OK that's a new one. A popover.

Not to login

Not to give you email address

Not for coupons

Just a fucking ad. Like there used to be popup windows for.

#enshittification

The ultimate #Google self-own: Google's AI Overview result of "enshittified google" that includes "AI Overview" as an example of enshittified Google.

#enshittification #chatbots #selfown @pluralistic

Since @loshmi and @jwz 's post about the #enshittification of #FireFox yesterday, I've been test-driving #webbrowsers suggested by people in response to my request for suggestions of browser alternatives. I thought I'd give a quick review in case anyone else is interested.

Suggestions:

@JayLittle Zen Browser

Downloaded AppImage of Zen. Feels very similar to FF, as it is based on it, but has a Vertical Tabs interface, which I don't like. I ran with it all morning, but it feels too alien to me. Import option only showed Chrome, not FF, but FF Sync is supported, and worked, so I have all my FF passwords, bookmarks and history. Gmail, ebay, Youtube all work.

@aspragg #Epiphany

Installed Epiphany from stock Debian repo. Very minimalist feel (which I kind of like). Says it supports FF Sync, but I couldn't get it to work - just displays a dialog saying "something went wrong". Gmail, ebay, Youtube all work, albeit with manually entered credentials.

@eliteamdgamer #Floorp #servo and #ladybird

Floorp makes you agree to a privacy agreement which is in Japanese, and I couldn't find an English version, so I have not tried. Servo looks interesting, but I don't get the impression it's "production ready" yet. Ladybird, as far as I know is developed by some rather bigoted techbros, so also not tried. Sorry eliteamdgamer, but thanks for the suggestions.

@IzzyOnDroid #LibreWolf

Installed LibreWolf from external repository (followed easy instructions to add to my apt/sources) so it will get updated with my normal system updates. Again, import option only showed Chrome, not FF, but FF Sync is supported (after tweaks in about:config to enable it), and it worked, so I have all my FF passwords, bookmarks and history. Gmail, ebay, Youtube all work.

So, in summary, I now have three extra browsers installed, and am feeling more positive about not having to resort to Chromium any more. I'm favouring LibreWolf at the moment, as it feels a lot more homely. Will continue flitting between all of these for a week or so, as I need to use other websites I haven't yet tested. I'll be surprised if anything flat out fails to work, but time will tell.

"Designed in California"

This should become the seal of bad products and #enshittification

my university has converted our office telephones to Microsoft Teams. when i grumbled about this to a favourite sysadmin, this is how they responded 🔥

“Microsoft has actually brilliantly leveraged the lousy security landscape -- for which they are in no small part responsible -- to capture even larger market-share, as we now need commercial entities to produce the software required to protect us from their failures, and therefore need a more uniform environment to achieve the necessary scale. The uniformity then guarantees an ever greater scale for the inevitable conflagration. Monocultures guarantee one big fire instead of a bunch of small survivable ones. We really have no interest in learning from evolution, in no small part because it would produce fewer billionaires.

— Local Cranky IT Guy” [shared with permission]

#Enshittification

So, have you ever thought your devices were listening to what you were saying, and then ads for that thing would show up...and all the pundits kept telling us it was coincidence and we were just seeing patterns because people seek patterns?

Yeah...naw. @404mediaco in their tradition of breaking all kinds of news, would like to tell you that you're not insane, and the pundits were wrong.

404 brings receipts: Cox Media Group (CMG) says it can target adverts based on what potential customers said out loud near device microphones, and explicitly points to Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Bing as CMG partners.

MindSift boasted about targeting advertisements by listening to peoples’ everyday conversations through microphones in their smart speakers.

Here's the deck, read it for yourself: 404media.co/heres-the-pitch-de…

(free signup may be required, iirc, but if you've got spare change, consider subscribing too. They're doing yeoman's work out here on the data front.)
#Enshittification

Here’s the Pitch Deck for ‘Active Listening’ Ad Targeting

404 Media previously reported Cox Media Group (CMG) was advertising a service that claimed to target ads based on what potential customers said near device microphones. Now, here is the pitch deck CMG sent to prospective companies.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

There are parts in the #Cricut Maker 3 that cannot be accessed without breaking plastic (red box) - like these screws (blue arrow) on the lid.

The iFixit article is not correct because it’s glued - it cannot just gently be pried off.

I am never purchasing a Cricut again. This is extremely anti-repair. #RightToRepair #enshittification

"Apple made a fateful decision that mobile-phone internet should be app-centric, not browser/website centric. Then Android copied their mistake."

Many interesting things in this article, but this is one particular gripe I have about today's Internet. I will go to so much unnecessary trouble just to avoid using somebody's app.

tumblr.com/accordion-druid/685…

#IndieWeb #Enshittification #Web3 #SocialMedia #Blog

“Viral videos showed customers ending up with absurd orders as a result of the McDonald’s AI drive-thru technology, like the woman who didn’t really want nine sweet teas or the girl shouting “stop” at the screen as it tallies up more than two dozen orders of chicken nuggets.” #Enshittification

cnn.com/2024/07/31/tech/taco-b…

@pluralistic has an #OpenLetter to #PolicyMakers to create a regulatory environment to prevent the #enshittification of our already partly enshittified #CleanTech

pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unp…

You need to read it, but most importantly, those who can actually, factually, change the system, before we're broke, living in a tent next to a mountain of #EWaste, need to read it.

