‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything::The term describes the slow decay of online platforms such as Facebook. But what if we’ve entered the ‘enshittocene’?
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I’m fine with whatever term we decide means “capitalism fucking sucks”. If we need some new term to escape the current terms that bind folk’s minds all up against their best interests then enshittisication is better than many
Without capitalism there wouldn’t be anything to enshitify…
Yes, because the first guy who lit a fire on purpose was like: “you want warm? You give food! Else fuck off!”
/s
To be fair, he may well have been like that. Humans have been selfish bastards since the dawn of time. And maybe this is why we need good government regulations - because human nature is greed. Any company in a position of power will just leech as much money as they can, if nobody is going to stop them.
If you think human nature is greed and selfishness, you’re falling for capitalist indoctrination. Humans have the capacity for greed or selfishness but it has not always been the dominant principle of human societies. But capitalists want us to believe it’s just “human nature” to be an asshole so there’s no viable alternative to a greed-based society.
I wonder what arguments people have to justify a downvote. Polarized either/or views. Capitalism is a great idea if regulated. Look to history and find good examples of societies that aren’t based on capitalism. They don’t exist.
I agree and value the Marxist analysis of capitalism. I’m a socialist. However, I don’t think that a Marxist economy would work. Social responsible capitalism works. Capitalism run amok doesn’t. Unfortunately, it is getting out of control, especially in the USA.
If you were a socialist you’d know what dialectical materialism is and not say something like “Marxist economy”.
What we have here is a capitalism that is devoid of the creation of goods and services; today’s capitalism is just neofeudalism in which the capitalist just collects rent without creating anything. This thread is confusing capitalism woth commerce.
Enshitification was coined by Cory Doctrow specifically for the tech space, because the tech space is uniquely poised to constantly shift and tweak a service-based product to manipulate users, creators, and the paying customers.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
This is on top of the normal problem of greed. Now I didn’t read the article because it is pay walled (go figure). Is this article actually drawing a correct comparison to the definition of enshitification above, or is it just lazily ascribing the phenomenon of greed to that word?
Enshitification was coined by Cory Doctrow specifically for the tech space
You’re not wrong it was coined this way, but he has referred to the process in other arenas where monopolies exist:
But it’s not just tech that faces the curse of bigness: your bank, your insurer, your beer company, the companies that make your eyeglasses and your athletic shoes — they’ve all run out of lands to conquer, but instead of weeping, they’re taking it out on you, with worse products that cost more.
Enshittification follows monopoly as sure as night follows day.
the term is way more specific, though.
Okay that’s it, it’s been overused.
I often wonder: can we start over? Like, can we just do MySpace again?..or have another YouTube that’s like before Google bought it? If we hate how tech bros have destroyed the fun, is there a way to redux the pre-tech bro wonder years?
Even if a great new service or product comes along it alway just gets bought out by somme billionaire
I think the Fediverse is not doomed any time soon. In other areas XMPP is an example of an open source software based protocol since long and still being around, with active projects, and attempts to make things easier, like Snikket : https://snikket.org
Communism is bad. Lenin was a murderer and Stalin was worse.
Not necessarily. The Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement is a thing. Most of the Fediverse is FLOSS, and I doubt there’s anyone who can take Lemmy or Mastodon closed source and buy every instance and then stop pop-up instances. It does require quite a bit of work, though, so it is difficult.
I think the real challenging thing is that a great FLOSS service needs to attract attention and care. When I bring up Fediverse/FLOSS alternatives to software my friends complain about, I’m met with lukewarm-at-best reactions, generally due to networking effects (I think).
This is defenitely the exception, this is why I hope more people switch soon
Me personally I have just accepted this is the way it is going to be. The company makes a good product and then it stops making a good product, I move on.
I mean, you’re on Lemmy right. That’s what we’re doing.
Peertube exists
while peertube is a solution, and I really hope it succeeds, the content and creators arent there, anyways we can always use piped.
I often wonder: can we start over?
No. All services that don’t enshittify will be outcompeted by services that do.
The love of money is the root of many evils.
Upvote for username
Funny enough c/politics just banned me for my username
That tracks
‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything
Subscribe to unlock this article
Dude, I was trying to deal with the fucking Fullscreen cookie popup when the subscribe to unlock bullshit popped up and I just closed it immediately
Couldn’t send that point home any harder
Unintentionally brilliant
Best comment I’ll read today.
The irony of clicking on this link and getting hit with “accept cookies” “Subscribe to unlock this article”.
Annoying for sure, but not what “Enshittification” refers to.
It may not be what the article was referring to (though, I’d have to pay to know for sure), but it’s definitely a trend making services shittier so I feel like it counts
Well blogs and new sites used to just show you the content. Now they show you this.
Welcome to language. It evolves.
Or perhaps, from your point of view, it’s getting enshittified. Even if you don’t like it.
