https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5
‘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’?
A link to an article about enshittification that's just a solid paywall....
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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.
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.
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
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.
Not on my phone, and it's pretty shitty to need add-ons just to make content readable, so whatever
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
he basically was all of EFF europe when i found him mid-2000s. he also worked boingboing for a very long time.
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.
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.
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
The irony of clicking on this link and getting hit with “accept cookies” “Subscribe to unlock this article”.
Annoying for sure, but "Enshittification" refers to a specific method in which platforms flex monopoly power to squeeze not just users, but business customers too. It does not just mean "things getting shittier"
And before anyone goes "language loses meaning over time" consider that if you change the meaning of "enshittification" then you need to also invent a new word to mean what "enshittification" used to mean.
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
Welcome to language. It evolves.
Or perhaps, from your point of view, it's getting enshittified. Even if you don't like it.
"See? Look!"
This article brought to you by the ultimate enshittifier of news, the Financial Times. The reason's in the name!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you were a socialist you'd know what dialectical materialism is and not say something like "Marxist economy".
What is the solution for when capitalism purchases the regulators? You can purchase SCOTUS rulings for laughably cheap and legislation for even less. If you're really into it, you can spend several decades building up a propaganda network so low information clowns will vote in an obvious con man. He'll drop corporate taxes down to zero, give trillions in handouts, and dismantle pesky shit like the EPA. Profits!
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
I remember there being a an mpv extension for firefox to watch youtube in mpv locally - you might want to look for inspiration there.
There's also freetube that might be extended in an easier way.
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.
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 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.
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(r) amounts of resources thrown at.
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.
Security camera stuff is really lacking. The only good one is zoneminder. It mostly works but it breaks a lot.
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!
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?
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
Yup. Time to build the walled gardens and pay for entrance. The times were good and now you can live that for a fee.
It will have to get worse before it's pushed back against.
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
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
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.
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?
Not that mustache man, the Austrian one who knows how to paint. I think he has a friend that wanted to "conquer Asia" or something.
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’m like 99% sure “enshittification” is just a code word for “capitalism”
*subscribe to unlock this article *
Make that 100% sure.
Corporate greed is ruining everything, as per... But hey! We have a cool edgy new tech term for it now!
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.
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.
I am a big fan of KDE, but having qt's role in mind I wouldn't be too sure. I think they already try to enforce 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.
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
But that doesn't maximize the profits of the shareholders, and we are now in a shareholder market.
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.
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.
In the Untitled States, that data is protected via several statutes, HIPAA being the most widely known and robust governance over such information.
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.
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.
