‘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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Corporate greed is ruining everything, as per… But hey! We have a cool edgy new tech term for it now!
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!
A link to an article about enshittification that’s just a solid paywall…
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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.
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”.
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!
he basically was all of EFF europe when i found him mid-2000s. he also worked boingboing for a very long time.
So hard to lift a finger to do the work yourself while you’re shitposting. Follow your own handle’s advice.
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?
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.
And not just any paywall, a NINETY-NINE CANADIAN DOLLARS PER MONTH ONE. Granted the first month is a single dollar, but still, that’s a grand total of C$1090 A YEAR.
I make it $100 Canadian per month, plus tax. It’s not intended for us lowly poors.
Whatthefuck
Old people pay the $1 because of course, then forget.
Yeah, it’s $75 USD a month. Who the fuck do they think they are charging that much? I get 1Gbps internet for less than that. That’s 2 weeks worth of groceries. That’s YouTube Premium, Disney+, Netflix, and Max combined.
Absolutely no way an online news outlet is providing even close to a quarter of that $75 in value.
its the Financial Times, they know exactly who they are charging that much, and those people will spend that about of money without even noticing its gone.
That’s 2 weeks worth of groceries.
I would be lucky to get a week off of that. If all I ate was instant ramen and stovetop pasta for every single meal, I might be able to stretch it to two weeks.
Absolutely no way an online news outlet is providing even close to a quarter of that $75 in value.
The outlet is called Financial Times, and—if you think about it—they certainly do an excellent job in helping individuals manage their finances correctly. After seeing a $75 charge on my bank statement from a news outlet, I would never forget to cancel another promotional subscription again.
You can get a lot of rice and beans for 75 dollars. Definitely sounds like a rough couple weeks tho
A paywall you find only after you have to manually reject cookies. Done? Okay, here’s your paywall!
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.
Only 420 euros if you sign up for a whole year
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
Still can’t read the content without pop-up ads. Hella enshitified.
Do you not have an ad blocker?
Bruh uBlock origin is the way
Not on my phone, and it’s pretty shitty to need add-ons just to make content readable, so whatever
Firefox+ublock origin for android, for iPhone I have no clue
iOS: Wipr takes care of everything. Even stuff Firefox Focus and my PiHole doesn’t.
Adguard does a good job on iOS.
I’m using Firefox focus’ adblocking and a PiHole and I still have three giant ads banners that prevent me from reading on Archive hahaha
I’ve only got uBlock Origin running and I don’t see any ads
Something’s got to be misconfigured on your end friend
Thanks for this, the article was well worth the read
Nothing wrong with paying for content? Enshittification is about something different than just being expensive or bad.
Paying for content: fair enough
Paying almost A THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR for content: barely worth it
That’s a value proposition. Explain to me how you would price this for it to be fair? If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. This has nothing to do with enshitification.
Here’s my response: [just paypal me $5 to see it]
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.
Or 99CND monthly for this shit
The phenomenon is due to pressures to be profitable instead of hemorrhaging money which is no longer free. For stuff like Uber, it just means it’s more expensive because they are done paying for a portion of our rides from their VC money. That means it’s pricing accurately instead of inaccurately, that’s good. If you don’t want to spend that much on a taxi, take the bus.
For stuff like reddit, it’s harder. They don’t charge, so they need to squeeze every little penny from advertising (hence forcing their app instead of 3rd parties), and try to find new funding streams like the AI API. On that you just have to hope that the new funding streams get big enough that they pay for the removal of some of the ads in the hope of encouraging more user growth. Or at least some app development.
And for TikTok, it’s the same, they’re hoping the e-commerce funding stream pays for the app so they can avoid going HAM on true ads.
Profitability is coming for everything, ZIRP is over. But there is the hope that enshittification can be reversed by new funding streams.
What kind of toothpaste do you use?
Colgate
Does it get the taste of boot out of your mouth?
I’m guessing one with led in it.
Netflix has been profitable since 2003. So pretty much everything they’ve done since has been responding to the pressure of, “MOAR PRAAFITT!”
Why’d you type all that if you just wanted to tell everyone you didn’t know what you were talking about?
Why’d you comment with no substance instead of actually disagreeing with what I said? If I’m wrong, spell out where or you’re just being a troll.
