by billionaire hacks.
The odds of this being wildly successful are pretty slim, I’d say…
This supposed "independent media" in hostage to about 4 or 5 centrally controlled platforms that dictate discoverability, delivery. Payment controlled by even less. How would that turn out any different?
That’s exactly the point. Right now, “independent media” (across all political spectrums, mind you) is trying to rise up, but they’re doing so on platforms that _could_ easily turn them off. There’s a ton of multi-million subscriber Left leaning, independent media channels on YouTube that could easily become irrelevant by a simple “change to the algorithm” that squashes them.
Patreon, Substack, etc are no different. We’ve seen people be silenced on X. We’ve also seen payment processors disallow payments to organizations and whatnot.
There's some kind of missing link here between p2p and "I write for a living" that I don't think is going to be bridged any time soon. Funding and p2p / independent might not be compatible organisms in today's social and economic environment. We've had the tools for this for decades and it's never been achieved at scale and sustainably. I don't think it ever will.
True. I don’t think it was ever successful, because it requires a strong ideological point of view from the people who are supposed to support this idea. With so much distraction in the digital world today, this seems close to impossible.
Independent media is not vulnerable to buy and squash because another will just rise in it's place every time you squash one. Supply follows demand, and there are no barriers to entry. It is vulnerable to the much more insidious force of audience capture, though.
The problem is that we don’t have distributed systems of discovery. Patreon, Substack, etc, are all centralized. You have to migrate your audience, and you’ll lose some every time.
So yes, another will rise up. But even better would be a distributed network that actually _works_, immune to the threat of centralization.
> We certainly need a more P2P, version of this type of platform and a way to fund and scale it such that it can’t be messed with by billionaire hacks.
We already have that. Selfhosting is possible, and today even simpler than ever. And there is a multitude of systems and platforms which one can use to collect money as long as it's not doing something too critical, like porn or terrorism. Influencers have those field already covered well, and will continue building them to avoid the hefty shares on their usual platforms.
Wouldn't any system that enables funding be susceptible to influence by the rich? Why would any sort of P2P/decentralized/etc system be impervious to that?
It’s less about being susceptible to influence by the rich. Nothing can truly stop that. It’s more about ensuring that platforms can’t silence dissent.
You can dissent in an echo chamber but it doesn’t do any good.
> Journalism (or what’s left of it now) is in the state it’s in because of the adtech funding model. I don’t know what the solution is.
A P2P [1] social media swarm where identities are signed pseudoanonymous hashes optionally tied to identity proofs. Reputation can be gained in the peer and interest graphs.
Advertisers and attention seekers can still exist in such a system without being obtrusive - they can flag their messages by signing them with proof that they burned funds contributing to a charity (or deposited funds to my personal inbox). Eg., "this message from xyz recruiter deposited $1 in your account - read?", or "this MrBeast video provably donated $1M to the EFF - watch?"
Journalists can make money on the graph by soliciting donors or publishing content to certain nodes early for a fee.
[1] not federated, apart from proxy publishing or relay nodes
There are plenty of outlets creating and reporting original news that are not dependent on adtech. They just aren't traditionally "mainstream" and so a lot of people don't like them
Whuffies from Doctorow's In and Out in the Magic Kingdom? Bitcoin could had derived into this 15 years ago, but it turned into another shackle in our chains. If it can be attributed some value, then it probably will end in a similar way.
I don't care for crypto at all, but if you burn money to talk to me or send me information, I might pick up. I would prefer to be paid for attention rather than have a third party be paid.
Nostr is starting to look something like P2P social, but it's still got a long way to go and isn't mainstream friendly enough. This needs kid-friendly coating. It should just work out of the box and have Meta-caliber product leadership.
When Google Chrome was new it was advertised a ton of places. All sorts of applications and plugins would by default install Chrome at the same time unless you opted out.
Not that that makes this any less bad, but it seems the more fair comparison.
I had totally forgotten about a Chrome download being sneaked into applications. It used a number of dark patterns like having the "install chrome" tickbox being light grey on top of white or it being hidden in "customise install" options.
I like using perplexity itself. However them forcing their browser everywhere is annoying.
