Has there ever been an industry that's been "enshittified" and then un-"enshittified"?
25d 8h ago by lemmy.world/u/idealotus in asklemmy
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.
Very briefly, after the CEO of United Health was killed, insurance companies were accepting claims they otherwise would have rejected.
Don't do that. Don't give me hope.
And some of those were literally life-saving claims.
Luigi saved more lives than he (allegedly) ended.
I went to pick up a prescription the next morning. It was mysteriously free.
Fuckin awesome
Is that verifiable? Claims are all PHI and kind of a black box. To be fair, there has been a shift in prior auth rules which could be influenced by the killing.
I've seen a few anecdotal claims that people with severe conditions got okayed after the killing.
Unfortunately, the ultimate fallout is less accountability, as they're now unwilling to release any information about the "doctors" supposedly reviewing cases.
Shouldn't that be prosecutable as practicing medicine without a license? They have to prove they have licensed practicing doctors making these calls.
Sure, lawyers are cheap
Video games
Had a huge crash around the Atari era due to an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published. Games were also extremely expensive then
Nintendo famously reversed this crisis with the introduction of the NES and their “Nintendo seal of quality”. Consumers were able to access a curated collection of quality games, and it really turned things around and basically launched the modern gaming industry
Steam, too. It was originally unpopular DRM for Half-Life 2. It had a broken offline mode that could only be selected when already online. It had no meaningful customer service and people permanently lost their accounts with no avenue for appeal (and probably no human even involved).
It was originally unpopular DRM and a launcher for Counterstrike. I think Valve was trying to take a page out of Battle.net's book. The Half Life 2 thing came afterwards, and if it weren't for that Steam probably would have just been yet another failed footnote in gaming history.
If anybody wants to know just how bad the crash was, Atari buried about 700,000 game cartridges and consoles in a landfill in New Mexico after the release of the infamously bad ET game for the Atari. A game that supposedly had more cartridges manufactured than there were existing consoles for them to be played on at the time.
It was so bad that the home console effectively disappeared from the US market as investors and customers believed that the fad had run its course and companies went back to focusing exclusively on arcade cabinets until Nintendo came in about 3 years later and proved that there was still a market for home consoles. It was so bad that Nintendo changed the name of the NES for the Japanese market to the Famicom - advertising it as a "family computer" system, not a game console.
I have a copy of ET my dad got for my older brother when he was a kid. Dunno if it or the Atari even still work.
You should hang onto it. They dug up some of the ones that were buried a few years back as part of a documentary and sold some of them at auction while the rest were donated to museums for preservation.
I used to have an old shareware floppy of wolf3d as well.
Can someone make this happen with mobile games please?
We're at the point where you can play all sorts of emulated games on mobile. There are near infinite bangers to play right now.
And I THINK there was a company out there trying to revive old mobile games that were actually good (think original Angry Birds) so they'd work on modern phones. I dunno if that took off sadly, though...
And best of all, even iOS has emulators now! For a while they were banned on the app store IIRC. Now there are pretty good emulators there.
I did not get very far with my first ever playthrough of Ocarina of Time personally. But I've played plenty of Pokemon Emerald over the years.
Apple did make an effort with Apple Arcade. The idea is it’s a curated list of decent indie games, none of which have monetization. But, you pay a monthly fee for them.
Not all of them Indie tbh, there are plenty of Arcade versions of popular games that normally have MTX or ads.
But yes, you also get some indie gems that normally are a one time purchase, and I believe some games specially developed for the Arcade.
Hilariously, Civ 7 is on there, but my phone has an A16 and it requires A17. And I stopped my sub a while ago
I remember the seal as a kid, I had no idea why they were doing that though. Thats a cool piece of history.
NES also introduced verification so you couldn't just manufacture random games and take them to market without approval.
Walled gardens - sucky but sometimes genuinely useful to clean up messes and keep them from happening (aka Grandma on her iPhone)
an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published
Who will save us now?
Indie games
The shovelware filling the stores by indie developers will save us? Ps Store always had some cheap mid, but they had effort put in, like ssarpbc (supersonic acrobatic rocket powered battle cars) for 1$ on sale always later became rocket league.
