‘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’?
It was coming for absolutely everything since 2013 at least.
I will never forget the day when Creative Suite was no longer a thing. I will never forget the day when Apple flattened iOS. I will never forget the day when the Xbox One was announced.
Can you believe their modern products are basically a continuation of what they started back in 2013? This is why it’s the worst year of all time.
Oh man we should really do a review of the most recent worst year limited to just the last 200 years or else we are competing with the black Plague or the final boss of 536 C.E.
Everyone would be talking about… certain events related to WW2.
Thanks a lot, mustache man.
Hmmm touche… Men with mustaches are gonna be a lot of years sticking points if we cast that big of a net. It’s shocking how nice things were on the base level the last few decades in terms of mass deaths.
Does feel like we are priming ourselves for a whallop though. So maybe worst foreshadowing year? Or worst step back year in the last 100 years?
We would have to look at death percentages to population numbers. We might just have more people dying because of population is larger. Dieing of stupid shit has to be higher.
This got me thinking for a bit.
I’m guessing these last two statements are kinda correct.
You leave Charlie Chaplin out of this.
We have been shockingly stagnant for some time now but it’s been creeping for a while now. Decades of slow but building shittiness.
The initial investment and machines put in motion and more and more the only goal was to scrape as much profitability from them.
Now that the tech is struggling to advance in meaningful leaps and bounds that the populace can easily be pushed into following cause it truly just keeps getting better we are really in the shit zone. But Companies have realized they are so big that your options are work with them for whatever scraps they feel like giving, or don’t work at all cause who else is there.
I wish it wouldn’t come to products… I understand the need to make a profit, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of landfilling perfectly good hardware. I’d love just an affordable tablet with 5+ years of updates and an unlocked boot loader maybe with NO battery, and just a USB
It’s why having open platforms matter.
But that doesn’t maximize the profits of the shareholders, and we are now in a shareholder market.
We just need to go back to paying for services. Free free free everything forever is not a sustainable business model. That’s why the big players just sell you to advertisers instead. And everyone is getting pretty grossed out about how much data that actually takes on you, so we’re passing privacy laws. Those laws mean these services can’t be free anymore.
Good. They shouldn’t be free.
EXACTLY! That’s why Streaming Services, Online Shopping and tech producers like Apple have NOT begun to Enshittify!
They have. Smaller catalogs, more ads, more restrictions, more extra services pushed to users…
As far as online shopping goes, if you’re getting free shipping and returns, there’s your answer.
And streaming services are just becoming cable again, so that’s not really surprising. Netflix with all the movies and shows for $10 a month was completely unsustainable.
It is not a sustainable business model because when it becomes paid people will realize they don’t need them.
Yes. This is the silent problem of enormous wealth inequality in the US. As the middle class disappears, fewer people are able to pay small fees to contribute to things like local news, community organizations, and online services.
Streaming services are paid and they are enshittifying just as fast as anything else, if not faster. No, it’s not that we aren’t paying enough and this is a desperate measure to make up for our neglect. This is corporate greed. Even when they have sustainable business models, that isn’t enough.
Also, I worry how societal inequality might increase if the whole internet becomes subscription based, if people can’t get informed or communicate without paying (more than their internet service, even)
Streaming services were charging way under what they needed to to be sustainable when everyone is on them. Netflix for $10 a month with all the content is not sustainable. Think about how much mom and dad paid every month for cable. The media industry costs money to run.
But yes, a portion of it is corporate greed.
That said, yo ho yo ho, 🏴☠️
I straight up do not believe that a company can provide a service for over a decade and not be charging enough to be sustainable. The CEO can come and say this to my face and I’ll call them a LIAR. One or a couple years I could buy the idea of investors holding it up for the sake of establishing the business, but why would they be accepting losses for such a long time? This is funky accounting. I’m more inclined to think “it was not sustainable, we need to charge more” is just something they say when they think they can get away with squeezing more money from customers.
I didn’t say they were operating at a loss, I said they were unsustainable. They’ve been profitable since 2003, but their profit relies on content. With everyone else pulling their content, their cash flow needs to be huge to produce content they can use to attract customers. $10 per subscriber isn’t enough income to sustain the cash flow needed to produce that much content, so they raise their prices to become sustainable. When they relied on licensing content from rights holders, their expenses were smaller, but they have been losing the ability to rely on that.