Also Gleen Greenwald will shill absolute any old nonsense. I used to watch his occasionally and he was doing ad read for these awful ads about vegetable drinks, like Alex Jones is infamous for. It was nauseating.
Yeah, it's really disappointing. Circa 2006 his blog and analysis were insightful and something I followed closely, but his overall attitude and connection to reality radically changed somewhere between 2012 and 2016.
You’d think with all OpenAIs money, talent, and 10x devs due to AI they could make a new browser and capture that same feeling chrome did back in the day when it first came out.
That they did not is very telling about how the future is going to play out. This is a cash grab before the bubble pops.
I don't think it's really possible to do that now just by throwing eng at it. Chrome being a monopoly hasn't actually stopped Google from improving it massively since it came out 17 years ago, so the bar is much higher. Browsers are a mature market now and I doubt that releasing something dramatically better than Chrome is possible just by engineering a better version of the same concept like Chrome was when it released. It would require a fundamentally novel breakthrough in UX design that renders Chrome obsolete, and that's much more likely to come out of a small startup than somewhere like OpenAI.
Readit News
The solution is the same as it has always been, stop spending time and money on things that are frustrating. If enough people do it in aggregate, then things will change; but I'll be damned if people aren't slow to catch on.
This feels like a pathology of board/C-suite culture, something that they feel like they "have to" do, rather than actual angry letters from Joe Shareholder in Des Moines demanding more user data farming.
Not that I'd put it past them, but I assume the entire point of the Monopoly campaign is advertising, playing on the nostalgia for the original, and that the app is just there because that's what you do now, you just have an app.
Gas station at 6a, nothing like blaring ads across 20 pumps. What a time to be alive!
No more "savey-save fcky-fck" cards/clubs as Bill Burr used to joke. No more apps required just to get a fair price. Get the easily transferable PFAS/PFOA contaminants off of my receipts and food wrappers. The sky is the limit for what we could demand.
Companies/shareholders could choose to comply or not.
That still works. Instant prizes will have a tiny QR code on them and you can still take them to the counter and let the person behind scan it. At least here in the UK.
Meanwhile Laurene Powell (Steve Jobs' widow) owns The Atlantic, and their subscriptions are up and they are now profitable:
* https://wan-ifra.org/2025/05/how-the-atlantic-keeps-subscrib...
* https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/11/media/the-atlantic-magazine-p...
* https://www.pugpig.com/2025/03/14/the-content-and-revenue-le...
One can have a well-run 'vanity project' or a badly-run one.
The problem I think is implied to be the choice to meddle with editorial not per se the choice for wealthy individuals to own such a publication.
I'd be interested with people who buy sports teams and interfere in running the team - does that go similarly poorly? Does it turn out that billionaires aren't great at choosing the team composition and strategy for NFL games ? Surprised Pikachu Face 'cos sure seems like Bezos doesn't understand how to write a great newspaper...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Post
[2]https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/02/the-new-york-times-made-mo...
[3]https://fourweekmba.com/the-new-york-times-print-subscribers...
“The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/oct/29/washington-pos...
News cannot survive, because it has no real revenue stream.
the NYT figured out video games as a solution.
That said NYT crossword has existed for much longer, puzzle games are a longstanding feature of many newspapers.
But if we interpreted the headline as if the article was actually about the idea: I do think there is an interesting idea (which I first read in Byung-Chul Han‘a The Transparency Society) which is that trust and transparency are functionally opposites. We tend to treat transparency as an automatically good thing in democratic systems, but I think you can make the argument that the call for transparency only comes after trust has already been lost.
So it’s not really a solution to a more democratic system that results in more trust between constituents and representatives, but rather just a way to deal with the loss of trust in an ostensibly practical way.
What service is that?
> Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. ...
The core argument for why transparency is crucial for democracy is can be framed as a question. How can people be sufficiently informed to govern themselves without information? This leads to follow-up questions like: (1) How much will it "cost" to get X more units of transparency? (2) How much will this help? (3) Who will "pay" for it (in terms of political capital and issue prioritization)?
> ... Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything—and everyone—has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world.
