OMG just realised the 9-hr thunderstorm video I've used to fall asleep with every night for the past seven years will now have ADS!! and be unusable!! as of tonight. :blobfoxshocked:
@tychotithonus@drewdevault : what I find fascinating with this trend is that scrollbars had two goals: allowing the action of scrolling and allowing to get an idea on the size of the page and your current progress. It was brilliant design, intuitive, universal.
There is absolutely no reason to ever change it.
But too look cool during demo.
This is pure #enshitification because we started to call "UX designers" people who were only "graphic designers".
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
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.
Wondering if we're about(18 months) to see the end of searchable information while we scramble to wrestle data away from big companies and their addiction to #enshitification
TIL about another community on Slack who is now being asked to pay thousands to preserve basic functionality 😬
Proprietary tools that offer a lot for free, without fail, will squeeze you. And unfortunately, because of their nature, a lot gets left behind when you inevitably migrate.
When we select tools for our communities, we need to think over longer time horizons.
FOSS options like Matrix for chat and Discourse for forums are the better bet.
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.
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.
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🧾
A lot of people have responded to my Duolingo post with things like "Never work for free," and "I would never donate my time to a corporation.” Which I completely agree with.
But here's the thing about Duolingo and all of the other companies like it. You already work for them. You just don’t know it.
On Duo, I thought I was learning a language. Participating in the community by helping other learners and building resources seemed like part of the process.
Luis Von Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, was one of the creators of CAPTCHA, which was originally supposed to stop bot spam by getting a human to do a task a machine couldn’t do. In 2009 Google bought CAPTCHA and used it to get humans to proofread the books they were digitising (without permission from the authors of those books btw). So in order to access much of the web, people had to work for Google. Most of them didn’t know they were working for Google - they thought they were visiting websites.
This is how they get you. They make it seem like they’re giving you something valuable (access to a website, tools to learn a language), while they’re actually taking something from you (your skills, your time, your knowledge, your labour). They make you think they’re helping you, but really you're helping them (and they’re serving you ads while you do it).
Maybe if people had known what CAPTCHA was really for they would’ve done it anyway. Maybe I still would’ve done all that work for Duo if I’d known it would one day disappear from the web and become training data for an LLM ...
... Or maybe I would’ve proofread books for Project Gutenberg, or donated my time to citizen science projects, or worked on an accessibility app, or a million other things which genuinely improve people’s lives and the quality of the web. I didn’t get an informed choice. I got lured into helping a tech company become profitable, while they made the internet a shittier place to be.
How many things are you doing on the web every day which are actually hidden work for tech companies? Probably dozens, or hundreds. We all are. That’s why this is so insidious. It’s everywhere. The tech industry is built on free labour. (And not just free – we often end up paying for the end results of our own work, delivered back to us in garbled, enshittified form).
And it’s a problem that’s only getting worse with AI. Is that thoughtful answer you gave someone on reddit or Mastodon something that will stay on the web for years, helping people in future with the same problem? Or is it just grist for the LLMs?
@chronos
Some things can be a reasonable exchange. Some websites provide a good service and if they need money from cookies and ads that seems reasonable. Then the fintech douchebros come in and start doing shit that either adds no value or takes it away. "hey this is a great tool, and we're making money on it, but not as much as if we fucked it up" #enshitification
No, ABC News app, I will not watch a 60 ad while waiting for my chosen report to load. I guess I never will get to see that fibonacci spiral that the humpback whales form.
I am sick to death if every last thing coming with a pre-ad, or an ad overlay.
Hmmm I still don't see what's happening with subscription services like Netflix as "#Enshitification". I see it as the inevitable evolution of a fundamentally limited business model.
I was reading an interesting, multi-paragraph, post on Facebook, when I was told my meal was ready.
I left the laptop open on the page. When I returned, I scrolled down a little - and Facebook showed me a timer graphic, then reloaded the page with new content.