No? The innumerable indie games that are actually good like the Outer Wilds, Stormworks, Hades, Eco, Highfleet, Beam.NG, Avorion, 7 Days to Die, Factorio, Dinkum, Deep Rock Galactic (is that one indie?), Derail Valley, Risk of Rain, and Barotrauma just to name a few.
they got lucky with pokemon IP, at least in the early 2000s pokemon wasnt really making much bank as it is now.
I got curious and did a bit of searching since I couldn't really think of anything. Apparently Fender (guitars) was originally amazing, was sold to another company and really degraded in overall quality, and then was purchased back by some of its engineers and returned to a better quality. Pretty nice to see that people who were actually passionate about something regaining control and saving something they loved.
https://www.soundunlimited.co.uk/blogs/articles/fender_timeline
Ironically, they are now sending cease-and-desist letters to guitar manufacturers that build guitars with the s-style that their stratocasters have, and they are public enemy number one in the guitar community right now.
https://www.guitarworld.com/gear/electric-guitars/fender-cease-and-desist-lsl-instruments
Sadly though with the recent cease and desist stuff they've been involved with it seems like they've turned scummy.
Disappointing :( It seemed like their overall production quality is what made them popular and revered, so going after someone who won't be able to source the same materials and match the same production scale does seem super low.
Could be that they don't want people selling knock off shit as real and tanking their reputation. Or it could be assholery.
Their Stratocaster shape is public domain in the US. They won a court case in Germany for copyright of it and immediately went after any builder selling to Germany.
It was a total asshole scumbag move. No silver lining, just finance bros destroying a brand.
I could so understand that! I'm not super familiar with their products beyond looking into things for this post, but I feel like their branding would be on their official products 🤔 If another company is making something similar and using their branding, that would be pretty disastrous.
They then proceeded to not innovate at all for a couple decades and now they're serving cease and desists to any builders making guitars remotely similar to the Stratocaster with demands to recall and destroy sold guitars.
Fender is dogshit ass like Gibson. Both companies have behaved like entitled nepo-babies for decades. These companies deserve to die as punishment for their hubris.
That was a nice read, thanks for sharing
Newman's own seemed on track to go through the same thing, but the original family bought it back before things got too far.
This is similar to how many of the big names in the video game industry were built. Disgruntled designers leaving companies like Atari to start their own company. It's how Blizzard got their start, and I believe Ubisoft, EA, and at least a couple of the other big names were founded the same way.
Then, of course, the bean counters started taking over and it all went downhill from there once they went from keeping the designers on task with realistic goals to maximizing profits.
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
Coffee perhaps. I think previous generations were more apt to just get a tub of Folgers or Maxwell House and not care too much about what they were drinking. Then third wave coffee shops started emphasizing quality, process, and flavor nuances. These days, you can find specialty coffee in most areas or get high-quality beans delivered and brew it yourself.
I got a nice local shop which was part of a chain but the manager bought out the location and has been doing pretty well.
Beer, too
I used to not understand why people liked coffee until I had a real espresso.
i think starbucks started the trend, and then better coffe chains became available. and then maybe coffee shops, that arnt in gentrified areas(the ones in these areas often go under very quickly).
plus french presses, and makers are cheap now.
starbucks didnt invent cappuccinos. that was established italian coffee which made coffee decent again. that started happening well before starbucks. they just made an american specific chain based off it
Beer?
In the beginning was European beer, and it was good. They created the American brewing industry and it was ok. Then they said “let there be swill” and that’s all we knew. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep.
Then Jimmy Carter said, "Let us make breweries in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the drinkers in the sea and the imbibers in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild party animals, and over all the pedestrians that move along the ground. And there was beer
Jimmy Carter saw all that he had made, and it was very good.
Edit: Jimmy Carter was the US President who signed into law deregulating beer. Since then we were legally able to start brewing our own, and it jumped-started the rise of craft brews here
it always amazes me how many people buy into the neocon garbage that Carter was a bad president. Dude was a nuclear submariner, helped cleanup a nuclear disaster, built houses with his hands, and his biggest crime to them? he cancelled the B-1 bomber when it became painfully obvious the stealth programs were going to eclipse it's usefulness.
Reagan got elected on treason with iran, and lies about the B-1.
4 years later he was talking about the amount of money the pentagon was spending on 'costumes' as he slid into dementia.
