I’m thinking even for cases of like shrinkflation.
I saw an article about potentially cheaper RAM here, so it got me curious if things ever really get better on occasion.
You really should read Cory Doctorows original analysis where he coined the term “enshittification”. He has written a book about this and it really is great. The point is that for companies to be able to enshittify their products, they need to be in a specific position. Esp. in regards of competition - if there is a market and other companies are able to offer non-enshittified products, you can’t. If you are a monopoly, you totally can fuck over your users. So for an industry to un-enshittify, you need to break the monopoly structures there, kill regulatory capture, try to kill network effects and bring real competition into the industry.
If you are a monopoly
You also can do it if you’re syndicate
I feel like I’m dense and stupid to ask this, but:
What about streaming services? there are a quite a few of them, and I don’t think any one of them is in a monopoly position. Despite that, all streaming services keep enshittifying. What am I missing?
They have a monopoly on content. If you want to watch Star Trek, you need Paramount+ for example. If you just want to watch Sci-Fi in general any streaming service would work but if you want to watch a specific show, then you still only have 1, maybe 2 options.
The services have become so segmented that you are forced into one to watch particular types of content. Want the Disney catalogue, well only one place to get that. Latest anime? Yup, generally the same thing. I wouldn’t consider them monopolies in that right but walled gardens I think is the proper term. They exist but are closed off from each other so can do as they want in their own garden.
This and also there’s no real competition because the entry barrier to create a streaming service is really high infrastructure wise.
Think: why is there only one YouTube? How many streaming services are popping up on your TV every year?
Yeah I guess that makes sense, actually. Thanks for explaining.
Not a problem. Have a nice day! :)
<3
Cartels serve the function of monopoly. Streaming services, and tech industries in general, are cartels.
that’s a really good explanation
In my opinion the issue there is with the content monopolies.
If shows and movies were licensed by many platforms the platforms would have to compete on technical ability and price. Instead most content is licensed exclusively and the platforms compete on their exclusive libraries.
When all of the services are moving towards the same enshittification, it seems to almost become cartel-like
Netflix has the vast share of users. By a large margin so well they might technically not be a monopoly they are.
Doctorows concept is talking about platforms and social media sites and not Netflix:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456
There might be a lot of Netflix clones, but YouTube is the only video platform that is relevant. And you can see how they screwed over their users and the content creators then screwed over the advertisers.
Book stores come to mind. Barnes and Noble killed local book stores and then Amazon killed Barnes and Noble which left an opening for local independent book stores to come back
And now the ones in my area are shutting down because B&N somehow is able to open new branches.
B&N did this huge push to Nook which has now been pretty much abandoned.
Barnes and Noble is profitable again
American beer. Used to be just be the macro brews with corn, rice and other adjuncts.
British beer too.
Watney’s and a small number of other breweries had a stranglehold on the UK pub industry because they owned a lot of pubs and could exclusively force their own brands upon their locations. Their Red Barrel bitter pissed people off so much that it led to the creation of CAMRA, an organisation that campaigns for real ale.
CAMRA formed from four ale enthusiasts on holiday in Dublin who were lamenting about the dogshit state of British beer. It was a very successful movement…
I can think of two cases that might qualify: The American meat industry and the Austrian wine industry.
In the former case, public outrage over Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle caused legislation and regulation. In the latter case, the wine industry got so cheap that they started back-sweetening rotgut with antifreeze and poisoned a bunch of people, and they had a choice: Rebrand to impeccable quality or die as a national industry.
The Austrian Green Veltliner is one of the few wines I always have to have at home.
AFAIK internet access was very siloed in the 90s - AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and the like, which weren’t quite ISPs, since they allowed access only to their own services and networks. Then, in 2000s, these companies evolved and ISPs started providing access to the WWW, whick you could call “deshittifying” internet access.
Probably before my time… What I remeber from using AOL was that their browser and keyword structure was like an idiot-proof version of the Internet that was accessible for the entire family. I guess they thought that typing www.something.com was for techies… But that ultimately they were still providing you an internet connection and you could use other software to access the actual internet.
Yeah, unless it was different in the very early days, we used AOL and it was basically a glorified homepage. Opening the browser and choosing your own sites to visit felt very advanced, but worked just the same.
strictly in the context of the title alone, video games.
No Man’s sky and cyberpunk definitely fall into this
No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk offered a great service to entice users, then got advertisers on board as clients, then sucked the value out of what the users and clients received in order to extract maximum value?
