We all know the struggle of beloved services slowly going downhill. What’s one service, tool, or website you’ve been using for years that’s still great and hasn’t turned to crap?
Steam
This! Steam is the only proprietary program I use on my Linux machines that I’m actually happy with and don’t want to get rid of
Their size & net worth vs enshitification levels are suspiciously high!!
Gabe & co better not die out before they turn it/some parent company into a nonprofit.
I think there are three reasons for this:
- Steam is not freemium. It’s built on paying customers rather than advertisers.
- PC games, unlike TV shows and console games, don’t end up platform exclusives (and because games storefronts aren’t a subscription, there’s no reason for them to be). There are console exclusives but exclusivity has never really made sense for PC games. And without exclusivity there’s genuine competition (even if none succeed at dethroning Steam)
- Valve is a private company owned by Gabe Newell, instead of a for-profit. Shareholders are short-sighted.
That second point got me thinking about Nebula (the streaming service). I don’t believe it’ll be enshittification even though it has exclusives. I wonder why that is.
Idk, plenty of companies that tick all three boxes and are not like this at all.
A single owner vs a company without a principal shareholder & how they threat humans is just a gamble.Overall it does have to do with ownership & how the company culture was built tho - in Valve there are like 20 people running a billon monies company. They all have enough, and are happy.
Oh, and Valve it’s def a “for profit” c company, being an actual non-profit is a completely different thing.
A for-profit company is a very specific thing. It means a company that’s required, by law, to put profit above everything else. Valve may be a for-profit company but as far as I know it isn’t.
Isn’t Nebular owned/ran by content creators? Or have I misunderstood what that service is entirely?
It is. And I guess that’s probably enough.
Nebula exclusives make sense and are being employed. Nebula technically has a monopoly on that content and that’s why I was confused about why I wasn’t worried about Nebula enshittifying. I guess Youtube-adjacent content is mostly interchangable so missing out on exclusive content isn’t on the same level as missing out on a cultural touchstone TV show.
Also Nebula just isn’t big enough to enshittify. It needs a far larger market share first.
Voicemeeter
Overwolf
Reaper
VLC
PCPartpicker
Ninite
There’s probably some others I’m missing.
Doesnt overwolf rely on ads?
Isn’t Overwolf’s business model literally monetizing and profiting from modding communities? Curseforge and Overwolf are the epitome of enshittification.
Yeah… over wolf was enshittified from the start lol
At least to me, Overwolf is the third or fourth iteration, following acquisitions, buyouts, restructurings, etc. The original FTB launcher worked perfectly fine. It’s mostly just obnoxious now and I make sure not to have it running in the background. No direct rent-seeking behavior just yet, I don’t have an account on there and it’s not a problem.
Right now I have it on my computer just use it to update packs that are only available there and then yoink them straight into MultiMC.
AFAIK it is owned by Curse and I guess those guys make most of their money from those godawful wikis and their ads.
I thought I’d check this before posting it, and it turns out it’s the other way around. Overwolf bought Curse. Worse, Overwolf is a company based out of Tal Abib… that’s two discoveries in one day. I was looking into getting a CaribouMini until I learned where that comes from. Less than two hundred kilometers away from me as the
missilecrow flies (and sadly, has flown). Great. Fucking great.The shitty thing is that a lot of cool pack creators only publish through Overwolf, so I don’t want to delete it just yet, but I don’t like this at all. At best a minor security risk, at worst I don’t even want to know. I just thought it was just some shitty ad company’s Curse buyout as a billboard for more ads. For all the issues I might have with Nexus Mods, I don’t think they’re quite this bad. Concerning that this is the de facto standard repository of MC mods.
I’m ok with things relying on ads to make a product free. Someone has to pay for a product or service, if I don’t want to pay for it, then show me an ad and let someone else pay for it. The thing that overwolf and more specifically curseforge do that keeps them out of the enshitification category for me is they simplify modding of games.