Carter didn't piss and moan, just went on building houses with his hands for 30+ more years.
Carter was also the last president to treat the American people like adults.
that's insightful; so much of reaganism was 'let daddy take care of things and don't worry your pretty little head about ww3'.
I remember reading his malais speech and thinking that the American people were a bunch of babies for trashing him over it.
malais speech
I'd heard this mentioned but it was before my time, upon reading it..... holy shit, america, this guy described problems like an adult and you freaked the fuck out and went reagan.
jfc
Yep, the idea that Americans thought Carter was a terrible president bad had me embarrassed since I was in high school.
it just says so much when they tell you who they think the good ones were.
like, so many of them still idolize trump, and he's a moron.
Carter was the last good president NOT “made for TV”.
Trump is the first “made for internet” president
never thought about it that way but valid. yep.
Carter brought the Iran situation on himself by himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter%27s_engagement_with_Ruhollah_Khomeini
That article repeatedly points out the shit-sandwich geopolitical and local political situation with Iran has been going back to Kennedy.
Is it bullshit petroleum company induced meddling and related crimes? For sure. Does it mean landing in Carter's lap means he eats the whole sandwich? I don't agree. YMMV.
The whole sandwich is not for Carter, but the part about handing over the country to Islamists.
and yet, instead of holding the responsible parties - war hawks, petroleum companies, the bomb-bomb-bomb-iran (barbara ann) caucus, who you know are directly connected to it, you say shit like "carter for handling over the country to islamists'
fascinating.
keep grinding your anti-carter ax, I'm sure it makes you very popular with the youts
In that sense, no president is responsible because they always are just figureheads.
In any case, if the US hadn't mingled in Iran there would have been no hostage crisis, and no islamistic regime.
sure thing bud
But all you fucking export is over hopped swill and fucking Brooklyn Amber lager!
Ha ha, every country keeps the good stuff for themselves.
Yeah, the over-hopped thing is a trend that should’ve been dragged out back and shot before it ever had a chance to become popular. I want to go to a beer garden and find a variety. Instead, I get a dozen IPAs, Guinness (not complaining about that one), seven different ciders that are flavored like sickly sweet tropical fruits, and a weird peanut butter flavored bock from a local brewery.
Over-hopped is a major style here, and I find it baffling. Give me the toasty, malty, barley, coffee, bitter, chocolate notes of a good porter or stout any day of the week. But no, the menu is 6 IPAs, 2 ciders, a bock, and a weiss.
Too true. I mean, I like over-hopped swill, but I like most distinctive tastes
Currently drinking a “Maine sour”: blueberry and cinnamon. My local brewery is influenced by the cuisine of the Indian owners and really leans into sour ales and tropical fruits!
But yeah, even though I like an IPA most of the time, what about everything else? I’ve actually had good luck finding dark/black ales this year but it seems like no one makes Marzens anymore. October is disappointing without Marzens. What’s up with that?
Edit: Mango Lassi Sour is back in season!!!!!
Thank you. Christ I hate IPAs. I always feel like people are lying when they say they like them lol. I know everyone is different but fuck IPAs are SO bitter and awful.
I like a session IPA, genuinely. It's just when all you taste is stupidly bitter hops that I can't be arsed.
There's a beer at a locally brewery here called Hop Shock. The name tells you everything you need to know lol.
Amen, brother.
I used to think I didn’t like beer, until I tried it in Germany. Now I just seek that style out.
I’ve also had an anger inducing moment when a forum debater claimed Government regulation always harms industries. I pointed to German beer, which in part remains fantastic because it has regulations to avoid devolving it into American slop. The damn liar pivoted directly into claiming their beer is terrible.
Have you tried Belgian stuff yet? Also highly regarded.
I think so, yeah; not as though the quality stops right at Germany's borders, several other European countries can follow the same style very well.
Can't stand Belgian beer. Coriander is disgusting and they use SO MUCH of it. Tastes like a god damn headache.
You've been drinking the wrong beligian beers friend. There's a lot more to Belgian beer than a coriandered hoegaarden.
Try a trippel next time you get a chance. Or if you're into hops Duvel is divine.
Tripels also contain coriander, but Duvels do not.
Some Tripels do, most don't though. Most are without coriander.
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.
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.