If you want people to help, use smaller comments
I’ll give you the first one but I’m not spending an hour helping you understand 10 things when you’re acting like that and will likely reply with “nuh uh”.
The phenomenon is due to pressures to be profitable instead of hemorrhaging money which is no longer free
You act like they want to burn investor money indefinitely.
They dont, not a single company.
They “invest” investor capital operating at a loss and eliminating competitors. The plan is always once the competition is out of business, to raise your prices higher.
This has been a thing as long as capitalism has been a thing.
And it’s incredibly basic.
That means it’s pricing accurately instead of inaccurately, that’s good. If you don’t want to spend that much on a taxi, take the bus.
They did that on the backs of poor working people who had, often expensive, taxi licenses. Those people are now out of business for the most part and Uber can charge what ever they want. If this was international trade they would be accused of dumping, and it’s fucking gross. Disgusting you would excuse such behaviour.
I say this from the bottom of my heart, FUCK TAXIS
Taxis have left me waiting for hours and ripped me off 1 too many times on top of every cab I’ve been in has been quite dirty. They tried using their near-monopolistic position in most places to ignore basic innovations, like having an app to request a taxi (and having that app not look like it’s a time capsule from 2008) or even taking card.
Uber drivers don’t regularly leave me waiting for hours with the promise of being “Just 10 minutes away”
Uber drivers can’t go “This guy isn’t local, so I’m going to go the longest way possible to rack up charges”
Uber doesn’t leave me guessing where the car is with my only way to find out is to call dispatch (Who will constantly tell you a car is on the way “just a couple minutes”)
Uber drivers don’t just stop 2 or 3 blocks away and expect me to walk
Uber cars have been far cleaner and better maintained than the best taxi I’ve been in
I’ve felt far more unsafe and uncomfortable in a taxi than any Uber ride I’ve been in
I have no sympathy for taxis, they’re dead to me. Do you honestly think taxis wouldn’t be doing the exact same things as Uber? They’re playing the victim now because they lost their monopoly and can’t. The only places that had even half decent taxis are places where they actually had competition like NYC or near major airports, everywhere else? Yea they would rip you off every chance they could and customer service? Pfffft
often expensive, taxi licenses
Over-regulation led to taxi medallions in places like NYC costing upwards of $1.3 million dollars. It isn’t surprising someone else was able to blow that system away by simply…not having to pay such exorbitant costs.
Over-regulation and corruption. The corruption was a solid chunk of it too.
Anti competitive behavior does suck. Stuff like million dollar taxi medallions being required before you can drive people around, or using your VC funding to drive taxi businesses out of business. But that’s not where the price increases are coming from. Taxi companies are still here, and so is Lyft. Some cities have their own local rideshare apps.
The price increases are from Uber deciding to stop losing money on their rideshare services anymore.
In the case of Uber, it isn’t simply good because they ousted many the taxi cab companies along the way with those subsidized ride rates.
I agree that running other companies out of business by losing money with VC funding is anticompetitive and bad, that just isn’t what I’m talking about here.
I disagree that the increased prices is from some newfound monopoly power. They didn’t succeed in becoming a monopoly, they just made the business decision to become profitable by charging more, and they did that due to the new interest rate environment.
because they ousted many the taxi cab companies along the way
GOOD, FUCK TAXIS
I will pay double the non-subsidized rates for an Uber before I ever even think about taking a taxi ever again. Until the threshold when it makes sense to just rent a car anyways.
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.
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.
🥺
It WAS coming for everything, but it’s been here awhile now.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
You leave Charlie Chaplin out of this.
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.
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.
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.
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
Well blogs and new sites used to just show you the content. Now they show you this.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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
I did for Prime.
Netflix didn’t put ads in for me, since I was already on the “4K” plan. Didn’t they just throw in an even lower tier for their ad version?
I dropped it with the new policy on sharing, although I didn’t wait for their follow through. As a divorced parent with kids, including one in college, if your family plan doesn’t work for my family because they may sometimes live in other locations, you’re out. I was ok paying for the family plan, but if you’re going to hassle one kid when he’s at my ex’s or the other at school, how is that worth my money?
Yeah, I agree that’s a crap policy for any family that may be spread over more than one household like that.
Do they actually cut you off if you ignore them and carry on doing it anyway?
I didn’t wait for them to follow through. I decided I didn’t have to spend money with a company that was going to treat me as a criminal
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.