I’ve been around since the early days of video game modding and know how hard it used to be. They have streamlined it to the point that if someone has created a mod it is a simple button click to download, and install, and then keep the mod up to date. You can even create and share collections of mods and mod packs. And if a modder has added a donate button, it’s a single click to donate to the modder. It’s everything I want out of the modding community with none of the headache, and it’s been like that for years.
I recently bought a replacement PC for my dad because of windows 11 (though his old computer was also over 10 years old so it was a somewhat fair upgrade, anyhow). Someone suggested I use Ninite to quickly bootstrap a lot of the programs he’d use and I was honestly surprised. It was genuinely no-nonsense and got the job done. A rare nice thing in Windows…
There is also WinGet.
Feel like overwolf was out of the gate pre-enshittyfied
Avoided it like the plague
Sure, I’ll add to that.
- Audacity
- Inkscape
- Notepad++
- DaVinci Resolve
- QBittorrent
- YouTube to mpe 3 convert (the command line one - can’t remember the actual name rn)
Is QR bittorent different from qbittorrent or was that a typo?
Typo. My bad!
Tenacity as the most successful Audacity fork after their Telemetry debacle.
- VLC
- Winamp
- Audacity
- 7Zip
- Openoffice
- Steam
- Firefox
- Wikipedia
- Duckduckgo (the search engine)
Most of those are programs rather than services.
That’s kind of telling in itself to be honest. Services for most people these days mean subscription (or some kind of recurring cost). The nature of the overwhelming majority of businesses means they will be looking to increase profits. One extremely common way is to degrade the service you provide slightly. Increasing ads, lowering quality, etc.
One of the only exceptions I would say is Steam. But people could argue that Steam isn’t a true service because it’s closer to a store front, at that point you’re arguing semantics though.
There’s also self hosting a service to consider? How would that count in this instance. I self host a few things like nextcloud, Plex, and others. Yes it’s still a program and technically a service as well?
If you’re self hosting Nextcloud, you don’t have to worry about the server operator (i.e. you) enshittifying it against you. There is still some concern towards the software supplier, as we keep seeing with Firefox, but users can react to that.
I’m not really familiar with the situation around Plex since I’ve heard some mixed things, but I don’t use it and have lost track of what is what.
I would consider Firefox to be a bad actor but it’s a bit more nuance than the situation with, say, Chrome. Firefox is involved in the server side as well (i.e. evolving standards that enshittify the web more and more). I would like to have had the web standards frozen some years ago. BIFL should apply to software as well as to physical products.
Open Office? It hasn’t been touched in a decade. LibreOffice is the true continuation of Open Office, which was forked off after Oracle bought Sun and OO had been left with poor governance and slow updates.
Open Office finally ended up under the Apache foundation but hasn’t been maintained since 2014.
LibreOffice has had continual development with both bug fixes and new features, and the Open Document Foundation gives it good governance and independence as an open source project…
Honestly, switch to Libre Office.
Thanks for the heads-up. Got both on my pc but i instinctively open up OO when i need to do writing. Will give Libre another chance now :)
7zip and VLC.
Actual paid services? Basically only Steam.
FOSS is the only software you can count on to not start nickel and diming you once the subscriber count starts to level out.
Steam
30% markup. Predatory currency conversion policies. Recent scandals with Steam censoring games on behest of Australian Right nuts groups.
You missed 3 times in a row.
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The 30% cut thing has been industry standard since the dawn of time. Valve goes out of its way to make exceptions to this rule down to 10% in cases of very high volume but everyone only talks about the 30 since thats all they hear about. Only an Epic Games apologist would parrot this as a talking point. Plus, developers are not getting nothing for that 30%, especially games that use Valve’s Steam networking services. Unlike Microsoft and Sony who also take 30% cuts, Valve doesn’t charge $10,000 per game patch to have someone review and approve it to be published.
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The regional pricing goes both ways. There was literally a game recently users were complaining about NOT getting it because the publisher opted out or something, where the regional pricing would have made the game affordable but in USD (Valves country of origin and therefore default), it was exhorbitantly priced. And this one wasn’t even Valve’s fault.
