Enshittification

A lot of tech knowledge is jailed in #StackOverflow, #StackExchange. Too much. The tech world is very dependant on this single gate keeper. This week, freedom to access SE’s indispensible tech knowledge has been lost.

“The average American,” Zuckerberg says, “has fewer than three friends, fewer than three people they would consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's something like 15 friends or something.”

Googling about an event in a Europen micro-nation, I ended up in an archive of the 1957 LIFE magazine. I was shocked at how reminiscent it is of modern news website, with advertisement everywhere that does its best to blend in and pretend it is content.

The next generation of "smart" TVs, that nobody asked for:

A few days ago I sent a GDPR request to some company to delete my personal data. They said to install their app and send a ticket from the app. The email was sent from the email address to which the account is registered. Is this even legal?

Catherynne M. Valente

Google offered three options: $50 cash money, a $100 credit to Google's online store, or a free battery replacement....

CrowdSec "Community" offering only gets worse and worse!

While onboarding with Aftermath, I went on a tangent, laying bare all my frustrations with manga-reading apps while pitching a blog. After spewing a word salad for what felt like a century, I was met with horrified expressions from my colleagues. The leading cause for concern wasn’t my pitch (thank god) but my casual comparison of the manga-reading ecosystem to streaming subscription services with the bonus of predatory practices rife in live service games. Reading the latest chapter of your favorite series involves jumping through a series of overcomplicated hoops that include microtransactions and earning points.

Perhaps not strictly enshitification of a service, but feels like a precursor to the enshitification of the idea of an open internet.

Archive.today link.

Reposting this from here from 2023, after I stumbled across it tonight and it hits hard.

Ofcourse you'll need gboard to bring back the spacebar!

To use Google messages you must sign in to one of your google accounts, even though that was not a requirement until today that I know of or was aware of.

Nvidia, the company that makes graphics cards you can't afford anymore and keeps vying for status as the world's most valuable company, is taking a page from Xbox's book and announcing a confusing change to its GeForce Now cloud gaming service that includes a monthly cap on the hours you can play games. As many people are saying in the comments to the announcement, maybe it's time to build a PC.

So now, if you want to get the app you gotta give up your email or whatever sign up information they want.

A leaked training presentation from a NY's largest hospital system shows how doctors are being encouraged to use AI for everything from writing emails to summarizing clinical evaluations to "diagnosing pancreatic cancer" and "parse" health records

Subscriptions such as HP’s Instant Ink challenge what it means to own our devices

Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station during rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her completely blind in her 30s. “I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.”