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] 30 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Becoming?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I've been using ad blockers since the early 2000's. Ads with noise is what did it for me. Pop-ups too were super annoying. There was also malware in some ads back in the day. So yes, ads poisoned the internet a long time ago and I absolutely refuse to browse the internet without one. Or two.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

yeah that part confused me at well... never used the internet without ad blockers since popup ads were a thing.

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

Lol I was thinking the same thing.

Ive used ad blockers since 2011. And when mobile browsing got to shit, I got a pi-hole because fuck that noise.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

I don't even browse on mobile much anymore, "oh wow a paywall guess I'll have to live without whatever this is" 🤷