I see a lot of folks making the argument that yeah, a lot of layoffs are happening, but it's due to irresponsible hiring. And yeah, it's true that you shouldn't hire a bunch of engineers that aren't doing anything; which usually isn't the case.
I think people don't understand just how unbelievably BAD the tech grift is right now for people in leadership positions. It's not just that they hired a lot of people, it's that they also tasked them with working on the wrong things.
So Google is now preventing people from removing location data from photos taken with Pixel phones.
Remember when Google's corporate motto was "don't be evil?"
Obviously, accurate location data on photos is more useful to a data mining operation like Google.
From Google: "Important: You can only update or remove estimated locations. If the location of a photo or video was automatically added by your camera, you can't edit or remove the location."
This post from @mmasnick is a helpful contribution to thinking about how Internet companies can resist the path to #enshitification that @doctorow first described.
It can be good for companies to define crisp lines for both their employees and their customers between what they consider to be reasonable and exploitive. "Don't be evil" was a good idea as a general principle but the devil is in the details. What kinds of things will we never do here?
I also think technical architectures that prevent user lock-in are an important part of the solution. People are fond of saying that if you aren't paying for a service, you're the product. A more important problem is that you aren't in a position to demand better service if you aren't in a position to walk away from the table if you don't get what you're asking for.
It's easy to hate big tech companies. Proposing constructive answers that aren't merely straw men is a lot harder. Much more discussion about this is needed.
Paramount+ is now entirely useless if you use a pihole to block New Relic, Doubleclick, and Braze. You literally can't watch the shows you paid for without providing minute-by-minute viewership data to multiple ad platforms.
With Reddit's impending #enshitification on July 1, it's probably a good time to checkout https://join-lemmy.org - a federated link aggregator and discussion board; basically, Mastodon for Reddit. #reddit
This week, on several occasion, someone did a Google search on his phone in front of me to find something we were talking about. Each time, the website we were looking for was obvious, official and unique (an hotel, a software, a band…). Each time, it was not on the first page of Google. Instead, most links were for commercial products with vaguely similar name.
As I use #Kagi, I didn’t realize there was so much #enshitification on Google. They are killing themselves slowly. With a dull knife.
when i was told a kabillion of years ago to try out Google Chrome the first thing that came out of my mouth was:
Why would I want Google to know everything i do on the internet?
people were like, butButBUT "DO NO EVIL"
yet here we are with Google doing every evil they can get away with; from recession-by-mass-layoffs, to killing adblockers & now with this new DRM #enshitification, "Web Integrity API"
from now on, when people call me a Luddite, am gonna take it like a g'damn badge of honor
Hey @pluralistic isn't requiring registration to read a story part of the #enshitification you talk about? Because here's a prime example
Please practice what you preach and try the make the net a better place (eg. You could hold this content on your own blog, craphound.com, instead of locking it in a walled garden)
On the #enshitification of #academic#publishing. Where scientists burn the candle at both ends, paying to read and publish their work, in what is the ultimate grift.
People can be as upset about this as they want, but so long as they continue to watch #YouTube they continue tacitly supporting their user-hostile actions. If you really want to make a difference, stop watching, and tell content creators why. When you can convince them to move to platforms that don't shove ads down your throat every 3 minutes, THAT is when you'll see #Google change their tune.
Time to deny communication with your peers and family under certain conditions. This is late-stage dystopian, they now openly sell psychological profiling and breach of private communication with others as a feature. #AI#enshitification#dystopia#BoringDystopia#security
Whew, the 'AI' generated fake reviews are really fire-hosing the web content, making it hard to find anything useful.
Searching for roundups and comparisons of #ZigBee thermostats, and lots of the content is garbage, often with no ZigBee capability in the products listed at all.
#Enshitification All Around:
"These Digital Goliaths are utilizing their websites’ authority and the public’s trust in their brands to sell every product under the sun.
They’re buying magazines we love, closing their print operations, turning them into digital-only, laying off the actual journalists who made us #trust in their content in the first place, and hiring third-party companies to run the affiliate arm of their sites."
I’m sorry to report that the #enshitification process has now begun with Best Buy. Maybe it began a while ago, and I didn’t notice because we don’t buy things there very often.
Tl;dw: 30 day returns now only apply to people with $50 annual subscriptions.
Everyone else only gets 14 days and has to keep their physical receipt🧾
The state of the internet 2023