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] 26 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

The internet has always been unusable without an ad blocker. The difference now is that it's not really usable at all. Somehow major multi billion dollar companies have decided it's completely okay to have broken-ass websites that don't work. This is especially true if they're trying to push an app. The major websites like Facebook, Reddit, and TikTok actually go out of their way to break the fuck out of their mobile site to try to push people onto their app. The biggest fucking problem is that the strategy works. People are desperate, stupid, little animals, and they'll do whatever they're told to do to get their little hit of entertainment and dopamine. The internet is dead. Long live the internet!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

I'm old enough (as are, I imagine, a good percentage of lemmings) to remember when you actually could use the web without an ad blocker. It didn't last long, but it was glorious. Those must be the halcyon days that everyone sits around the old folks' home reminiscing about.

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

This.

And to all the germans, fuck Kleinanzeigen

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

What’s ironic is that the big players only got the mainstream attention by providing an ad free experience at first.

Back when Internet was just hitting critical mass, there were paid sites, free sites with ads, and big players. The big players didn’t rely on ads or pay to use their web services. They took money to provide their core service and the website was a “free management tool”.

Now that they have killed the ad only business model (can’t pay for a website with simple and ignorable ads), and convinced a lot of people you should pay for just digital services, they are finally free to enshitify everything, make people pay for digital only services now that it’s normal, and try to maximize ad revenue. Truly the enshitification model!

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

It would still be kinda tolerable if they stopped there, but they don't. They're tracking literally every single tiny detail that they're capable of, and then they're selling our information to companies that we never agreed to do business with. It should be extremely illegal, but our legislators don't even understand it, and the ones that do are getting kickbacks from it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It would still be kinda tolerable if they stopped there,

Oh I fully agree. The issue with capitalism is the never ending desire for more, I could easily handle static greed.

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

It wasn't always like this during my lifetime. It has become increasingly worse over the last couple of decades.