‘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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A link to an article about enshittification that’s just a solid paywall…
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
This would be a meme by itself:
SIXTY NINE EUROS PER MONTH HOLY FUCK
EDIT SEVENTY FLIPPIN FIVE USD
Financial times has always been always expensive AF because it’s made for rich investors.
FT is for suckers. Barron’s is the better news source.
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Still can’t read the content without pop-up ads. Hella enshitified.
Thanks for this, the article was well worth the read
Which does answer the question very succinctly.
Not just a paywall, but a cookie dialog taking up more than my whole phone screen, where you have to click into it to “reject all” (and it doesn’t reject all), just to get to the paywall
A paywall you find only after you have to manually reject cookies. Done? Okay, here’s your paywall!
It was on purpose, now you get the point clearer.
Ohh no, it’s a real article, if you have bypasspaywall clean you can read it
I’ll give em a little credit, the article is by Cory Doctorow
But then we have this:
"The internet isn’t more important than the climate emergency, gender justice, racial justice, genocide or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we’ll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it’s joined."it costs a dollar to read the article.
They mean “free to charge you a dollar” by “free”
Nothing wrong with paying for content? Enshittification is about something different than just being expensive or bad.
Here’s my response: [just paypal me $5 to see it]
When your only claim to fame is jamming the word “shit” into other words…
You need to milk all that ad money out of it you can.
FWIW Cory Doctorow was famous before coining that word. He’s done a lot of great work. You should research before saying things.
So many accomplishments you couldn’t even name a single one if you tried!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow
Awards 2000 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer[91] 2004 Locus Award for Best First Novel for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 2004 Sunburst Award for A Place So Foreign and Eight More 2006 Locus Award for Best Novelette for "I, Robot" 2007 Locus Award for Best Novelette for "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" 2007 The Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award[92] For Little Brother 2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award[93] 2009 Prometheus Award[45] 2009 Sunburst Award[46] 2009 White Pine Award[94] 2018 Inkpot Award[95] For Pirate Cinema 2013 Prometheus Award[45] For Homeland 2014 Prometheus Award[45]Yeah, I saw those on Wikipedia…
Honestly the only impressive bit was an xkcd character is based on him.
Like, you know it’s not amount the amount of awards, it’s the quality?
Like those Prometheus awards, those are just for libertarians and they have like five winners a year.
And most people have zero.
I don’t think you understand how many awards there are for writing…
Do you know about any of those or do you assume any award is prestigious?
So hard to lift a finger to do the work yourself while you’re shitposting. Follow your own handle’s advice.
Let’s skip for a moment the fact that, as other posters highlighted, Cory Doctorow was already famous before coining the word. Let’s pretend that his only achievement was indeed the concept of enshittification.
Even then, it’s a big fucking deal. He noticed a rather nasty pattern in a system used by 2/3 of the world population, described it, labelled it, identified potential causes and solutions. It wasn’t just “lol lmao he jammed the word «shit» into another X-D”.
CD is a beast. One hell of a great guy. I have actually donated money to some of his more worthy causes before.
Ft It’s kind of a s*** hole though. And for the paywall to abruptly block you outright not a single word not a hook, which is kind of weird because it’s a little bit against what he stands for I know it’s not apples to apples…
I read the article. It’s kind of disappointing, somewhat of a Nothing Burger.
‘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
Best comment I’ll read today.
https://i.imgur.com/Al6GCMW.png
HAHAHAHAHA
“See? Look!”
This article brought to you by the ultimate enshittifier of news, the Financial Times. The reason’s in the name!
They really meant it!
By reading this comment, you consent to cookies btw.
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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?
the term is way more specific, though.
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’m not trying to justify unlimited greed, nor do I mean that we should permit unlimited greed. I’m saying the opposite of that - I think we should have laws to curtail unlimited greed.
But I do still think greed and selfishness are human nature, because when I look at humans, I consistently see selfishness and greed. Maybe this means I’m a pessimist but I think it’s just realistic. If humans weren’t inherently greedy and selfish then there would be no need for laws that punish theft.
As for whether greed and selfishness have been dominant in human societies… it looks like the rich and powerful in society, throughout history, never gave up their power and wealth unless they were made to do so.
“Subscribe to unlock article.” Oh, the irony. 😂
Enshittification = Corporate Greed
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.
The tech things most people currently enjoy will soon become entirely unaffordable to anyone not made of money. Anything that you aren’t willing to switch to an open source alternative for, prepare to learn to live without it.
I even self host my own music streaming. I never had a streaming service, not even in 2012 when Netflix was all the rage. I don’t even own a windows compatible pc. I don’t even know what modern ms office looks like. I use my home network more than I use the actual internet just about.
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.
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.
Security camera stuff is really lacking. The only good one is zoneminder. It mostly works but it breaks a lot.
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 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?
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.
Even if a great new service or product comes along it alway just gets bought out by somme billionaire
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
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
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 really feel it now that Prime and Netflix have ads in the middle of their content.
If everyone who complained about ads in Prime and Netflix canceled their accounts, then Prime and Netflix would be motivated to remove their ads.
The minute I got the prime notification I went and canceled immediately. And same with Netflix, I wish more people would do the same.
Fr the longest time, I got Prime because of Prime. The ebooks and videos were just an included bonus. The bonus going to shit doesn’t change what the original decision was based on.
Prime video has been on this road for a long time, as videos with ads took o paver more and more of its Home Screen. It got more and more annoying clicking past the clutter of “FreeVee” videos to find stuff I wanted to watch, but I guess it’s all stuff to click past now
Wouldn’t this also cause them to charge more to make up for lost paying customers? 🤔
Certainly possible, but there is a limit to what they can charge before losing customers on price as well as on principle.
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 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.
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.
Corporate greed is ruining everything, as per… But hey! We have a cool edgy new tech term for it now!
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.