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Valve did not censor games directly on behest of the Australian nutjobs, they fought back against them pretty hard, but Valve is ultimately beholden to the payment processors (who they also pushed back on). Once Visa and MasterCard started threatening to pull services, Valve was put in a “comply or die” situation. If they didn’t do as they were told they wouldn’t be able to accept money with anything but Stripe or Bitcoin. They literally lost Paypal as a payment option over this fight.
I think its very dishonest of you to frame these points as enshittification. This term means the intentional degradation of a product or service for the sole motive of increasing profits. For point 1, the whole industry literally started off like that. For point 2, it was literally an attempt at equity (valve may not get the deltas correct but in some countries they’re losing money on games). And for point 3, you might be able to argue it but ultimately it wasn’t for profits so much as it was survival.
If you wanted to shitsling at Valve, you should have mentioned how Valve invented lootboxes in TF2 and then exacerbated the issue in CS:GO/CS2, releasing that awful plague onto the industry.
Only an Epic Games apologist would parrot this as a talking point.
Why are you trying to offend me? I didn’t call you names, why are you doing that?
but ultimately it wasn’t for profits so much as it was survival.
Visa and Mastercard aren’t the only available payment options in Steam. Yielding to them was for profit.
Survival? Steam has enough profit to create it’s own payment processor and make it popular.
He didn’t. He said people who parrot it are.
Unless you do, there is no reason to be offended. Up to you.And no; realistically, if you lose Visa and Mastercard, you can close shop. Obviously it’s for profit, because a 99% reduction in turnover means all employees out of work.
Yes, I took that number out of thin air, but I know most people would never bother as that is what they have.
Maybe it’s different in your country.Me:
30% markup
Them:
everyone only talks about the 30 since thats all they hear about. Only an Epic Games apologist would parrot this as a talking point
You:
He didn’t. He said people who parrot it are [Epic Games apologist]
Confused noises.
Semperverus said anyone who says that 30% is too much is an Epic Game apologists, whatever that is.
Semperverus is insinuating anyone who says that 30% is amount taken by Steam is wrong, and saying that is parroting, and should be instead thought as “Poor Steam is forced to take 30% because this is industry standard”, but Valve, and I quote here, “goes out of its way to make exceptions to this rule”.
And no; realistically, if you lose Visa and Mastercard, you can close shop. Obviously it’s for profit, because a 99% reduction in turnover means all employees out of work.
Doesn’t change the fact that bending over backwards for Visa and Mastercard and banning some content because of their whims is enshittification. The service is worse than it was before, in the name of profit.
No, again, he said anyone that parrots it. If you keep repeating that argument over and over, then your are parroting it. That’s what parrots do; they repeat stuff.
If you are offended, then it’s time for some self reflection. That is not an ad-hominem, but a blanket statement and opinion.And no, you’re being selective with the truth. You cherry pick bits of what he said to present your argument in a better light. I don’t entertain that, my friend.
Your last point is true, but again you are being selective with how you present it.
If I point a gun at you and say you die unless you do something against your personal morality, you’d most likely still do it. That is in the name of survival.
Yeah, you’ll be able to go to work tomorrow and make money because you’re not dead, but nobody can accuse you of doing it for profit. That is what you are in essence doing here and it’s a bad take in every possible way except morally.
Steam fought back and lost. They could morally tell Visa and MasterCard to pound sand and die with their heads held high, but I’m guessing they like you as my potential murder victim above, chose to keep existing instead.
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Signal is good so far. Firefox is teetering on the edge, but it’s also good so far (poor little fox). Lemmy and Mastodon are both great, but maybe that’s EZ mode because they’re built as alternatives to proprietary social media sites.
I pay for ArsTechnica and I feel that I get a lot of value out of doing so. And keep in mind, being a paying subscriber of a service does not safeguard the service from enshittification, so that’s quite great
My regular open source tools:
- Inkscape
- GIMP
- OpenShot
- Synfig
- Firefox/derivatives (currently using Waterfox)
- Terminal emulators
- OpenSCAD
GIMP is SO much better than it used to be, too!
I do like Inkscape a lot, but GIMP simply isn’t a viable alternative for photoshop for most users. The interface is horrid and the capabilities are limited. Adobe knew what they were doing with their strategic buyouts of developers.
