this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
480 points (99.0% liked)
Asklemmy
44149 readers
1795 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Just to add, the concept of a bait and switch, where you lure a party in with something and then swap it out once they are committed, is not a new idea in the slightest. This is just a modernized, refined tech version.
Uber and Lyft are good examples. Drive out most of the competition with an aggressive early phase where you spend most of your capital to shore up a massively negative balance sheet. You are baiting the customers to you with very low prices.
Then once the competition is eliminated, you raise your prices on the captive consumers that rely on the service to recoup your costs and start making money.
If you, in a video game, have ever lured something in with ranged attacks and then switched to melee to kill it, by plan, you executed this same strategy.
Every single discounted trial period for a subscription is employing a riff on the same concept, where they hope you're too lazy to cancel.
Fools been falling for the bait and switch since ... oh dawn of civilization maybe? Awareness of it defeats it, people don't take bait when they know it's bait. It is not complicated though, and does not require complex understanding to grasp.
IIRC, it's in the article, but what makes enshitification so prevalent in tech is that it mostly involves networks, wherein part of the value of using the application comes from the presence and concentration of other users and providers on it (network effect). Even Amazon, Netflix, and Uber, are subject to that effect because they capture providers, not just users you will interact with. It's a somewhat uniq trait that really exacerbates the problem. This trend will probably continue untill interoperability is legislated.
I would still argue that it is possible to educate enough to dramatically reduce its prevalence, as it does require a very large number of consumers to function in any kind of way.
While I'll grant this is unlikely and has little historical precedent, that is true for many things in the modern world. We should keep our eyes on what is possible, not simply what is likely.
Unless you're at a poker table or something.
Right before the pandemic I was trying to not use Amazon anymore (I said f it during the pandemic because it was so hard to get ANYTHING for the first six months, but I need to go back to it). There was some random thing I wanted to buy, so I hunted down the manufacturer's website and ordered it from them directly.
The thing still arrived in an Amazon envelope from an Amazon fulfillment center in an Amazon delivery van, because the small manufacturer was using fulfilled-by-Amazon for all their logistics, even for stuff sold on their own website. So apparently I can't even stop using Amazon if I want to!
Your metaphor reminded me of killing vampires in Skyrim and it made me smile as I also feel a deep sorrow from the fact all major companies now are racing to the bottom while leaving their skidmarks on everything I used to love.
What is the real world equivalent of standing on a rock to abuse the NPC's pathfinding and cheese them to death?
Probably something along the lines of a castle of some sort. Maybe with a little of the "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you..." thing to a younger sibling.