When all of the services are moving towards the same enshittification, it seems to almost become cartel-like
Apple products. They were considered junk until Jobs came back and revived their style. They are currently in the round 2 of the enshitification process.
Yeah, you're right, we're in round 3.
I'm not usually an apple fanboy, but it's hard to hate on the M1 MBP. I have one used (around $800) and it's still insane after all these years. Just a great laptop even today. Really hard to find anything better at that price.
Snagged an M4 air for 600USD new last year and it’s a monster. I have a bunch of Linux machines and Windows computers for games, but for general “everything use” like editing videos and images for shitposts and just doing computer stuff, it’s perfect.
It was that interval after they'd merged with NeXT but before iOS became a thing.
academic publishing. It used to be monopolized by a couple publishing company with unreasonably high fee for access on both the side of researcher and reader.
Now, through hard works of the academics and funding from the public, now many publishing company are non-profit governed by working academics. And in many fields, open access has become the default.
I wouldn't call it de-shitified but it is getting better. I think also Anna's archive and syhub should not be underestimated in their effect. If students and researchers are not dependant on journals to do their work, they are more likely to publish open access.
Yes, there are many field that are still struggling, but nowadays most of, if not all, the articles in my domain is published by ACM and Schloss Dagstuhl, both are academic governed non-profit that are full open access (I don't think author even have the option to close access.
That being said, fields like medicine, biology, engineering is very much behind. I am very glad my field moved away from publishing with IEEE. They are not necessarily "behind" the entire academia, but certainly way behind my field.
i looked a biology ones(different fields under bio) most are still gatekept, while some are freebies.
Yeah, bio and medician had it quite bad...
Probably the biggest effect IMO is sites like arxiv.
And all it took was for one of RSS’ authors to be murdered by MIT.
its still paywalled for the person who wants reader, its free if you are in a university either as a student or a faculty.
Not the case with ACM and dagstuhl, but I know other publishers like Springer and IEEE does this. That is why we moved away from them :)
Now, instead of paying a subscription, they charge a one-time several thousand dollar fee to the researcher for open access. Problem solved! Everybody knows those fat cat grad students and post docs have plenty of money to throw away on oat milk lattes.
I don't think that is the case for ACM and Dagstuhl. ACM used to have this ACM open system where department pay a fixed amount subscription per year depends on the department size.
Now that all ACM paper is open access, I don't know if they are still doing that. Dagstulh never had these, as far as I know, hosting articles are extremely cheap.
These is certainly not the norm everywhere, but our field have already navigated out the swamp of free access, I hope more fields wil.
Ok? Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer all do this.
I am not disagreeing or attempting to downplay that academic publishing is still bad in many fields. But there are fields that are now out of the dumper fire, so I sm hopeful that other fields can learn from these and escape.
I also want to highlight the solution that worked is organization, public funding, and academic governance. So if you are unhappy about the situation in the field, maybe it is a good time to organize all your unhappy colleagues and build something new and better :)
Bowling Alleys, at least some of the ones I've seen lately. There was a period in the late 00s where bowling alleys thought they were the shit and started charging upwards of $20/player/lane, plus $30+ dollar pizzas. Not to mention the arcade jumping from quarters to dollar-credits.
The last couple I've found have all but dropped that, basically back down to the $15/lane/2 hour model with however many players and complimentary shoe rental. One even had $5 personal pizzas (that yes were just Totinos or similar heated up, but hey it's better than $30 for a red baron).
I guess the ones that survived covid realized no one was willing to spend a nice dinner's worth of cash on a night at what should be the second cheapest type of third space available to people.
There was an article on here about some sort of antitrust suit against Bowlero just a few days ago, with a bunch of people in the comments complaining that bowlibg is more enshittified now than ever before.
I would love $15/lane/2 hours. Bowling here is $285 for a lane for 2 hours
Shit, good thing I suck at bowling
I'd say American car companies. Due to market consolidation and car brands being a symbol of national pride, they were able to enshitify in the 1970's and 80's, producing low-quality expensive cars. Competition from Japan in the late 80's and 90's forced them to improve. American cars still trail behind Japanese cars in quality, but they've gotten much better.
Free and fair competition is essential to any economy. The gutting of antitrust laws in the USA is partly to blame for whatever you call this system we have now (I can't confidently say it's capitalism anymore).
