‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything::The term describes the slow decay of online platforms such as Facebook. But what if we’ve entered the ‘enshittocene’?
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A link to an article about enshittification that’s just a solid paywall…
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
This would be a meme by itself:
SIXTY NINE EUROS PER MONTH HOLY FUCK
EDIT SEVENTY FLIPPIN FIVE USD
Financial times has always been always expensive AF because it’s made for rich investors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Which does answer the question very succinctly.
A paywall you find only after you have to manually reject cookies. Done? Okay, here’s your paywall!
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
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
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
Here’s my response: [just paypal me $5 to see it]
When your only claim to fame is jamming the word “shit” into other words…
You need to milk all that ad money out of it you can.
FWIW Cory Doctorow was famous before coining that word. He’s done a lot of great work. You should research before saying things.
So many accomplishments you couldn’t even name a single one if you tried!
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.
And most people have zero.
I don’t think you understand how many awards there are for writing…
Do you know about any of those or do you assume any award is prestigious?
So hard to lift a finger to do the work yourself while you’re shitposting. Follow your own handle’s advice.
Let’s skip for a moment the fact that, as other posters highlighted, Cory Doctorow was already famous before coining the word. Let’s pretend that his only achievement was indeed the concept of enshittification.
Even then, it’s a big fucking deal. He noticed a rather nasty pattern in a system used by 2/3 of the world population, described it, labelled it, identified potential causes and solutions. It wasn’t just “lol lmao he jammed the word «shit» into another X-D”.
CD is a beast. One hell of a great guy. I have actually donated money to some of his more worthy causes before.
Ft It’s kind of a s*** hole though. And for the paywall to abruptly block you outright not a single word not a hook, which is kind of weird because it’s a little bit against what he stands for I know it’s not apples to apples…
I read the article. It’s kind of disappointing, somewhat of a Nothing Burger.
Enshittification = 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.
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’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?
Without capitalism there wouldn’t be anything to enshitify…
Corporate greed is ruining everything, as per… But hey! We have a cool edgy new tech term for it now!
deleted by creator
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.
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.
