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.
view the rest of the comments
One EU member state implements their own msging system which uses 2fa by requiring people to insert their ID card into an EMV chip reader and enter a PIN. Despite that quite good security, they started block Tor. That way they can track your approximate location by IP address. Then to notify you that you have a msg waiting, they send an email with a surreptitious tracker dot, so they can track whether you opened the email and your approximate location at that moment. If you decide the bounce upon discovering the shit-show, then you would have unread msgs on the server which are deemed to have registered letter status and considered to have been read (even though all their tracking theoretically ensures that they know what is unread).
FOSS should certainly be on the client side. But on the server side FOSS doesn’t help. FOSS rules: only ppl who receive the binary are entitled to the code. FOSS does not require distribution.. just that binaries must come with source. What you’re perhaps really after is Italy’s “public money → public code” rule. You couldn’t know for certain what is running on the server or with what configuration, but at least in Italy the code is available for reuse.
Anyway, there are a minefield of problems. A public option is good to have and it’s likely inevitably coming to a gov near you. The dire need is retaining snail mail as an alternative. That’s where the good fight will be. In the US you already have gov agencies that ignore postal mail. For example, go to a secretary of state website to lookup a business. You might be blocked by Cloudflare (esp. if on Tor). And if access is granted, you could be forced to solve a Google reCAPTCHA. When you quite reasonably say “fuck this, I’m sending a postal letter to request the records”, you will find that they will just ignore it.
℻ is a quite useful alternative because you can send it electronically without revealing your email address, thus preventing the recipient from responding with personal data in an email. But we’ve mostly lost fax. Many gov offices have dispensed with it.
The digital transformation shit-show is in full swing in Europe. It’s a little slower to impact public services in the US, but it’s coming.
why would they need to send you an email if they are providing you with an email. That is where the communication should be. The problem here is it needs to have all the legal protections of regular mail. It should be illegal to monitor someones activity like that without a judicial warrant just like opening mail or putting a tracker on a car. We have historic examples of the way freedom and privacy should be implemented and it can be done the same electronically as it is physically. That is the problem. I should say that everything. Absolutely everything. Should be able to be done in person at an office without any need for any technology. Thats a big problem to. There should be a right to not use technology.
The msg portal uses 2FA to access. People do not likely want to go through that login process on a daily basis to just to check for new msgs, so there is an /optional/ e-mail notification feature. The notifications can be disabled but then you are legally responsible for having read msgs that arrive even if you did not login to see them.
If you mean that conventional email (SMTP) is where the sensitive payloads are sent, very few people can handle PGP, sadly enough. I would sign up for PGP over conventional email if, and only if, the gov would also guarantee that surveillance advertisers like MS and Google are not used on the gov end (I don’t even want them to have metadata).
Yes, I would insist on that, but I would still distrust legal protections on their own in this post-Snowden era.
Europe assumes the only reason not to use tech is incompetence. So they provide the elderly with “digital buddies” who do the tech work for them. For me that’s insufficient because it’s my opposition to the tech that stops me using it, not competency. I would not want a “digital buddy” solving Google recaptchas on my behalf either.
So indeed a !right_to_unplug@sopuli.xyz (right to be analog) is paramount. I believe it’s the most important right we could have w.r.t. digital rights. It’s the only nuclear option we can trust.