Hard disagree lol, the American OEM standard is a bar so far down you can see the sparks of hell. The improvement was just their initial attempt to catch up before they gave up.
They nuked the EPA regulations which is why everything in the US is an SUV now and they bypassed competition with Japenese OEMs by lobbying congress to make anti import laws (exactly like what they are doing right now for Chinese EVs) which is how we got all these hodpe podge 90s era hybrid deal brands like diamond star or mazda & ford.
By the time those brands finally entered the US market with local production in full, they had already learned the gg ez system from their American counterparts and began to follow the same crappy practices of reducing cost and quality on every possible corner.
I wouldn't buy a Ford vehicle of this decade even if it ends up being cheaper because the thing is made of ABS plastic and Chinese aluminum glued together with the freshly harvested tears of their yearly department layoffs.
This is on top of warping the entire US transit system so that many cities require cars to do anything, and most places aren’t walkable. And, intentionally designing those SUVs to look “tough” in a way that completely ruins their pedestrian visibility from the drivers seat. That shittification definitely hasn’t been walked back.
I'd argue that the big 3 2 never recovered. Car design peaked in the 1920s and never recovered when the larger corps lobbied/wrote safety and fuel standards to force the mass consolidation of companies down to 3. Innovation slowed down so much and it is why China is going to eat our lunch through the transition to BEVs.
Cronyism is the system we have
Japanese cars are currently in a state of industrial shittiness. If the US is still trailing them, there is no hope for the US car industry.
They've been a bit more spotty on a couple engines and transmissions, but dollar for dollar they're still averaging above US on reliability most of the time. Pretty much every car company has had a few complete disasters over the past decade.
I wonder how many companies love the cyber truck for making their failures look good?
Tesla in general. BYD is going to absolutely crush the global market, though. Anywhere they're allowed to sell, they're going to dominate. Better battery tech for way cheaper. Tesla won't shake the global market much, but China will do it.
I agree with you. Ford still sucks though. if only for the awful interiors.
I once heard a take that American cars prioritized a great experience under the hood (spacious, easier to work on, fun to show off) ...but cramped, uncomfortable cabins, while Japanese cars did the opposite.
My old Honda Element (RIP) seemed to support this theory: Interior passenger comfort? SO much leg room and dude, the back was basically luxury theater seating! That thing was ROOMY.
Working on it though? Half the time it legit felt like the only way to get to The Thing You Had To Fix was to run it through a Honda assembly line backwards.
...Or have a VERY strong octopus friend who could work a socket wrench...
That engine compartment was not made for human mechanics once the thing was put together. The starter location was EVIL.
Helped a friend replace the alternator on a 1990 Honda Prelude once. The official procedure was to disconnect one of the engine mounts and jack the engine up a few inches to create a path to get the alternator out. Crazy.
Pour one out for the Honda Element IYKYK!
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.
Cash. Currency exchange. Used to be a tourist trap, intransparent and bad rates, commission on top; take only mint banknotes. Now often we see: No commission, rates with low spread (same as the best bank rates available to consumers). Takes bank notes and coins at no surcharge, no discussion.
This is for countries where cash is still king and practically required. It's competition at work; there are multiple local shops and they advertise their rates publicly. With internet in everyone's pocket, there's little room for cheating. Just enough spread for this to be a profitable business without robbing the customer.
Compare to ATM operators, which are usually a oligopoly charging growing fees to foreigners. Because they can.
In some ways shrinkflation is "cyclical" in that inflation rises costs, companies try to cheat consumers by shrinking products, but wages go up and "premium" products launch that are a decent quantity again. Those do well, but then inflation hits again, they shittify and shrinkflation happens again.
The long standing "big" brands never recover, but new stuff does come along. Good example is the "premium" chocolate bars that come along, their selling point being they had more cocoa in them. The established mass market brands used to have cocoa in them, but reduced the proportion to save costs. Now some of those "premium" brands have reduced the cocoa content and new even more expensive chocolate brands are available.
Fun fact: most American chocolates cannot be called chocolate in the EU because they don't contain enough cocoa.
Equally though many European chocolates can't be called chocolate in the US because they have too much vegetable or seed oil in as a ratio to cocoa butter.
Enshittification happens in both places, they just toe the line of the rules in each.