Promoted something amazing, fell way short on launch, but instead of disappearing with the money, fixed the game, offered free dlc/updates and redeemed themselves.
Maybe not the definition of enshittification, but at least the games are well worth playing now. My kid and I have paid licenses for each game.
Video games are at an all time enshitified state. What are you going on about?! You must not be following the whole market.
Everyone and their dog is making games these days, so it’s very easy, if you’re choosy, to never have firsthand experience of a bad game anymore. The only thing holding us back is listening to adverts that over-promise and ever pre-ordering anything. We don’t need them anymore.
What are you talking about? There are hundreds of great games being released, the gaming industry is a lot more than a couple of big corps.
The indie game scene is thriving and while there’s a lot of crap out there, it’s not really what I’d consider enshitified.
On the other hand, AAA games and anything mobile is absolutely enshitified.
i was referring to atari in the 80s
anway…
Yeah, video games went through an early enshitification cycle. Atari came out and was all the rage as people made games exploring what could be done, which attracted money, which attracted grifters as well as impatient executives. Between them, a lot of garbage got released to the point where the video games industry pretty much died. Nintendo revived it with the NES and their licensing program that meant someone there had to agree a game was at a certain level before they could even publish it.
Over time, the video games industry grew to the point where it is large enough to survive a wave of shitty games, even if those games are released by the ones normally expected to know what they are doing but don’t because MBAs come in with “optimizations” that ruin things, plus sometimes brag (or are otherwise obvious enough) about what thet are doing to the point where people turn against them.
So even though the video games industry has come up with new ways of enshitification that the 80s grifters would have creamed their pants over, there’s enough competition that understands that enough people don’t really want or like that to thrive without doing it.
they turned into slop for most of them.
Maybe the porn industry? It was rife with abuse and financially yoked its porn stars. Then things like OnlyFans came along and now adult entertainers have full control of their content and careers.
I encourage you to look into the agencies that prey on young women, essentially owning their content and taking most of their earnings.
He didn’t say it didn’t still happen. Just that there is now an option where it doesn’t. Essentially it’s an improvement instead of a continued enshitification.
It’s not that predatory entities don’t exist anymore, it’s that modern systems help make porn stars more independent if they want to be.
They’re still getting pimped by influencers, they take a percentage, prob most of them arent tho
I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.
They also don’t need to make the same insane amount of content to make way more money.
The USB mess and proprietary cables.
It’s an even bigger mess now. At least with proprietary cables you could see what a cable was for and what capabilities a port had.
Now you see a USB port, but does it allow charging and in which diretion? Does it have DisplayPort alt mode, thunderbolt, which USB version does it support? 2/3/4, USB3 gen 1, 2, 2x2? Is it 480Mbit, 5Gbit, 10Gbit, 20, 40, 80 or 120? Same goes for cables, what features does it support? No way to tell from looking at the cable.
How is that worse? It’s a new problem, but it’s not worse. Even with propriety cables, you might have memorized the specs, but you couldn’t change them. Now you just need a single high quality USB-C cable for your various devices. If you don’t care about fast charging, then it often doesn’t even need to be high quality
You used to be able to look at a computer and see exactly what kind of connections it supported. Now there even are computers where the supported features are different between ports that look exactly the same. It’s not just “does this laptop have DisplayPort out”, but you have to figure out which port supports what. It’s SCART all over again.
You used to be able to tell your mom to just put the cable into the hole with the same shape, often they were even color-coded. Now try to explain over the phone which of the 5 identical-looking cables she should use and in which of the 4 identical-looking port it should be plugged.
That is objectively worse.
That is objectively worse.
It is absolutely subjectively worse. There is 100% an argument to be made that this is a better situation than not having a proprietary cable, and the only option is to purchase an overpriced replacement from select manufacturers.
you have to figure out which port supports what
I have never personally used a device like this. Every port has supported every function for me. I know it happens, but I work in IT and have not come across a device like this yet.
However, I can use my laptop charger on my steam deck, my phone, my ear buds, and of course my laptop. So given the problems it’s solved vs the issues it’s created, we are in a much better spot from my perspective.
Data transfer is a mess afaik, big reason I tend to buy my cables in different lengths, if it’s long I know it’s for charging, short it’s for data. Some manufacturers do mark the cable ends with their capabilities (ugreen for sure does this, just checked my power ones are marked 240w and my data a marked 10Gbps), my stuff is mostly older though so I don’t have a bunch of different data speeds to worry about.
