Enshittification

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What is enshittification?

The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source

The lifecycle of Big Internet

We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.

Embrace, extend and extinguish

We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.

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The Internet is becoming genuinely unusable without an ad blocker (lemmy.zip)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I don't know if it's just me, but browsing virtually any mainstream website without an ad blocker or with alternative frontends is becoming harder and harder to justify. It's getting to the point where adblocking isn't an optional luxury - it's a requirement to effectively get basic information about things.

Yesterday, I was trying to search some information about Ghouls from Fallout. This lead me to this Fandom wiki page which had ads on almost every corner of the website, autoplaying video in the corner, asking for my age as soon as I clicked on the site, injecting polls and random unrelated videos into the communty wiki content and being incredibly slow to browse. A query that in the past that took 5 seconds now takes 50, for what? Money?

I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (3 children)

It's kind of a selfish feeling but I'm always so bummed to find the only wiki for an indie game on fandom. Yeah, I could put the work in to make a different one elsewhere....but I'll probably beat the game before I'm done copying the info over.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

On the upside the forking process will likely continue to get streamlined.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Pretty sure they C&D or whatever, so you have to modify the content before using it on another website.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm not sure if they do, but that's some hypocritical shit since they blatantly rip off content from independent wiki's (you can see this whenever the Terraria wiki is updated).

They'll claim "we didn't do it, one of our users did it, and we aren't responsible for them".

Fuck Fandom

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

My bad if they don't, I'm regurgitating half remembered facts from a video I watched about it.

Fuck fandom.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I've recently witnessed people creating a new fandom wiki twice. Both times I warned them, sent them stuff explaining why Fandom is shit, they shrugged their arms and created it. People are dumb.