That's mainly the British ones, to be fair. Brits developed a taste for vegetable oil during the war, and we're nothing if not nostalgic.
Huh. I had no idea.
More British than European typically.
Cable TV was replaced by early streaming, although that is now well on its way to enshitification too
That's not the same thing.
but cable didn't improve which is what the question asks for
"How people watch media at home" improved
It actually did though. They now include free DVR and on-demand on most packages to compete with streaming. In some cases they include a streaming service with the cable package too.
its already there, i think its alot worst off than cable. because all of the streaming services are costing them billions a year, operating at a loss. Disney is able to stay afloat because of its PARKs.
they thought if enough people subscribe to anyone or more than one streaming services it can offset the cost of the streaming itself(which includes budget for actors/Vas, STUDIOS,,,etc)
Domino's pizza turned itself around.
I am pleasantly surprised by the quality shift. Managed to unseat my local pizza joint
Waterstones was on the brink of collapse, until a Russian billionaire bought the chain and put James Daunt in charge.
Daunt reversed years of enshittification. Publishers couldn't buy shelf space for their books anymore, local managers were given autonomy on what books they wanted to stock and each branch was run like its own individual book shop.
And to the surprise of the business world, his plan worked.
Barnes and Noble is another book store example that's following a similar arc. They were on a severe downward trend for years, but new leadership let each store set its own content and suddenly they opening stores instead of closing them.
B&N is a weird example too because they have a publishing house, which saved them from the fate of Borders who had to rely entirely on moving products without a fallback.
It’s a similar arc because Daunt is its CEO. Saw an interview with him and he’s definitely on the tiny list of “Good CEOs.” Him and Sam Reich.
My local waterstones is a wonderful place.
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.
Yeah, they do sometimes and in some situations, usually when you have some major disruption, but the problem is that the disruptor often ends up becoming the enshittifier eventually.
Case in point, look at Google. On a technical level Google genuinely cracked search in a way that no other company did, and made it so good that it became the dominant way to find information online.
They then ambitiously decided to use those resources to try and break into / disrupt several other markets like web browsers, email, office software, mapping software, operating systems, video broadcasting, etc.
During those early years we got a bunch of genuine improvements. Chrome was way better then Internet Explorer, and substantially cleaner and faster then Firefox, and still open source and not developed by ad-focused people.
Maps was way better then MapQuest, Google docs at least gave you an easy and accessible alternative to Word, Gmail was way better then Hotmail with way more storage, the original Chromecast and Chromecast audios were amazing value.
But then companies get entrenched, they start tying every product together, building walls around the garden, and start pulling up the ladder behind them. Then when everyone is thoroughly walled in they start extracting every possible opportunity for money and we're back to enshittification.
Chrome was always The DoubleClick Browser, since Day 1. Google Docs spied on you to create an AdSense profile. Google Maps & Earth were creating local business advertising profiles.
Firefox. Zoho Docs. MapQuest.
Isn't that just the standard enshittification arc?
Google hasn't un-enshittified and is IMO highly unlikely to ever do so. All those things (perhaps excluding the original search) were new high water marks in privacy invasion and data mining.
That is just the normally enshittifcation process. Many enshittified companies started as genuinely innovative or decent companies. I mean, they went into ads quite early on and tacking, but other than that...
They definitely haven't unenshittified.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Not as long as the owner or anything is an investment fund. And they tend to be.
That's why in most of the examples, the goodness returns after something like a market collapse that scares off the investors leaving only the people with instrinsic interest in doing it right.
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.
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."
Video games... Once. They enshittified in the late 70s, and then unenshittified in the 80s with Nintendo's Seal of Approval. Unfortunately, they also re-enshittified again after the 2000s.
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.
Runescape is currently de-enshittifying, was able to login to RS3 for the first time in years and not be inundated with shit MTX popups
I think they enshittified further since they removed that, thier 10% revenue is gone so they are forcing more of a grind which people hates, they threw a huge fit and removed every remotely related to "not grinding", plus the same people who complained about ORAS people are now complaining about the rising prices. i dint see anything get better for RS3, and many find the memberships tiers have no other benefit other than the increased cost.(they already increased the cost last, and again a month ago)
Tbf there's going to be growing pains, you can't just hit stop on 10% of your revenue without compensating somehow
And you can't tell me not having those squeals of fortune or treasure hunter or whatever fuck else MTX screen popups isn't an improvement lmao
many players have suggested compensation for all those removals, not just the MTX, i dint hear there were compensation of any kind. it was fair to remove MTX, but everything else, "dailyscape too"+ premium membership amenities?
