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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

    For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

    And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

    As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

    Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

    And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.

    DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.

    Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)





  • I mean, not directly no - we boiled it first - but you gotta drink something, sometime.

    What worried me more is not when the screw-up is so easily detectable, but when it goes unnoticed, like the permanent damage done to the residents of Flint, MI, or all those toxic chemicals caused by the multiple train derailments, where the company men tried to pay/threaten/whatever people to say that they were not sick.

    Company profits >>>> human health & safety.




  • This should make us all very very afraid of what that water is doing to US!

    (Especially if/when it is colored - last year my water became orange and started giving everyone I knew that drank it mouth soreness, I only wish I was kidding, and ofc it was traced to a corporation found illegally dumping toxic chemicals into the water reclamation systems, thus exposing the entire city to those effects. No, they never faced any legal consequences beyond the slightest slap on the wrist iirc, why would they? That is what finally tipped the scales and helped me realize: the USA is not a first-world nation anymore.)


  • I think a lot of shows are AWESOME, but then late-stage capitalistic enshittification happens and they become… far less so, and often quite TERRIBLE even, though ostensibly still have the same title, even though nowhere near being an identical show.

    One super-good example is Stranger Things, where the first season was really quite good! So many homages to nerd culture like E.T. and D&D - it was fantastic!:-) As I read though, the pair of creators had 2 rules: never use CGI, and absolutely do not “sell out”, i.e. a story should want to be told, not sold merely for the sake of cash. So after the first season where they made it b/c of their love for the craft, you can guess how the subsequent seasons played out (I believe one of the pair even quit over it).

    Arguably a better example is The Walking Dead - it started off REALLY good, but then… well… it too “sold out”. Actually I keep trying to force myself to get through it, I even started watching it over again from the start (a couple times now) thinking that would help, but have yet to accomplish this feat.

    Another is Designated Survivor. It had some big-name actors, most of whom quit (I think the show was sold to a different network… or something?), and the last season was just terrible, limping along before they finally put it out of its misery and ended it.

    The really fantastic shows - like Star Trek - had to prove themselves, then the creators were given leeway to subsequently make great sequels and spin-offs and even entirely unrelated titles. Fun story: Gene Roddenberry even created shows after his death, as his wife took his unfinished notes and lead their creation under his vision, like Earth: Final Conflict.

    TLDR: why offer you a good show when they can offer you a crappy show that they made for a tenth of the price, yet charge you the full amount?

    (though stupidly enough, they also seem to be trying to offer us even more terrible shows that cost 50x the price to make, and yet somehow suck all the more for that!? anyway it all seems to be based on greed + arrogance - they want to make money, but they do not want to put in the effort to actually earn it, e.g. by paying the actors a decent wage)





  • Welcome to late-stage capitalism, where companies sell what you do not want to buy. e.g., no wired connection has ever once had this problem, but they had to sell more thingies, so now everything is bluetooth, whether it should be or not, plus it seems like nobody ever bothered to finish implementing bluetooth - e.g., this exact issue you are having, which surely could be fixed except… why bother, when you (& your neighbors) have already bought all the thingies?