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] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I experienced a shock watching my much younger cousin play mobile games on his phone. It's just constant unskippable ads next to all the banners. Back when I was young, mobile games were actually playable and ads were at most a voluntary option to get some in-game currency. In general, though, I have grown so accustomed to my Pi-hole (+ automatically connecting to a VPN when I leave my house so Pi-hole is always there) that I've either forgotten what life without it was like or completely missed the downfall of the modern internet.

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

It’s what you’re used to. One reason I never started using YouTube was just this hostile behavior from the beginning. It’s really taken until now that I’ve been able to get enough out of YouTube to see if it’s worth finding a reasonable way to watch