"come to our centralized platform, we are good guys and we will stay good forever, we absolutely will not prioritize monetization over your privacy at any point in the future even after several changes of ownership"
honestly, the janky-ass superflous animations & effects even with all the “reduce motion” #accessibility options enabled seem to exist only to slow down my previously very snappy recent-gen (n-2) #iPhone – this isn’t event planned obsolescence, it feels like hastened obsolescence to make the #Apple money printer go brrr just a little sooner than usual, as a treat 😤
on a device that has the hardware to support 120Hz refresh rates, why am I ever seeing folders & icons get visibly drawn on my screen? 🤪
The flood of #enshittification that #Broadcom unleashed upon #VMware and its customers after acquiring it, and its seismic waves in the whole IT supply chain, are a testament of how bad managers who seek for short-term revenue hikes without thinking of the long-term are a cancer, and walking ticking bombs for the tech industry.
We all know what Broadcom did to VMware after acquiring it. VMware was turned overnight into Broadcom’s cash cow, they hiked prices by 3x in some cases, scrapped perpetual licenses, forced all customers into more expensive subscriptions, said that they only wanted to focus on the most profitable customers and fuck everyone else, all while worsening customer support and providing literally zero added value and features to the product.
Basically a parasitic acquisition solely focused on sucking all the vital lymph out of another product - pure Oracle textbook.
When you play such stunts with individual customers, unfortunately, it works most of the times. Individuals don’t have much leverage, nor choice if there is too much concentration in a certain market. They may complain, but often they swallow the bitter bite.
Things are different when you play them in huge corporate products that are an integral part of the IT infrastructure we all use.
It turns out that among the businesses who were disgruntled when Broadcom suddenly cancelled their VMware perpetual licenses there was Tesco.
But Tesco didn’t acquire VMware licenses directly from Broadcom, of course. They acquired them through a reseller of hardware and software licenses - Computacenter. So Tesco sued them instead for failing to provide them the licenses that they were contractually bound to provide.
Computacenter, on its hand, didn’t acquire VMware licenses directly either. They were provided with the Dell servers they sold, as Dell was an authorized VMware reseller. So Computacenter sued Dell.
Dell, on its hand, says that it has no fault if Broadcom has suddenly changed VMware’s pricing model, and that they are the ones who broke contracts with the whole downstream supply chain. So Dell sued Broadcom.
And there we go. A chain of 3 lawsuits between 4 giants across the whole IT supply chain in order to call a parasitic company accountable.
What a mess. But I guess that the manager who proposed to squeeze annual recurring revenue got his/her fat quarterly bonus home after things seemed to work for the first year.
This is also your daily reminder that as a sysadmin you must use only FOSS products supported by the community and by strong foundations - and contribute back to them once their success becomes your success too.
Enough with the “but stability - but support - but licenses - but my manager” corporate bullshit.
The cost of writing your own little qemu CI/CD pipeline to spin up your virtual machines is much lower than the risk of your corporate subscription getting suddenly enshittified by chains of wrong financial incentives at any place in your upstream supply chain, and having to spend years of tears on expensive long-chain lawsuits.
And, even if things go bad, the cost of migrating out of proprietary and non-standard implementations is usually much higher than the cost of migrating to a compatible fork.
While the #enshittification path depends on centralization and hoarding to create an all-knowing oracle, the #dialogic path depends on diffusion, openness, and human-centred design to create a powerful, expressive lever for human agency. 11/11
One is a small set of companies effectively prevents competition by hoarding capital, hardware, and network resources, effectively blocking new entrants and stifling innovation. Let's call that the #enshittification path. 8/11
«Please, pretty please, don't call it slop. Do you have any idea how much money we sunk on this thing? Can you imagine what kind of about-face I'll have to make if this thing tanks for good? Our investors are going to cry so hard when they figure out…
Three years ago I bought @juliette an electric kettle for her birthday (because romance is not dead).
Looking for a stainless tank, hidden heating element, and temperature settings, I found the Krups KE07. Bit expensive, but it'll last decades. Right? Button 1 broke after a year. Button 2 today..
Thread in three parts
1. How it broke
2. Why I think you should not buy a Krups / Tefal appliance
Sometime around the 2020 era, we lost the right to be mediocre at things we love.
No longer can you just bake bread...you must start a sourdough side hustle lol. Wanna stay fit and go jogging or running? Nah, you gotta optimize your biometrics for a marathon. What my point is that every hobby has been enshittified and gentrified into a brand opportunity.
This strange infatuation with optimization culture is killing the human spirit.
So this new year, starting tomorrow, one of my resolutions is to do something bad but fun. Maybe I write a terrible poem. I like to draw and paint, so perhaps I will draw a horse that looks like a table or sing off-key in the showers or in front of my loved ones. The algorithm driving the mainstream social media wants me to be a polished product, but my humanity lives in these messy, unoptimized, cringe-inducing joyful failures.
