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.
Not sure about your definition of “enshittified” if it includes memory prices going up and down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Can someone make this happen with mobile games please?
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
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 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.
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…
I remember the seal as a kid, I had no idea why they were doing that though. Thats a cool piece of history.
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.
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.
its still paywalled for the person who wants reader, its free if you are in a university either as a student or a faculty.
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 :)
And all it took was for one of RSS’ authors to be murdered by MIT.
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.
Probably the biggest effect IMO is sites like arxiv.
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.
Very briefly, after the CEO of United Health was killed, insurance companies were accepting claims they otherwise would have rejected.
deleted by creator
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.
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
I went to pick up a prescription the next morning. It was mysteriously free.
Fuckin awesome
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
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.
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.
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.
That was a nice read, thanks for sharing
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.
Newman’s own seemed on track to go through the same thing, but the original family bought it back before things got too far.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would love $15/lane/2 hours. Bowling here is $285 for a lane for 2 hours
Shit, good thing I suck at bowling
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.
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.
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.
It was that interval after they’d merged with NeXT but before iOS became a thing.
Jobs and the ipod started the entire enshittification paradigm.
Don’t @ me.
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.
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.
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.
