Enshittification

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What is enshittification?

The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source

The lifecycle of Big Internet

We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.

Embrace, extend and extinguish

We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.

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The Internet is becoming genuinely unusable without an ad blocker (lemmy.zip)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/enshittification

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I don't know if it's just me, but browsing virtually any mainstream website without an ad blocker or with alternative frontends is becoming harder and harder to justify. It's getting to the point where adblocking isn't an optional luxury - it's a requirement to effectively get basic information about things.

Yesterday, I was trying to search some information about Ghouls from Fallout. This lead me to this Fandom wiki page which had ads on almost every corner of the website, autoplaying video in the corner, asking for my age as soon as I clicked on the site, injecting polls and random unrelated videos into the communty wiki content and being incredibly slow to browse. A query that in the past that took 5 seconds now takes 50, for what? Money?

I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.

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[–] grue 82 points 2 weeks ago (10 children)

I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate

They don't, though! Pages of static HTML are tiny and cost almost nothing to serve; they bring the cost upon themselves by ballooning the page with multiple megabytes of ad-injection and tracking scripts. That claim is like 99% self-serving lie.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

It really depends on the content being served. Even with JS, a website is just a bunch of text on its own and should be pretty cheap to serve, but a website with just text and no media is out of the ordinary and very limiting. You expect wikis to have a fair few pictures and some sites even have legitimate reasons to be serving videos. The sites that autoplay some random bullshit video when you open them absolutely are bringing those costs on themselves, though.

[–] grue 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's javascript and then there's Javascript. A page with a few dozen lines of inline script to do form validation is one thing; a page that wants to load the entirety of React because it has delusions of grandeur about being an "app" is entirely another!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Haha true. That's kind of also self-inflicted.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Everything you described is static content which can be expensive with big videos.

The cost is way higher when you have accounts for your users and they can search/query for data.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Most of the visitors on those awful sites come from google and are people who don't have accounts.

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