Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by plagiarist 148 days ago
Enshittification seems to be accelerating. Humanity will reach an advertising singularity long before a technological singularity.
1 comments

Come on man, putting ads is not enshittification. Haven't you used the Internets 20 years ago? It was a decent way to live for the webmaster in those good old times when most of the traffic was from humans.
My dude adding ads to a free product after locking people into using it for free is LITERALLY the example used by Doctorow in his original article[1] that COINED the term “enshittification”. It couldn’t be more accurate if you tried.

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai

> Come on man, putting ads is not enshittification.

Sure man, until ads became unbearable and intrusive. The good old times are gone. This is the future.

There are a lot of examples of enshittification. Putting advare was never enshittification, no matter how intrusive they are. They are never unbearable. There are a lot of thing tangential to ads which is enshittification, for example dark patterns.

But if the alternative of ads is communism it is not enshittification.