I survived 32 years before the World Wide Web was opened to the public. I’ll do just fine now without it. I still have a flip phone around here somewhere. 😉 #enshittification
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
I think this is a big deal, actually. It's these sort of breakthroughs, which are like a sledgehammer smashing the chains of proprietary lock-in (you know, "#enshittification"). Nice to hear of the progress! I hope to eventually see videos breaking down how this is actually useful in the real world! #Google
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 ...
@fresseng @swheritage ah, yeah! It is not that we think Github will dissapear overnight, it is that we are afraid of #enshittification and of their current political situation... It is owned by #microsoft after all.
today is officially *THREE* weeks until the submission deadline for Good Internet magazine!
Good Internet launches in May 2025. it's a volunteer-run, not-for-profit print and digital quarterly magazine for personal website owners and those interested in using the internet as a means of self-expression, art, and recreation.
🔍 we're looking for 1,500-4,000 word articles about anything related to that!
if it relates to hobbies on "this side of the web," whether you call it the #smallweb or indieweb, we probably want to run it!
you can have your article as low-media (meaning only text and images) or interactive, where you code an entire webpage to help tell your story.
if you're interested in learning more, you can sign up for our email list for when we launch or you can check the submission guidelines @ goodinternetmagazine.com!
More "enshittification". This time from Amazon. Amazon is pulling a Google, killing off popular services. Evidently, I have until 25th February to download my 708 books that I have purchased from them. After the 25th you can no longer download YOUR books for backup or transfer via USB
Good job I did this 2 years ago eh? Buy the books from elsewhere.
Someone on #Reddit complained about #BambuLab changing their warranty after they bought something and refusing service based on the new "terms". They used @internetarchive to prove that the change was made.
As expected, #BambuLab released the standard corporate press release
1. All those things we just invented as the criticism we didn't do 2. Sure, you can use "developer mode" and lose our support 3. We tried to work with others, and it's their fault they didn't do it fast enough and by our rules 4. Everyone else is at fault for this misunderstanding though we might have contributed in the slightest of ways 5. "I am sorry that you are upset"
Problem with that is (besides occasional bugfixes), most people including myself would see #curl to be functionally complete and anything "nice to have" would be considered not worth the balooning in #complexity and #size.
I mean, does curlneed to be able to do #BitTorrent (magnet:), #IPFS (ipfs://) or god forbid #blockchain (i.e. #EVM) support?
Do you really want to integrate @torproject / #Tor support natively into curl when using #HTTP (localhost:8118) and #SOCKS5 (localhost:9050) #proxy allows for the same and doesn't necessitate having to handle and ingest Tor arguments as well??
Maybe someone who wants to have said functionality like tor support built-in will go and IDK make i.e. #[url=https://infosec.space/tags/neocurl]neocurl[/url] or sth. along those lines or build something like #[url=https://infosec.space/tags/ethcurl]ethcurl[/url] or #[url=https://infosec.space/tags/tor]tor[/url]curlor #[url=https://infosec.space/tags/ipfs]ipfs[/url]curl or whatever...
That being said I am glad curl isn't solely maintained by you but has other contributors (give them a shoutout!) but I also am glad you maintain that vital software that most "#TechIlliterate #Normies" most likely never heard of but propably use on a daily basis as part of all the #tech they use to #consume media with...
I consider curl to be "the #vim of downloaders" (tho that's kinda insulting and limiting since curl is more than just a downloader and more intuitive than vim) with wget being "the #vi of downloaders" (tho wget is even simpler to use than vi)...
I have certain paths, which are too long to type, so I need to wrap all those in one script as alias and source that script to my existing package code.
These should set alias permanently over that
They cover a lot of really interesting aspects of #ClimateChange, technology and #OpenSource. There are so many good innovators in the clean tech space, yet even with good motives, the incentives can drive towards #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.
(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
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.
"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.
If you're like me and you're trying to keep an open mind that there may someday be a non-scam application of blockchains, you've probably read some articles about "Web3", which promises to re-decentr…
“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
And he even anticipates the cover stories and plausible deniability that we see in the vulnerability and breach reports almost weekly now. He budgeted $1B for his ORCHESTRATION (#enshittification) thought experiment. The US MIC budget for this task is much much higher. @kornel
And force people to use centralized SSL authentication certs and DNS systems. And nag people to death about self-signed certs and cookies. And centralize access to webmail. And #EEE (#enshittify) most popular apps for encrypted communication. Anticipated all this a decade before Docororow coined the word #Enshittification @kornel
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.
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.
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.
See link at end.Welp, the #Enshittification of #Mastodon starts! Why would you appoint board members like this, especially ones that are heavily involved in AI/Blockchain/other monetization things if you don’t plan to monetize/commercialize mastodon? This is why I started seeking other #Fediverse projects that are not soft forks of Mastodon that have a mission of designing for Disabled users. Found some fantastic options so will move after testing. Mastodon forms new U.S. non-profit - Mastodon Blog blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/04/…
As part of our commitment to supporting the growth and operational capabilities of Mastodon, we have established a 501(c)(3) non-profit entity in the United States aimed at facilitating our efforts, including being able to receive tax-deductible U.S.
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.
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.
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.
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.