I will try to reclaim the right to be an amateur. Will you join me?
This might be the point in time where a successful project – #Mozilla – may need to be forked by the community (especially developers) into a new, unenshittified reimagination.
It's worked with LibreOffice (previousloy OpenOffice), MariaDB (previously MySQL), Valkey (Redis), ... and many more.
I have hopes that the recent turn of events won't kill the former browser of common sense. There's hope it'll become a 'PhoenizillaFromTheAshes' to arise without #enshittification.
Let's support a world with less #GenAI/#LLM and other shit in it, which is harmful to society, mental health, democracy as well as our environment.
"The last 2/3rd inch XYZ camera I personally owned was this one." where "this one" is a link to Amazon. No other detail.
Several camera rumors websites do that. Not only it's shitty, but it often rots completely as it might just be a search query on the lookup for referral fees.
wow, @pluralistic has really made a splash with #enshittification, very exciting to see. I hope people take a breath and try to understand the underlying challenges that makes confronting antidisintermediation so challenging, many of use have been engaged in this struggle for years. If it was easy, we would have smashed big tech ages ago, cc @ntnsndr, @techworkersco, @disco_coop
The latest round of tech working mobilization inspired by Cory's "enshitification" framing is amazing to see, tho I can't help bracing myself for the inevitable wasted energy as people rush forward without understanding counterantidisintermediation
I wish we had better blindness media that actually talk about things such as the #Enshittification of adaptive software, but that would require the blindness press to actually have a spine. This blog posts disgusts me in ways I can't articulate yet. vispero.com/resources/account-…
Learn why account information is requested, how it’s used, and what changes are coming to simplify Vispero’s registration process for JAWS, ZoomText, and Fusion.
After Epson bricked my last printer a couple of years ago, I decided not to buy another personal ink jet printer. There have been some slight inconveniences, but not as many as I worried there would be.
A trip to the neighborhood print shop when something absolutely has to be printed is less stressful than owning a printer that can be bricked whenever the corporation feels like it.
I just attended a @pluralistic talk hosted by the @internetarchive , in which he shared that thanks to #enshittification, printer ink now costs over $10K/gallon, more expensive than semen from a prize-winning racehorse.
Maybe the real reason Big Tech turned on us is that their original plan was to monetize our search history by advertising things we were looking for, but we were all looking for things nobody wants to sell, like "better working conditions" and "social justice" and "affordable housing."
Today's AWS debacle is the perfect example of the reason why in the last few years I started to be less enthusiastic about Signal, and more oriented to federated or even P2P solutions like XMPP and Jami. I wrote about it already:
Let's ignore for a second the blind reliance on AWS or any other cloud provider. In a decentralized system, this would not have happened, or at least it would have not impacted so many users.
Yes, I am a cryptographer myself, I know that Signal's encryption is the best. But encryption is not everything. Availability issues, geopolitical troubles, risk of enshittification, limitations on users' freedom to use and control the software lead to a lack of trust, even in a supersecure solution. And I say that with honest admiration for the folks at Signal, who are doing a great job.
Everyday I find more ways that the web has enshittified.... To people doing websites: each time you decide to make a popover that is not related to what you user is doing you should how much you hate your users.
Google maps has had this silly feature of proposing worse routes for a while now, but lately they have started indicating them before the splitting, on top of your current route. Very confusing #enshittification
Enshittification comes for open source: Slack is kicking two large open source groups, Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Kubernetes, off of their donated enterprise tier, giving them one week notice to migrate multiple years of data to a new platform before it's all deleted: cncf.io/blog/2025/06/16/cncf-s…
Instead of learning from this experience and not trusting the good will of profit-motivated closed source companies, it looks like both projects will be moving to ... Discord. Because "people know it." Will we never learn?
(Dropped Cory because he's probably getting tons of spam from this. Sorry!)
The CNCF Slack workspace will be converted from an enterprise plan to a free plan on Friday, June 20, 2025. This will have implications for how Slack works for…
In a move that surprises absolutely noone, GitHub now requires users to login in order to browse public repositories (including open source projects). After a few (~10) requests, you get blocked (I can confirm). In order to fight AI scrapers, I guess.
So, GitHub decided to blanket-limit access to open source projects as a defense against the very scourge that they(r parent company) unleashed on the world.
I won't be hypocrite: it's a bit embarrassing, but undeniably satisfying to say "told you so". I moved away from GitHub long ago and I moved all my stuff to Codeberg instead. And so happy I did!
Select Topic Area Question Body "I'm experiencing an issue when trying to access files from a GitHub repository without logging in. After 3 attempts, I receive an Error 429 (Too Many Requests) and ...