Enshitification only comes for the things capitalism touches… So yeah, everything…
Nah, it won’t touch projects like KDE.
I am a big fan of KDE, but having qt’s role in mind I wouldn’t be to sure. I think they already try to endorse tracking there.
Qt is exactly why I’m so sure. They made sure that there was a legal agreement that Qt would always stay open source or else they’d get the ability to make it available under a BSD license: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/
That’s a project that understands the entanglement and doesn’t allow itself to be taken over.
Enshitification comes because of the unsustainable growth required by Capitalism in order to appease shareholders. Line must always go up!
Enshittification comes from failure of government to establish a market where capitalism acts for the benefit of society. It comes from failure of antitrust regulations, failure of consumer protections, failure of broadcaster fairness doctrine, failure to reward a sustainable business model rather than simply maximizing quarterly profit, failure to support public broadcasting, failure to mandate ethics/honesty/transparency, failure to incent public good such environmental responsibility.
So Capitalism, gotcha.
If ads are pushed into ed(1), then it truly is everything. But, as long as Theo is the leader of OpenBSD, we will always have a free operating system.
Until governments get serious about trust busting, it will keep happening. Companies that don’t have to compete enshittify.
Monopolies don’t matter in this case. The market has been saturated. Nearly everyone pays for a streaming service; probably 2 or 3. There are no “new customers” so all that’s left is to squeeze existing customers even more.
Same things happened with Peloton. Pretty much everyone that would buy their products have and they’re not buying a second bike or treadmill, so they introduced tiers of service. Pay more or you get fewer features.
This is what capitalism demands. Ever increasing profits by any means necessary.
If the market was competitive, people would just choose another product or service that didn’t use such practices as you can clearly be profitable without doing this.
You’ll only get “competition” in the streaming space if you could eliminate most or all of the exclusive content. You want to switch to send the message you’re unhappy but you’d probably be just as unhappy or moreso with a service that has nothing you care to watch.
It WAS coming for everything, but it’s been here awhile now.
Yeah you might as well give up… everything is lost…it’s never going to get better but can you put me in your will plz? I want that bag of Cheetos
That big bag of cheetos? Yeah that still only has like 2.5oz, it too has been enshitified.
🥺
“Subscribe to unlock article.” Oh, the irony. 😂
Now, the enshittifiers aren’t taking this lying down. Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has run more than 80 pieces trashing Khan, insisting that she’s an ineffectual ideologue who can’t get anything done. Sure, that’s why you ran 80 editorials about her. Because she can’t get anything done.
I love when other people realize the value of Lina Khan. I’ll vote for Biden for the sole reason to let Lina Khan do good work!
I actually thought the paywalled article was the meme at first.
Also shoutout Bypass Paywalls Clean (D). It’s practically up there with uBlock Origin as required to browse today’s internet.
The add-on you linked appears to be a fork after the original was DMCA struck, the original is still available at https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean
I believe the one you linked is the fork. Here is the original.
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
I recommend the fork you linked because the original author supposedly was slow and reluctant to add new sites and now copies fixes from the fork.
Read more about the history here: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean/-/issues/1
Holy shit, YES!
Enshittification = Corporate Greed
It’s one of many expressions of corporate greed.
Fine with me if we life in the enshittocene. If the fedicene is coming right after it
How has healthcare software like MyChart been enshittified? It’s probably the tech I care the most about and the tech no one seems to talk about.
I would love to see someone discuss any enshitification trends with EHR software, as well as any initiatives to bolster FOSS stuff like OSCAR for hospital use cases (far as I know, it’s pretty much just used at the clinic level, with more and more uptake of proprietary solutions for that use case as well here in Canada [obligatory Fuck Telus]).
I’m not familiar with that particular piece of software. It may not be enshittified… yet. But it only take someone in the company to makes it to show the can make some ad revenue by plopping a bunch of ads on the site. Or even worse, they could start selling the data, which is particularly worrisome given it’s medical data. Think about how much pharma companies spend on advertising and how valuable it would be to them to be able to do targeted advertising directed at people the know have conditions that they’re selling treatments for.
The data on a site like that is ridiculously valuable. Sooner or later someone may decide to give a marketing company contracted by a big pharma company just one little peak at some data.
Removed by mod
They will find a way around it. Maybe they will claim it doesn’t count because it is tried to metadata and not an individual person.
HIPPA is no joke and companies actually don’t fuck around with it. It’s not worth it. It’s one of the few pieces of consumer protection out there that has real teeth. Under HIPPA, you are expressly forbidden from using personal health information for anything unrelated to that patient’s care, and companies can and are fined heavily for violating it.
It’s only illegal if you can’t afford the fines. As businesses routinely prove, if your company is big enough they just budget for fines.
HIPAA fines are massive for now. So the cost risk doesn’t work for them yet. But I’m sure some politicians will find a way to make it just the cost of doing business soon.
The other option is “It’s too expensive to go after them.” See: Taxes.
