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

I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate,

This is verifiably just false.

How much does food cost you a day? Maybe $25, depending on what you buy.

How much does operating a 1000-user lemmy-instance cost for a day? Around $0.0003 per person per day.

Trust me I did the math on this one. Internet services are not expensive. Internet corporations just try to extract a lot of money out of you.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

$25 a day for food? USD???

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

Yeah, seems high tbh.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

Depends on where you are and what you're eating, tbh.

If my wife and I eat out once that's 20something right there for just that one meal that one day, for example

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

And how much time?

How many hours does it take to fill admin roles? How many hours does it take to fill mod roles?

What if you had to pay them?

Lemmy is currently at a scale that it can be sustained by volunteers only. That will change as it grows.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I run my servers for free on the always free tier of oracle cloud. (It feels like hell froze over, but for over a year I am using a free service provided by tech satan and my soul is still intact, I think.)