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.
I wonder how much more they need to do before more people start using tools like uBlock and such. The internet is practically unusable without it, and I'm not using hyperbole--most websites have so much garbage on them that you literally can't read them without an ad blocker and/or reading mode.
Since Google removed support for ad blockers, I convinced my wife to switch to Firefox. She noticed a huge improvement immediately, especially on mobile.
I went as far as installing network level ad blocking on both my home network as well as devices.
Recently, I've had a few friends over whom are... not as technologically adept. They were incredibly surprised that after joining my guest WiFi, suddenly they were able to browse most websites almost completely unobstructed. No ads, no popups, no BS. Aside from the usual cookie agreements, of course.
If you can, help your friends, install ad blockers for them, make their internet experience better. Even DNS level adblocking is relatively easy to set up, and the only thing this hurts is the unscrupulous megacorporations that want to milk you for every single bit of personal information to sell.
@CurlyWurlies4All Relevant essay from Ed Zitron. It's well-worth a read, for those who haven't already.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
The picture I am trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average person’s experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy, sludge-like frame, and as the wider internet opens up to said user, already battered by a horrible user experience, they’re immediately thrown into heavily-algorithmic feeds each built to con them, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like NBCnews.com feature stories from companies like “WorldTrending.com” with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying it’s an ad.
It's this extreme enshittification that made me sail the high seas again
It's not that I want to
It's not that I don't want to pay
It's not that the seas are cheap
It's not that the seas are easy
It's hard, it's expensive (storage is cheap until you need to store boat loads of 20-40GB files, it takes huge amounts of time and has become a hobby because that's what it takes.
I would gladly pay a single provider 100/month for all my series, movies, music, etc and always have access to everything everywhere without ads but the providers literally fucked us over on each and every one of those items so I'm done.
Aarrrr mateys, all aboard!
No chance @ 100/month. At that money, I want my dick sucked as well. Netflix used to be just 5.99 a month. I let it run for months even when I wasnt watching it because, fuck it. Its only 5 bucks. Not its what, 20? Fuck that. And thats before you get to all the other shit.
I spent 300 on a 22gb HDD and havent looked back. Sonarr downloads whatever tv shows Im watching, and I play it through plex or infuse. Both of which I paid the 100 for the lifetime sub. Other than that, I pay for internet and power. I also pay 45 a year for an iptv sub. Im in the UK, so thats 45 for the year to watch football that would cost me 50 per month to watch legally, and I still wouldnt get to see every game.
All of these greedy cunts have created this world of the high seas. But in order to get people away from it, it would have to nowhere near 100 a month. Theres no way Im chipping in for some fat CEOs fucking boat, just to watch tv. They can charge a fair rate, or they can fuck off.
I'm reading Cory Doctorow's latest book, Enshittification. As Ed Zitron said, never forgive them for what they did to the internet...
Normally i don't read a wall of text in post images, but damn. Every sentence is true.
Yeah the wall of text is the medium for this art piece and it’s very effective.
It really matches the exhaustion of dealing with tech in 2025.
it's not "tech", it's capitalism. tech works fine. you can see this with linux and fediverse and such. it's companies making everything into a subscription service that sucks.
Reject consumerism, embrace FOSS.
Many of the reasons OSS and OSH are so critical to a post-information world.
Our governments' failure to protect our rights from corporations is monumental. And when politicians are captured by money and not the people, we have no choice but to do things ourselves.
Hence dbzer0's mission and vision! Come join!
A lot of this I'm on board with, and I know Patreon is a shitty company with its own problems, but including "join my Patreon" in this list is silly.
Creative people deserve to be supported by the people enjoying what they've created. If the complaint is strictly about Patreon or about how Patreon has monopolised the "creator support" space then I agree, but the wording makes it seem that there's something wrong with artists who have Patreon memberships.
It would be better of them to encourage direct donations or something ofc but 🤷♂️ I just felt that one item missed the mark!
I would imagine the problem isnt paying creators or artists with membership support as a concept, but more that its still annoying to be bombarded with all of these different costs. I'm paying for this, I'm paying for that, where am I supposed to get the money to pay a monthly subscription for this one creator? You can't enjoy anything without being reminded theres another bill. I am annoyed by patreon subscription requests, I don't have the money. Whether or not the money is going to a better place doesn't necessarilly make being reminded everything costs money and that you are broke ass bitch any more fun
It's the wild west all over again until they establish law and order in the tech world. No standards, just everyone trying to make their millions (billions nowadays?). I can' help but think the end result of all this is an empty husk of a planet, floating dead through space because people wanted to collect money tokens of various values and denominations.
I FUCKING HATE HAVING TO DELETE MY ACCOUNT BY SENDING EMAILS IN A LENGTHY AND UNNECESSARY SUPPORT TICKET EMAIL CHAIN
give me a button. give. me. a. delete. acount. button. I am asking this not of the corporations, but of the government. Right to be forgotten should mandate making it convenient. When I want to delete my account I click Delete Account and recieve a confirmation email. I click the link in the email. My account gets deleted right then and there.
