People often read this quote and assume the negation; that if you are paying you aren’t the product. Unfortunately for any public company that simply isn’t true. The true “customers” of a public company are the shareholders, and they demand maximum profit. The people paying (or not) are just a resource to be mined as effectively as possible 」
— kevincox.ca
「 This spring, open-core team chat vendor Rocket.Chat moved its read receipts feature from the free open-source version to its enterprise offering without warning, deeply upsetting some users. Rather than acknowledge the change, the release announcement touted it as if this 2018 feature were brand new 」
— @zulip
when CEOs get on earnings calls and brag about how covid, war, and scare-stories about inflation let them hike their prices and rake in never-before-seen profit margins, I think it's reasonable to blame inflation on greed, not on workers getting a couple of relief checks during the lockdown.
Amazingly, this is a controversial position! For more than a year, Very Serious People have dismissed the greedflation hypothesis…
Increasingly feels unbelievably lucky that I grew up in the narrow period of time when you could consistently find true and useful material on the internet just by typing an obvious query into a search engine
As for search, well, I don't have any good alternatives to Google yet (even DuckDuckGo buys search results from Google and is suffering from the same problem). Maybe a new federated alternative will come along? You never know, you just have to stay vigilant.
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."
Popular image host imgur has announced that it will ban explicit content from its service beginning on May 15.
Perhaps more importantly, the company also announced it will begin purging old and unused photos that are not tied to a registered account. This will result in an enormous amount of link rot, especially on early Reddit where imgur was the image host of choice.
So a little while back @pluralistic discussed the #enshitification of the internet and it has me wanting to remind people that the pioneers of enshitification, from which techbro VCs got their inspiration, was undoubtedly the large home appliance oligopoly.
My parents had appliances thgat lasted 30+ years before replacement.
The appliances I got with my house in 1999 have all been replaced in the past 4 years (that is, they lasted about 20 years)
The average lifespan of such appliances made in the 2010's is apparently a scant 12 years.
But it's more than that...in my observation they are not only less durable, they objectively do an inferior job performing their actual purposes.
My new dishwasher looks spiffy and runs quiet but has a filter that needs cleaning 3 times as often and can't clean hot chocolate residue out of a mug.
My new fridge farts and also has some sort of disposable filter to replace.
My new clothes washer can connect to wifi but sometimes has a hard time rinsing.