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.
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, though 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 be come the default.
And all it took was for one of RSS’ authors to be murdered by MIT.
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 :)
its still paywalled for the person who wants reader, its free if you are in a university either as a student or a faculty.
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 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.
Probably the biggest effect IMO is sites like arxiv.
Not sure about your definition of “enshittified” if it includes memory prices going up and down.
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 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.
I used to not understand why people liked coffee until I had a real espresso.
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.
Cable TV was replaced by early streaming, although that is now well on its way to enshitification too
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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
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.
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?
Cartels serve the function of monopoly. Streaming services, and tech industries in general, are cartels.
that’s a really good explanation
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.
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.
Netflix has the vast share of users. By a large margin so well they might technically not be a monopoly they are.
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.
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.
Yeah I guess that makes sense, actually. Thanks for explaining.
Not a problem. Have a nice day! :)
<3
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?
If you are a monopoly
You also can do it if you’re syndicate
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).
I’d argue that the big
32 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
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.
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.
Pour one out for the Honda Element IYKYK!
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
telecommunications before and after AT&T was broken up
Never. Once you poop, you have to wipe clean.
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.
