‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything
‘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.
I make it $100 Canadian per month, plus tax. It's not intended for us lowly poors.
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:
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"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.
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".
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
Unintentionally brilliant
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.
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.
Well blogs and new sites used to just show you the content. Now they show you this.
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.
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.
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.
the term is way more specific, though.
Without capitalism there wouldn't be anything to enshitify...
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.
Enshittification = Corporate Greed
It's one of many expressions of 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.
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.
Security camera stuff is really lacking. The only good one is zoneminder. It mostly works but it breaks a lot.
"Subscribe to unlock article." Oh, the irony. 😂
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
No wonder why nobody really tried to make neomorphism big
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!
Enshitification only comes for the things capitalism touches... So yeah, everything...
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 wish it wouldn't come to products.. I understand the need to make a profit, but it shouldn't come at the cost of landfilling perfectly good hardware. I'd love just an affordable tablet with 5+ years of updates and an unlocked boot loader maybe with NO battery, and just a USB
It's why having open platforms matter.
But that doesn't maximize the profits of the shareholders, and we are now in a shareholder market.
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.
We just need to go back to paying for services. Free free free everything forever is not a sustainable business model. That’s why the big players just sell you to advertisers instead. And everyone is getting pretty grossed out about how much data that actually takes on you, so we’re passing privacy laws. Those laws mean these services can’t be free anymore.
Good. They shouldn’t be free.
Streaming services are paid and they are enshittifying just as fast as anything else, if not faster. No, it's not that we aren't paying enough and this is a desperate measure to make up for our neglect. This is corporate greed. Even when they have sustainable business models, that isn't enough.
Also, I worry how societal inequality might increase if the whole internet becomes subscription based, if people can't get informed or communicate without paying (more than their internet service, even)
Streaming services were charging way under what they needed to to be sustainable when everyone is on them. Netflix for $10 a month with all the content is not sustainable. Think about how much mom and dad paid every month for cable. The media industry costs money to run.
But yes, a portion of it is corporate greed.
That said, yo ho yo ho, 🏴☠️
Yes. This is the silent problem of enormous wealth inequality in the US. As the middle class disappears, fewer people are able to pay small fees to contribute to things like local news, community organizations, and online services.
Our dollars are not as important as those who can pay obscene amounts of money for the better stuff. Same way the death of first class and the selling of private transportation is such a danger.
It's also not great that they just sorta expect the trickle in of a poor populace who combined still make a great share of the income and think their stranglehold is so tight that the money will never stop coming in.
It's piss poor management from the late generations of the wealthy. Didn't have to build or think about maintaining the economic machines and just saw how it could work for them to make them unimaginably wealthy and safe forever.
We are coming to the rest of if that's true and I think entropy of nature itself will prove the answer is no.
It is not a sustainable business model because when it becomes paid people will realize they don't need them.
EXACTLY! That's why Streaming Services, Online Shopping and tech producers like Apple have NOT begun to Enshittify!
As far as online shopping goes, if you’re getting free shipping and returns, there’s your answer.
And streaming services are just becoming cable again, so that’s not really surprising. Netflix with all the movies and shows for $10 a month was completely unsustainable.
They have. Smaller catalogs, more ads, more restrictions, more extra services pushed to users...
It WAS coming for everything, but it's been here awhile now.
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.
🥺
Fine with me if we life in the enshittocene. If the fedicene is coming right after it
So, not unlike, say... "Ow, My Balls!" era IRL? That tracks.
It's the bubble popping and its glorious.
Okay that's it, it's been overused.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Netflix has been profitable since 2003. So pretty much everything they've done since has been responding to the pressure of, "MOAR PRAAFITT!"