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
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.
I'll see if I can invoke Cunningham's Law, here -
No, I don't think it happens. There's not enough financial incentive to un-enshittify, and often the companies that turn their products to crap were bought/sold to investors. To un-enshittify the product, the new owners would have to care about a long term investment and actually spend time & energy to learn whatever business they just bought up. Just doesn't make sense when their end goal is to quickly sell it for a profit, even if it means stripping the otherwise-healthy business for parts.
It happens, but it generally takes financial failure to drive off the people with pure money motives and yet still be alive enough for interested parties to keep it going out of actual interest and passion.
3d printing kinda. I remember in the days before reprap when stratasys had a virtual monopoly
Not exactly, but Runescape3 went hard into microtransactions (which arguably generated the revenue needed so they didn't need to be implemented in OSRS) but they did a pivot abd are rolling back microtransactions, removing gambling loot boxes in some cases and leaving things as direct purchase, etc
https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/the-future-of-mtx-our-approach--your-involvement
They've even gone as far as to launch cosmetic free worlds so mtx cosmetics are disabled. Which I, for one, have always enjoyed the visual progression of gear in games, getting cooler gear as you get more powerful and knowing of the really cool items which are hard to get.
https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/mtx-experiment-cosmetic-free-worlds-live-now
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.
I mean if you're talking about in a case as limited as RAM, SSDs and HDDs have gone through supply shortages and price increases, then come back down again in the last 10 years.
Yeah that's not really the same thing as enshittification imo. That's just classic supply/ demand disruption in a product that is difficult to scale up production on. It usually balances back out in the end.
Never. Once you poop, you have to wipe clean.
Not sure about your definition of "enshittified" if it includes memory prices going up and down.
Shrinkflation is not really related to enshittification. It's a symptom of inflation, which has been severe, and real wage growth not keeping up.
Is RAM being enshittified or just demand driving up prices? (Like lack of supply is driving up fuel prices)
Either way inflation and real wage growth comes and goes in cycles. Usually in an upward spiral. We're living through harder times right now, but I'm cautiously optimistic for the world as a whole.
also CHEAPFLATION is part of it too, user cheaper ingredients, and disguising it as a "new" or the same product as before is a little more deceptive than shrinkflation. most notably for things that are often locked in stores, toothpastes,,,,etc.
monopoly capital == "enshittified" ... so crapitalism is functioning as intended... liberalism is a twisted bandaid and at this point it should be obvious what we should do but the transinternational security elite and the media operators who work on behalf of the crapitalist class interfere in proletarian revolution via divide and rule pacification methods (better them than me). I think liberals (ivy league grads aka sophist turds) do more damage than the right wing hogs. It is up to the kids honestly because the elders are so brain broken and useless. No one reads anymore or criticaly thinks. I just avoid "the enshittified" by staring down the barrel of reality and celebrate the crumbling and colapse of the consumer spectacle that brainwashed entire generations that we some how were a shinning city on a hill or a land of opertunity. If you are not completely questioning everything by now ..... you are the problem. I enjoy the suck... I enjoy the fact that your toys are getting taken away. Now it is time for a tanturm... but lets make the next one productive and not woke. I hope I get downvoted... that was my intention. NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR.... boom bust boom bust boom bust boom bust boom bust but the overview is alway down down down on a planet that can no longer handle our nonsense. Justice will be served either way... thank god all men die. Change is coming just like the plates shift. *we might go through a period of fascism though and we just gotten a taste but what was once fear will become rage. I think what comes after trump cause that ODB will die one day will be so much worse. Both parties are imperialist. See the USA is a brutal imperialist empire. Fascist are the useful idiots of empire. Fascism is crapitalism in man made crisis and imperialism is its highest form. Russia won WW2 The usa played both sides and absorbed the nazis into our rocket program and NATO. We didn't need to Nuke JAPAN and we just did it for the LOLs and to intimidate the USSR *sticks out tounge....