Fine with me if we life in the enshittocene. If the fedicene is coming right after it
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
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.
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 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
I mean, you’re on Lemmy right. That’s what we’re doing.
I’m like 99% sure “enshittification” is just a code word for “capitalism”
*subscribe to unlock this article *
Make that 100% sure.
It is a word coined to describe a specific capitalistic process, yes.
The tech world is going downhill fast. Anything that isn’t currently obtainable through only foss means isn’t going to be attainable by the average person for much longer.
I’ve been trying to remember and watch all the old YouTube videos I loved before they disappear either completely or behind a paywall that I won’t pay.
Let’s get some shoes. Let’s get some shoes. OMG! Shoes!
All of that will be gone soon. Not just the space where people can let their creativity flow, but where there is nearly 2 decades of that kind of creativity archived.
Download those videos while you still can, use
youtube-dlp.I actually just went through my old favorites (that are still accessible) and downloaded them with jdownloader last weekend.
:( I should probably archive anything I ever enjoyed. I wish I had put more time into remembering what those all were, I was too busy just having fun. I had entirely forgotten about Liam Kyle Sullivan, including that was what his name was, until very recently. Muffins was uploaded in 2007, am I officially old? Pre2010 YouTube was so simple. I remember uploading runescape videos to YouTube before Google bought it.
Pretty much. Even if seemingly every website wasn’t diving into anti-user nonsense, things online don’t last forever. I think it’s worthwhile to make a backup of pretty much anything you feel is worth the effort and space.
I wonder if I should put the effort into making a desktop and/or android UI that downloads every video you watch in a format you specify for archive(so you could watch in whatever res but archives in 1080 or lower for space). Fork something like free-tube and run python for yt-dlp to archive. It would just be a font end for existing back end, and would probably be less effort than manually downloading anything I feel important. Just delete anything I feel isn’t when it’s in the archive folder.
What can’t I do with FOSS though?
Whatever you’re about to say, let’s crowd fund it. I’m not even kidding.
ChatGPT4
You mean like personally hosting it or something?
There are open models that one can download on HuggingFace and run locally, but they are not as good as ChatGPT4 which has had insane® amounts of resources thrown at.
But don’t we have to go through openai for gpt anyhow? Always have a browser for that.
I don’t understand your question. GPT is proprietary and hosted by OpenAI. There are other large language models (LLM) that one can download (or even train if they are open-source or at least have a descriptive scientific paper and open training data) and host themselves, but they are not as powerful.
So there’s no advantage to having windows as opposed to Linux for using it.
Use industry software standards. Adobe, Autodesk etc etc. I know, these solutions sucks, but it is the world people live it. Most Lemmy people are into tech for the sake of tech. You are technological literate to the highest degree. Understand and critique developments in tech. Very important work! However, a graphical designer probably isn’t that literate and wouldn’t be able to do work in a Foss environment. Yes, 1 in a 1000 might use Gimp but good luck colabbing with other people in the industry.
Yeah I know Gimp doesn’t use(or didn’t last time I checked) CMYK and as someone who does QA for flexographic printing, I know how that’s important.
You’d think the world would put some effort into getting away from Adobe. All my homies hate Adobe.
So. Why don’t we crowd fund our way to better solutions for these things?
Krita is actually a very professional choice for some things people think they need Adobe products for. And it looks like Krita has CMYK support. Giving Krita more attention that it deserves would be welcome.
Heck yeah!
The artist who makes Pepper and Carot comic uses the open source Krita and shares videos about using Krita on a tablet. https://mastodon.online/@FediFollows/106596993208066262
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.
🥺
I really think this is overblown. Almost all the services encompassed by the term are luxury. We don’t need Netflix. Just stop paying for it. Businesses all follow a similar trajectory: concept -> growth -> monetisation -> decline. If you’re over 30 you’ve seen many companies rise and fall. They all fail eventually, and from their ashes rise new companies. If you’re ambitious, you’ll capitalise on the opportunity and your company will fill that gap.
Embrace change.
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.
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.
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.
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
It’s the bubble popping and its glorious.
If a service becomes shitty it is almost always due to corporate greed. It usually starts with data-mining your subscribers without their knowledge or consent. Then it moves on to making the service itself worse by introducing advertising and making changes to the interface that forces them to VIEW those ads instead of the content they came for.
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
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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
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’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.
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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.
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.
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]).