In #Germany, I'm looking at you: @Bundesregierung @BNetzA
@Bundesverband

Wenns auf #Deutsch sein soll, geb einfach Bescheid.

@0xSim sometime it's too close to the reality to be unbelievable.

#enshittification

What the hell, where does the sudden #enshittification on #Startpage come from? There even are two additional "sponsored" entries on the bottom of the page, barely more results than ads. Doesn't get caught by µBlock Origin or another addon either.

Time to move to a better search provider. Probably a self-hosted one.

Like many other technologists, I gave my time and expertise for free to #StackOverflow because the content was licensed CC-BY-SA - meaning that it was a public good. It brought me joy to help people figure out why their #ASR code wasn't working, or assist with a #CUDA bug.

Now that a deal has been struck with #OpenAI to scrape all the questions and answers in Stack Overflow, to train #GenerativeAI models, like #LLMs, without attribution to authors (as required under the CC-BY-SA license under which Stack Overflow content is licensed), to be sold back to us (the SA clause requires derivative works to be shared under the same license), I have issued a Data Deletion request to Stack Overflow to disassociate my username from my Stack Overflow username, and am closing my account, just like I did with Reddit, Inc.

policies.stackoverflow.co/data…

The data I helped create is going to be bundled in an #LLM and sold back to me.

In a single move, Stack Overflow has alienated its community - which is also its main source of competitive advantage, in exchange for token lucre.

Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow's former instantiation, used to fulfill a psychological contract - help others out when you can, for the expectation that others may in turn assist you in the future. Now it's not an exchange, it's #enshittification.

Programmers now join artists and copywriters, whose works have been snaffled up to create #GenAI solutions.

The silver lining I see is that once OpenAI creates LLMs that generate code - like Microsoft has done with Copilot on GitHub - where will they go to get help with the bugs that the generative AI models introduce, particularly, given the recent GitClear report, of the "downward pressure on code quality" caused by these tools?

While this is just one more example of #enshittification, it's also a salient lesson for #DevRel folks - if your community is your source of advantage, don't upset them.

The Man Who Killed #Google #Search.

This guy is taking no prisoners. Even though we all have a good intuitive sense as to why Google has gone to shit, there has been something slippery about it. This article makes it all more concrete.

wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-ki…

#enshittification #SmallWeb #web

The Man Who Killed Google Search

This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem.

^{Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)}

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-ki…
Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.

The Man Who Killed Google Search

This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem.

^{Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)}

#Google is turning #GMail from an Email provider into a website.
No more access via standard email protocols such as #IMAP and #POP

The final stage of #enshittification . Locking the users in.

I wonder how they want to get rid of SMTP as stated in the support posting.
I guess this means outgoing SMTP to forward mail to a real email server.

I guess without relaying I won't ever receive any notifications Google services send to me again as I don't use the Gmail website.
I host my own Email server for many years, thank you.

Timeline for transition

Summer of 2024:

If you (or your users) try to connect to a less secure app for the first time, you will not be able to. This restriction includes third-party apps that still use basic authentication, such as CalDAV, CardDAV, IMAP, SMTP, and POP, to access Gmail, Google Calendar, and Contacts. If you’re not trying to connect for the first time, you will be able to continue using the apps until they’re turned off.
In the Google Admin console, you will not be able to access the turn on and off setting for less secure apps.
Users will not be able to turn IMAP on or off in their Gmail settings.

support.google.com/a/answer/14…

I admit that I feel salty about the word “enshittification” taking off instead of my phrase for the same thing: “user domestication”. I prefer the latter because it emphasizes the gross disrespect so many platforms show their users, and how the lack of autonomy/mobility naturally leads to enshittification.

Any platform able to get away with enshittification will do so when given the incentive. Enshittification emphasizes the process of a platform’s downfall; we should be taking steps to prevent that from happening in the first place by keeping platforms open. Vigilance against enshittification is misplaced when better spent against user domestication.

Originally posted on seirdy.one/notes/2024/01/11/en… (POSSE). #enshittification #UserDomestication

Enshittification and user domestication

I admit that I feel salty about the word “enshittification” taking off instead of my phrase for the same thing: “user domestication”. I prefer the latter

^{Seirdy’s Home}

Youtube's tantrum escalates.

Forced to concede that they cannot outpace ad blocking extensions, parent company Google artificially limits the rate of extension updates in Chrome.

No justification for the user experience is given, and in fact this makes chrome users more vulnerable to attacks injected via ads.

#tech #news #enshittification

arstechnica.com/google/2023/12…

Chrome’s next weapon in the War on Ad Blockers: Slower extension updates

When ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game, make the mouse slower.

^{Ars Technica}

1. Read this:

“Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot.”

github.blog/2023-11-08-univers…

2. Go here:

codeberg.org/

#git #gitHub #codeberg #enshittification #BigTech #cooperative #dev

Universe 2023: Copilot transforms GitHub into the AI-powered developer platform - The GitHub Blog

GitHub is announcing general availability of GitHub Copilot Chat and previews of the new GitHub Copilot Enterprise offering, new AI-powered security features, and the GitHub Copilot Partner Program.

^{Thomas Dohmke (The GitHub Blog)}