There are definitely some things PS can do that GIMP can’t, but I’d argue it’s fine for anyone who isn’t coming from Photoshop expecting all those features. I’ve only ever used GIMP, so it seems great to me.
I love OpenSCAD and also realize it is a super backward way to make 3D models, according to most other people. I don’t bother even mentioning OpenScad as an option for most people, I know it is only for certain people.
I tried my hand at modeling and designing using more traditional CAD programs that work more visually. I have good spatial reasoning and visualization abilities but I could never get the breakthrough to a point where I felt literate in those tools.
Constructive Solid Geometry approaches just work for my brain. Now when I need a part designed, I can quickly sketch it out in rough code and I feel confident seeing myself as a ‘designer’ now. Other more ‘visual’ tools waste my time as I get sucked into finger painting instead of working out the fundamentals of the design.
With the code-first framework, I have to really think about what the part needs to do before I tweak the code.
I’ve worked with 2D CAD programs like Autocad for years, I enjoy working with them. Once I tried 3D modeling, I found the experience frustrating–half of my time was spent typing in parameters anyways. I’m sure with enough practice I could get familiar with it, but modeling 3D shapes with a 2D tool just seems like a losing battle.
There are times when the sculpting ability would be nice, but it doesn’t come up that often for me. When I need more complex shapes, I’ll use Inkscape to make a 2D profile and import it into OpenSCAD. So far it’s been working well for me.
The Pirate Bay
That’s plain wrong that site is littered with viruses and ads these days. 1337x is much better.
Also snowfl and eztvx haven’t let me down yet
Is it? I use https://piratebayproxy.info/ these days, as well as uBlock on “medium mode” so maybe I just don’t see any of it.
It’s littered with uploads which are plain viruses and other garbage. And lacking many things I searched. I found 1337x much better. Rarbg too but I think that was taken down.
PiHole
Kiseido Go Server (KGS)
If KGS’s UI looks like it hasn’t been updated in 20 years, that’s because it’s already perfect. There’s no ads, it’s purely functional, it does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. If you click on “KGS Plus” you have the option to spend money on lectures given by human pros. Otherwise it’s completely free, and it’s still an active go server that’s been around forever.
- Dropout.tv
- Davinci resolve
- Obsidian
- Jellyfin
- Airgradient air quality monitor
Dropout is pretty good. I don’t think they’ve really been around enough to enshitify yet though. They’re on big up-swing. During that time they’ve been cheap, audience-focused, and fair to their cast and crew. They’ve already raised the price at least once. If they get some loans/investors involved or have a bad year, I could easily see them becoming more like other streaming services. I hope I’m wrong.
True, it’s likely too early to tell. I think I just inadvertently compare them to all the other streaming services right now. As for the price increase, that’s only for new subscribers- existing subscribers are grandfathered in at the previous price.
+1 davinci… it’s incredible what you get in the free version, and the studio version is getting more and more worth the money in a value add way rather than a need it way
Which reminds me, I’ve had a few dropout shows on my jellyfin for a while but really need to drop a sub to support. They do great stuff
I swear, I feel like I’ve watched (or have shown off to people unfamiliar with dropout) A Game Most Changed like 5 times.
Or if they’re straight, Sam Says. Lol
Agnostic:
- VLC
Windows:
- TotalCommander (Android too!)
- Irfanview
Mac:
- A better finder rename
- Daisy disk
- Iterm2
Craigslist
Hasn’t changed much at all, and their app is exactly what it needs to be, nothing more–i think the only thing I wasn’t able to do in the app was clear a saved search, but there’s no bloat, no ads, don’t need an account unless you’re posting or saving searches.
The site still looks like it came right out of the late 90’s and that’s all it needs to be
Every few years I’ll look for something on craigslist and every time I’m amazed that it’s still going strong and it’s still exactly the same.
Irfanview https://www.irfanview.com/
It’s literally one of the only reasons I’m still using Windows.
No other image viewer is as fast and as useful.
