this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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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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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet cafeterias, and kombucha on tap:

Whoa. That's not the experience I had.

Since graduating software engineering in 2008 I've had a lot of trouble finding a job from a company that didn't want to screw me over on salary and work hours. It's only recently that I was able to negotiate my salary to something decent.

Not everyone works at Google.

[–] ICastFist 1 points 1 week ago

Same. Graduated back in 2013, but since I live in a "third world country", not a single company here did anything even remotely similar, not before and not since.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I live in Canada. But even in the US it hasn't been like this for everybody. Ever seen the movie Office Space? The truth is closer to that movie for the vast majority of IT employees than whatever big tech Silicon Valley companies offer.

[–] ICastFist 3 points 1 week ago

The correct title would be the "enshittification of FAAMG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google) tier tech jobs" , because anyone that never worked on any of those companies can attest that having a miserable work life was the rule, not the exception.