Enshittification

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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.

founded 1 year ago

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CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.net

Enshitification attributed to the fall of FTP services (slrpnk.net)

submitted 2 months ago by activistPnk@slrpnk.net to c/enshitification@slrpnk.net

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cross-posted from !newrules@slrpnk.net : https://slrpnk.net/post/30020824

FTP servers always just worked. No bullshit, garbage, or hoops to go through. Governments are now distributing documents that should be public access to everyone, but just like the private sector web-distributed docs bring in an infinite number of enshitification possibilities which make document access limited and exclusive.

For example, see the 1st item on this post. HTML PDFs are sometimes not even real PDFs anymore.

Some people have lost access to legal statutes because some foolish backroom jackass working for the gov decided to proxy gov websites via Cloudflare.

The EU has an “open data” law and an “accessibility” law. It’s a good start but these laws are vague and easy to disregard and weasel-word out of enforcement. It’s likely impossible to define a law that captures all possible varieties of enshitification, dark patterns, and exclusivity of access.

I do not think there are many ways to fuckup anonymous FTP. An IP firewall is perhaps the only variety of shenanigan we might expect.

So new rule:

All government distributed docs must have an FTP distribution. Outsourced distribution still carries with it the FTP requirement. If the gov wants to also do an HTTP distro, fine. They can do whatever Cloudflare enshitified shenanigans they want and exploit the fact that countless pushovers will dance and solve CAPTCHAs. But there still must be an FTP pathway to all docs.

Future review:

Three years after enactment of this policy we will review and possibly consider allowing Gemini to be used in lieu of FTP.

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[–] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

why would they need to send you an email if they are providing you with an email.

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.

That is where the communication should be.

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).

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.

Yes, I would insist on that, but I would still distrust legal protections on their own in this post-Snowden era.

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.

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.