What the fuck is with that write an email to cancel your account by the way? Seriously what the fuck is that? I ran into that a few months ago and I was so fucking furious.
I'm glad the governor of my state made this shit illegal. Basically: if you can acquire a service through a certain channel/medium, cancellation must be available through that same channel/medium. The law is from 2007; it was originally made to address a few traditional roach motels (newspaper, TV, gyms, credit cards, internet providers), but it works wonders against this sort of e-arsehole too.
If they put enough hurdles in the way, you might not bother deleting your account so they can continue to sell your info, bill you for subscriptions (gym memberships for example), or just pad their user numbers making them look bigger/more popular than they are for investors.
Blizzard won't let you delete your Battle.Net account without your photo ID.
I once joined a gym that required a paper written letter to cancel.
Spot on summary
Embrace free software and piracy. No account needed. No ads. No spam.
Youtube is not full of ads.
This comment was brought to you by Invidious gang.
No ads on my side, either.
This comment was brought to you by the uBlock Origin gang.
Unlock Origin for browsers (mobile and desktop)
NextDNS or PiHole (for everything)
FOSS apps for ad free apps that do exactly what the ad-full and premium apps do but free
And minimize usage of software that sells your data wherever possible
Everyone needs to be doing these things. Corporations gaslight folks into thinking they need ads and your info to upkeep and improve their services, but it isn't true. They pocket the revenue while making their products shittier and shittier.
Don't support shitty buisinesses
It's all so tiring, honestly...
I just stopped, I only use non shit stuff nowadays. It feels amazing.
We do not ask for this capitalist Internet. We were good at year 2.000 where most of the content were made by and for fans because they love what they were doing.
This is why I'm angry and weirdly into Cybersecurity practices.
uses proprietary crap and wonders why it sucks
You say that, but plenty of FOSS projects are getting worse every day too.
but you don't understand, 500 megabytes of dependencies in a slow language bundled with a web browser is the only way to make modern user interfaces
I think I encounter at least one of these phrases daily. The internet is so fucking gross.
There are people who are building and participating in alternatives. They deserve support. But people have also become accustomed to getting a lot for free.
Now I'm not defending YouTube, but they have to store billions of hours of videos and serve millions of people at a time, just so you (and me) can stream 10hrs of video a day just to listen to lo fi study music or watch let's plays. that's very expensive. The whole model is ass-backwards, that content creators exist to get paid. YouTube should be charging content creators for storing their videos, and if the creator wants to saturate their shit with ads and e-begging, then it be their choice.
I'm sorry, but this is kinda epic.
Steal what you can, live without the rest. Its shockingly easy to unplug from the majority of platforms.
I work with a guy in his 70s who has gotten his credit card or bank card info stolen at least 5 times in the last year. He simply doesn't have the digital education to identify a spam email or a scam call from a real one. It's all just too overwhelming for him.
I got one call from the coast guard asking me if I had a package from Mexico coming in. He tried to sound aggressive and had an Indian accent. Total scam of course.
I just was aggressive right back. Like have you opened the package? If so, what's in it? Money? Cause I'll take that! He keeps pressing me for what's in the package. I said, you tell me. I'm sure you opened it already? Just hangs up. Believe nothing you get from a phone call and always verify multiple ways.
Yeah, it's not looking great right now. For spotify on pc I use blockify, which makes the ads silent and about one second long. It does just kind of break whenever this one ad tries to play, but you just have to reload the site. For the visual ads on pc, I use ublock origin, which works well. On mobile, I use this app called newpipe instead of youtube. Patreons and memberships are so that the creators get more money. Some of them need the money, some of them obviously don't. Ai features and dogshit updates are everywhere, and I hate it. I don't personally have any workarounds for them. Shows and movies can just be pirated using one of the sites on yarrlist and an adblocker. Only being able to play games with wifi, yeah, that's pretty annoying. The account stuff sucks ass. Things are in fact, shit.
You know, if ads actually worked, I wouldn't mind them. We have AAAAALL this tech to try to find the exact thing I might want to buy, and they still can't do it. If the ads in my feed were 100% things I would buy, I wouldn't actually mind them because it's things I like and either have bought or would want to buy. Instead, I hate ads because it's all things I don't and never would buy!
When I was growing up watching Cartoon Network, obviously there were ads, and those ads actually were suited to me, because I was a child watching children's programming. When they advertised a toy, I saw it and I thought "Ooh I want that!"; I didn't always get it, but I definitely wanted it. That was in the late 90s, with 1000x less information on me personally than they have now.
The shit that really killed me is when my favorite card game, Magic the Gathering, went all in on making cross-promotional sets. Who knew fucking card games could have ads too? Had to cut that shit out of my life.