I’m with you though, I’ll take it over a bunch of different proprietary cables.
i don’t know about you, but I learn about the device I’m buying, and what the ports support before I buy it.
also, the argument is about proprietary cables, not the old printer port, mouse port, display port, etc.
proprietary cables are like Apple’s old lightning cable
Your problems with ports aside… the good cables have symbols on the plug that tell you what they do. But yeah, it’s still a cluster, just less so.
You misunderstood the term. An individual company gets shitty and dies a slow death. Meanwhile another company rises and picks up the users of the dying company. And then the cycle starts anew.
Or maybe you just meant to say “Which industry went bad, and then went not bad again”.
I thought enshitification was the specific process of “platforms” gaining a large market share, then exploiting both the buyers and sellers that use the platform to jack up profits/extract more rent.
Yes, while Mr. Doctorow isn’t interested in policing any language, including the term “enshittification”, it was originally a process of how platforms are first good, to attract users, then bad, betraying their users for advertisers and/or suppliers, then worse, betraying their advertisers/suppliers for their investors, and ultimately they provide the cheapest/worst service possible to just barely keep users and advertisers/suppliers using the platform, advertisers/suppliers locked in to the user base, and users locked in due to a lack of interoperability or effective monopoly.
It’s related to “chokepoint capitalism” and to a lesser extent “technofuedalism”.
no, it’s about companies creating dependent users, then cutting costs and quality, and jacking up the price
Yeah, companies. But OP used the term to describe an entire industry.
The need to constantly show growth makes me wonder if it’s worth doing crazy stuff that tanks the business just to show growth by getting it out of the ditch back to where it was before.
telecommunications before and after AT&T was broken up
These comments don’t leave room for much hope…
That’s because no one’s actually answering OP’s question lol
Lemmy’s slowly approaching peak reddit Q&A format: “Where can I find X?” “X is stupid, use Y.”
Somewhat tangential but you should read the story of how WaWa did an end run around a corporate takeover.
T-Mobile had the worst customer service of any company I have dealt with, then had a turnaround to the best customer service of any company, but now, sadly, not so great. Though not nearly as bad as it was to start.
nursing, bad example. but a while ago it was getting so bad with the shortages, there still is and still bad. but they can go the travelling nursing route which is more lucrative and payout is more massive than a standard hospital. they make way more if not as much as some MDs. Hosptials/networks thought they can enshittfy by staffing less, but they realized more patients were getting maimed, died due to neglect. and they are apparently paying out the ass in underserved areas just to attract nurses back.
not so for MDs, apparently many insurance, or hospitals are forcing them go through more patients per hour/day then before.
Yes! Nursing really is having a resurgence. Pay is keeping up with cost of living in my area and travel contracts show promising wages in the areas I’m going next. Much better than it was 2019-2023. Those were some PTSD inducing years.
travelling nurses specifically have more flexibility with thier jobs so to speak, if one hospital is shitty, you can just go to another city/reigion. although covid has made nursing quit in hospitals, havnt heard so much on the other option.
Physicians have a lot of problems preventing us from demanding our worth because we can’t collectively bargain like nurses can. I wish I’d gone the other route but I think if I had I would have regretted it too.
if you can tolerate patients, thier excretions, thier attitude nursing is for you, or hours. nurses do get shit from MDs they are working under, once while i waiting at an ENT waiting room, the ENT i was seeing went off on a poor nurse, CNA? for apparently making me only do a phone call with him and wasting his time by going in person(if he indicated first lol, how was i suppose ot know that) then i realize he was just a very jaded MD lazy.(thats when his attitude change towards me very passive aggressive.
I really want to respond to this with a real comment that comes from a place of passion and honesty but I can’t if you type like that. Sorry, can’t take you seriously.
When i was a kid, soft drink cans were 280mL or something like that. Then we got the 355mL cans. Product inflation. I think its the only thing i can think of that’s never been shrinkflated.
Now they have the smaller cans for portion control reasons, but they still havent shrinkflated the normal cans
Here they tried to introduce 400ml beer cans, explaining that this is what people actually want. The anger quickly removed that crap from the shelves.
400ml to pint size cans are common in the UK. But I noticed in Sweden for example smaller 330ml cans are available - also available in UK but no where near as common.
330ml was already a thing. But introducing 400 is just a way to remove the 500ml, then increase prices