I take Han's meaning, but there are major limits to this. Practically, various byzantine corporate ownership structures can make it very resource-intensive -- sometimes nearly impossible given a time deadline -- to make sense of who controls what.
Information has the potential to move way faster than our ability to vet it.
> A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. [2]
Back to Han, second paragraph from [1]:
> Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust.
Speaking in terms of statistical association, sure. Transparency may co-occur with the negatives listed above. But -- YIKES -- the quote above muddles the issue! We should not confuse causality: transparency does not cause a lack of trust once you include the other relevant factors. [3] Transparency promotes trust in the long run, even as it highlights scandals and corruption in the short-run.
Don't shoot the messenger. Don't blame transparency. The deeper problems tend to involve human nature (e.g. greed, power-seeking, tribalism), misaligned incentives, ineffective institutions, and eroded norms. [4]
Too much of anything can be a problem, but in aggregate, I doubt we have too much transparency in government and corporate affairs.
Of course transparency is not free; we want to spend our political capital strategically on the better kinds of transparency. Nuance matters. For example, effective negotiation requires that leaders can speak candidly and off the record when working out deals. However, once a proposal is hammered out, there should be a sufficiently-long public comment period so the public and interested parties have time to make sense of whatever has been proposed and get involved.
[1]: https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/transparency...
[2]: Who originally said this? Twain? Churchill? Not according to the analysis at https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ which suggests the core idea can be traced to Jonathan Swift in 1710.
[3]: I'm a huge proponent of promoting clear and direct statements of causality, rather than burying one's assumptions. See Judea Pearl's "The Book of Why" as well as his more technical work on causality.
[4]: One can divide this up in different ways, but I think this four-way split is reasonably useful.
In a properly functioning democracy, I think you’d want leaders to want to be a part of the political process. The more hostile and demanding that becomes, the less likely you’ll get those people in positions of power.
We certainly need a more P2P, version of this type of platform and a way to fund and scale it such that it can’t be messed with by billionaire hacks.
The odds of this being wildly successful are pretty slim, I’d say…
Patreon, Substack, etc are no different. We’ve seen people be silenced on X. We’ve also seen payment processors disallow payments to organizations and whatnot.
This is all a problem.
True. I don’t think it was ever successful, because it requires a strong ideological point of view from the people who are supposed to support this idea. With so much distraction in the digital world today, this seems close to impossible.
So yes, another will rise up. But even better would be a distributed network that actually _works_, immune to the threat of centralization.
We already have that. Selfhosting is possible, and today even simpler than ever. And there is a multitude of systems and platforms which one can use to collect money as long as it's not doing something too critical, like porn or terrorism. Influencers have those field already covered well, and will continue building them to avoid the hefty shares on their usual platforms.
You can dissent in an echo chamber but it doesn’t do any good.
A P2P [1] social media swarm where identities are signed pseudoanonymous hashes optionally tied to identity proofs. Reputation can be gained in the peer and interest graphs.
Advertisers and attention seekers can still exist in such a system without being obtrusive - they can flag their messages by signing them with proof that they burned funds contributing to a charity (or deposited funds to my personal inbox). Eg., "this message from xyz recruiter deposited $1 in your account - read?", or "this MrBeast video provably donated $1M to the EFF - watch?"
Journalists can make money on the graph by soliciting donors or publishing content to certain nodes early for a fee.
[1] not federated, apart from proxy publishing or relay nodes
Nostr is starting to look something like P2P social, but it's still got a long way to go and isn't mainstream friendly enough. This needs kid-friendly coating. It should just work out of the box and have Meta-caliber product leadership.
And they tell us that revenue growth is organic. When Google was new, you didn't need a single ad.
Not that that makes this any less bad, but it seems the more fair comparison.
Also Gleen Greenwald will shill absolute any old nonsense. I used to watch his occasionally and he was doing ad read for these awful ads about vegetable drinks, like Alex Jones is infamous for. It was nauseating.
There is only so much malfeasance I can swallow, and Perplexity tick a few too many boxes.
That they did not is very telling about how the future is going to play out. This is a cash grab before the bubble pops.