[0x262d]

I'm getting really tired of the enshittification cycle. Learning about android verification and captcha changes recently has been another big frustration point. I moved to android as a more open alternative to apple just a few years ago, and to bitwarden from lastpass around the same time. I would like to just have these infrastructural services work well and quietly without thinking about them for many years. Do I really have to put up with this happening faster and faster for the rest of capitalism? (I think so)

[Barrin92]

>Do I really have to put up with this happening faster and faster for the rest of capitalism? (I think so)

no, if you relax the qualifier "without thinking" slightly and are okay with thinking for a few hours. There's so many off-the-shelf open source solutions now to just throw on a 5 bucks VPS, it costs you less time and money than switching or the premium plan of most of these individual services.

[zeroonetwothree]

Bitwarden hasn’t “enshittified” anything. It’s all entirely speculative

[degamad]

Red flags are always speculative.

The point is that if there are only one or two red flags, you can risk assess them and continue as is if the risk is low. But if there are a large number of red flags, then you need to consider your exit strategy as well.

[jnovek]

I don’t wait for companies to enshittify anymore. When they start making decisions that look like they’re heading in that direction, I start looking for alternatives.

[zzleeper]

Same. Whenever I see a PE acquisition, I immediately shift my purchases (eg namecheap last year)

[overgard]

PE's entire modus operandi is enshittification. If there's no enshittification to be done there would be no point in purchasing the company

[evolve2k]

It has already enshitified. These changes are text book.

- Inclusion and Transparency values made more shitty

- Always free commitment removed. What? It’s right there “always”.

- Shittily hacking old blog post to become nonsensical

- Loss of confidence

- Stalling improvement cycle, no more repairs, just things quietly breaking and going bad.

[mixologic]

yet. The hallmarks of enshittification are there. We've all been through the cycle of "this product is too good to be true, and provides considerably more value than it costs" "Customer Acquisition/Market Capture" phase. And we know what has to come next. They have to make the product profitable, because you cant just burn up VC money forever.

[trinsic2]

Looks pretty bad regardless of speculation. There are enough red flags to warrant actions and to consider this another enshitification.

[smallmancontrov]

Does a bear shit in the woods?

[wafflemaker]

Interesting, where are you from? Where does this proverb come from?

I know this proverb as (translating from Polish): You're asking the boar if he's shitting in the forest.

[chuckadams]

It's an extremely common phrase in the US, along with "Is the Pope Catholic?" Sometimes the two phrases are humorously mixed together.

[alluro2]

I've never heard it mixed (not from US)...

"Is bear a Catholic?" doesn't seem very funny.

But a notion that everyone knows how Pope is regularly shitting in the woods absolutely is :)

[Jailbird]

We say "are bears Catholic?" when in more polite company and we can't get away with asking if the Pope shits in the woods :)

[smallmancontrov]

I don't know if it is exactly the same proverb -- it isn't about objecting to the bear (or boar) shitting in the woods, it is about our ability to infer that the bear shits in the woods even if we have never seen it happen. We know the bear shits, we know the bear lives in the woods, even people who have lived in the city their entire life and have never seen bear shit can infer that the bear shits in the woods.

In context, my intended meaning was that software enshittification works the same way: we don't have to see a particular private equity firm enshittify a particular piece of software to know that they do enshittify software, just as we do not have to see a bear shit in the woods to know that the bear does shit in the woods.

[hobonation]

Vendors doing a rug-pull isn't just capitalism. China is adding DRM to AM radio: old receivers won't work. Heck, Soviet WWII ration cards no longer give turmips.

[pessimizer]

They're not doing it to increase margin. "Enshittification" or "rug-pulls" aren't when things get worse or things change, they're when the conditions that were used to attract an audience are changed in order to extract more margin after that audience is captured.

The larger exampls to compare them to would be "dumping." Dump subsidized, tariff-free corn in Mexico to make it unprofitable to farm corn in Mexico, and after all of the Mexican farmers go bust, buy their land and raise the price of corn to infinity while cheaping out on the quality of seed and handling. Enshittification. Rug-pull.

[throawayonthe]

uh, by DRM you mean Digital Radio Mondiale[0], an open digital radio broadcasting standard? sure analog receivers won't work, but hardly a rugpull lol

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale

[BobbyTables2]

Yeah? That has to be the worst possible acronym for an open thing.