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] 8 points 5 months ago

Don't feel bad for blocking their ads. The internet was never meant to have that much advertising in the first place. If websites can't afford to keep their site up then they probably don't need to be running it in the first place.

If your site has to host spammy bloated malicious third party advertising then I think there's a bigger issue at stake. Users shouldn't have to sacrifice their privacy and security to view content. Also greed isn't the same as "we need ads to keep our site running" when clearly they are making enough but want more.

It's honestly insane how tech illiterate people can't grasp this privacy concept and just learn to use a damn ad blocker. I don't mind justification but at some point you have to be the bad guy and fight back against cooperate greed.

Stay strong. Firefox+uBlock origin is the goat!