Enshittification
Welcome to Enshittification
A community for everyone who misspelt it as enshitification.
"I the onceler felt sad as I watched them all go, but business is business and business must grow, regardless of crummies in tummies you know."
This is your space to document the decay, demise, and destruction of the tech world as we know it. Share stories, articles, and firsthand experiences that capture the ongoing decline of once-celebrated platforms, services, and companies in the late stage capitalist landscape.
From monopolistic corporate shifts to anti-user updates and the relentless pursuit of profit over quality—if it’s broken, bloated, or just plain bad, it belongs here. We’re here to spotlight the moves that make the tech world worse, one piece of enshittification at a time.
Guidelines
🔹 Stay on Topic: Only post content about the decline of tech products, platforms, or companies.
🔹 Quality Content: Give some context when posting links or articles to drive quality discussions.
🔹 Respectful Discussion: Critique companies, crappy tech, and capital, not community members.
🔹 Positive Monday: The first Monday of every month is reserved for positive content only that shows enshittification isn't inevitable.
Join us to expose the changes that ruin the things we once loved and to discuss what comes next in a tech world gone wrong.
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I don't know about FTP, a useful and crawlable website is fine for me.
What I am much more taking issues with, is the use of proprietary file formats like the MS ones.
I maybe am overly critical, but in my opinion, public access should be access without any redundant payment requirements.
The problem with HTML is it gives too much freedom to the web developer who can enshitify it with proprietary JavaScript, CAPTCHAs, etc. Sure it is possible to implement interoperable non-enshitified HTML like this example:
http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
But you cannot trust web devs to be responsible. And you cannot trust lawmakers to have the competency required to ban all the shitty things that can be done using HTML and JS. FTP is inherently limited so a bad admin cannot screw it up too much. It technologically protects us from enshitification.
Not sure what you mean by payment requirements. Govs distributing docs usually does not involve payment. Nonetheless, I want as many payment options as possible because even payment systems are enshitified. E.g. PayPal is a shit show by a controversial company with a long list of wrong doing.
By paying requirements I mean, that at least the German government sometimes still provides documents in Microsoft formats using macros, templates and design features, that are not supported by open source, or free alternatives.
In my opinion, every document provided by a city, a state, a country, should be available in the least expensive way and it is really no big hustle to turn MS stuff into open formats.
Regarding the HTML problem, I think everything can suck hard, if someone wants it to or doesn't care. But honestly I myself don't know how to address that in a useful way except for annoying people until they do things right.
That’s already illegal. Directive 2019/1024 Art.5¶1 states:
So when you encounter a gov agency who distributes public docs exclusively in MS Word, in principle it’s just a matter of filing a complaint that they are required to act on. But I suppose there could be a snag because MS published an open spec for the Word format. It was likely just a symbolic gesture because I heard MS Word implementations do not comply with MS’s own spec. But then that works to your advantage because it could be argued that a non-conformant doc fails to be “re-usable” and fails to comply with the open standard.
I agree but there need not be a law about cost because using an open standard generally and typically implies that some FOSS will exist for it, and most FOSS is incidentally gratis.
Not with FTP. FTP greatly limits the ways and degree by which the deployment can suck. Someone who doesn’t care in the very worst would choose a non-intuitive file structure. Someone who wants to be malicious doesn’t have many ways to do so. And their act in FTP would stand out and be difficult to explain.
With HTML there are infinite ways to make it suck. Most web devs abuse their freedom in countless ways to make it suck. It’s actually very difficult to find well designed websites. FTP is the inverse of that. It would be difficult to find a poorly designed FTP host.