Just installed ifranview via winetricks install program option. Ifranview works on Linux 😀
It’s the VLC of porn photo viewing
People still use porn photos?
Why not?
Because videos exist?
alternatively you could use your imagination. get used to it without porn and you’ll have better sex too.
xnview for me, and it’s cross-platform
I’m sure you have your reasons, but I just cannot imagine continuing to use Windows over image viewing software?
Wow, I used that late 90s or early 2000s it was great.
I will have to try it under WINE in Linux
Same here. Every time I have used Linux or MacOS for long periods of time as my main OS. I run into that moment when I need/want to look at images (or even just one), and all the other fun things go right out the door. It is such a weird problem that other viewers can’t manage to “feel correct,” Always amazes me at how this one program is the cause of such a specific emotional response from me. lol
I try out Xnview from time to time on Windows to try and adapt to it, but always run into just something (but it is a very good program and is why I make the effort to check-in on it at all). I think that in Xnview’s case, it is just waaaay too much going on and even with the massive amount of settings I can’t find the ones that “just work” for me. Just end up installing it through WINE and deal with the random weird things that come from using it that way (most tend to be the UI looking so different due to not matching the OS and presenting the fake C: when opening a file from the menu). And still “feels” much better.
Other more simple viewers also don’t “feel” right due to not having some of the additional settings/features Irfanview has for light editing. Would maybe help in the case of Xnview if someone was able to mod it to have Irfanview look (kind of like the various mods of GIMP to layout like Photoshop) and hide the tons of advanced stuff that Irfanview doesn’t have in sub menus or a toggle to switch to the normal setup. Though I can get it kind of close if I play around with moving stuff around on the main toolbar. So still like the best next option I have used.
Hey i really love xnview but why do you install it with wine? Xnview is also available on linux.
Sorry if my wording was bad. I meant installing Irfanview with WINE. Xnview having versions for the different platforms is a major good thing. If I can get myself to use it more than I do Irfanview, then I at least know any future jumps to daily using Linux or Mac OS will work fine (at least for image viewing lol).
Rss.
It’s cool yeah. But not unenshittified. Many sites enshittify their own RSS feeds, demanding workarounds like caching, reformatting, or scraping, using tools like RSSHub.
You are very correct on how lots of sites have made RSS basically a method for just spamming you with crap. They just give a headline and link (not even a paragraph to know what the thing is about). But RSS itself still works the way it used to. It is the sites that enshittify the feeds.
Yep! I am hopelessly addicted to RSS. On a daily basis I probably use a thousand feeds minimum in some capacity
But the problem is the lack of good, simple RSS readers on mobile. I miss Pulse.
Honestly it’s better to use an RSS server and then manage the feeds in one single RSS feed so you don’t have to shuffle around any kind of local readers. That will make most of them a lot more bearable since their biggest issue is organization. For editing lists of RSS feeds I recommend RSSGuard as it has the best filesystem-like management. Otherwise just use regular expressions on the OPML file
Sockethub (RSS/XMPP/IRC bridge) for Conversations/Cheogram or the Delta/Arcane Chat bots are my personal choice because chronologically bumping the feeds makes sense to me, muting/archiving/custom notifications is easy to manage, as is inviting collaborators.
I actually have invented something better than Google Reader (including the social aspect) but it’s kind of a secret rn 🤫
This sounds awesome! If what you’re talking about is a new software you’re working on, hit me up! I have time to spare for some coding and have literally considered writing a better feed reader for myself or finding an OSS project to contribute to
It’s pretty slapdash and unprofessional using a variety of other people’s projects but I will make a guide for easy, reliable assembly of a federated google reader equivalent when I am satisfied with my shitty fork. The whole misskey fork community is a travesty tho bc misskey has some ǫᴜᴇsᴛɪᴏɴᴀʙʟᴇ design choices. Will keep ya ppsted
But you don’t even need the website to support rss, if they enshitified the official rss feed can’t you just paste in the url and bypass it?
Sadly, no. Look over the RSSHub docs to see the measures people take to scrape various websites and services such as Telegram or Twitter. Instagram is flat out impossible
