askchapo

Don't know if I've mentioned this before, but my favorite part is the language that's used in press releases. ”We're committed to bringing you great content at a great price, and that's why we've re-evaluated our subscription options. Starting on November 1st, the Standard streaming subscription will be phased out in favor of the new Standard With Ads subscription at the same affordable price.”

Capitalists do love to piss on me and tell me it's raining.

It's amazing how much of this is solved with Free Software and piracy.

Tangential, but I had no idea people were still putting vignetting on text posts like it's 2012.

Not only enshittification, few people seem to talk about how everything has a fee. Fee for this. Fee for that. Save your business from having to pay someone to answer the phone to take orders, I pay a convenience fee. Fee to pay bills. Fee to not pay bills.

When I am pained by the flaws and lack of professional opportunities of the FOSS software I use, I remind myself that enshittification is looming for the rest of the world and I regain courage

Eventually it will get so bad that people will start to abandon the old platforms, and when that happens the platforms will run to the government to force people back on. Age verification is one way they're already doing this, small forums can't really keep up with the demands of the regulatory apparatus being forced on them.

I have been thinking about this lately, and I figure if these companies can't figure out how to turn a profit, they'll just shutdown or get bought eventually. Many of them are still riding the VC money parade and have now idea how to actually monetize. It's kinda funny, because many of these sites were fully functional and made at least enough to stay alive when they were simpler websites. When growth overfills the niche, the subject has no choice but to die.

Netflix is so interesting, because they have been so forward thinking for the entire lifetime of the company. I imagine the industry will just keep watching and copying their work, to various levels of success.

The verification can greentext will seem quaint compared to reality

I don't like the complete lack of complaint about em-dollar sign even though they're 100% part of the problem especially with that AI-invested spyware called Windows 11.

It's gonna get all the way bad.

The ssh app I use on my iPad recently updated and there is now a permanent bubble down at the bottom telling me to 'Ask AI to generate a command'. It takes up maybe 1/5 of the screen real estate. I think it's going to take a while before the next thing comes along to really enshitify things the way AI has.

I recently sat through an hour-long webinar (fuck that fucking word) from Intuit on new AI features they're adding to their web-based business and accounting software. It was obvious that they're getting universal unified pushback from accountants and bookkeepers who rightfully don't trust this shit to make proper decisions. Half the presentation was about how humans will always be making final decisions. Reading between the lines, I suspect Intuit has been desperately trying to make an accounting AI as good as a barely-competent human bookkeeper and failing absolutely miserably. The fancy new AI-powered features coming? Here they are in their entirety:

• A popup window when adding a new supplier that scrapes their contact info from their websites so that you don't need to visit their website in a browser and copy/paste the address, phone number, etc.

• Suggesting how to categorize a transaction based on how a transaction involving the same customer or supplier was done prior.

• Using an LLM to draft emails to corporate credit card holders on why a transaction was justified/how it should be categorized.

• A kind of "at a glance" info screen clearly aimed at C-suite types and their VP servants with pretty-but-useless graphs.

So bad until it becomes unusable and everything crashes down. Its the same with climate change.

Please insert dna to continue

Oops sorry we lost your dna. Give us more dna

I was thinking about how they could make the services worse, but so many things already seem to be built with maximum profit incentives in mind. I guess the next step is something to do with AI, like instead of the emoji movie which is basically a one hour and 30 minutes long product placement made for the proles based on the data they collected from us as a collective, they could make like individualized emoji movies for you specifically based on your data that you watch on the bloated streaming service which serves you more ads as you watch the ad and you have to play a minigame to train the AI, every now and then, if you don't pay for the premium+ subscription.

Michael Roberts blog post on the AI bubble is instructive https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2025/10/14/the-ai-bubble-and-the-us-economy/

Hes an openly Marxist economist, not just some guy.

Why should we care?

I honestly believe that history will know us as a people only concerned with our indulgences and digital escapes.

The slop is starting to taste like slop now? Ok. It's getting harder to escape through the mediums you've been accustomed to? Ok. Why should we be allowed to escape anymore?

I don't think any facet of western terror can be separated from our proclivity to hide in its benefits and escape from addressing it.

I think computer chip technology is starting to plateau and with how important we've made computers to everything they're going to enshit and squeeze everything to make more money out of it

Who the fuck added a massive vignette to this fucking meme? Is that supposed to make it more readable?

Eventually people won't take it anymore, but until then it will continue to get worse in new and exciting ways.

Optimistic take (dangerous, I know):

• big tech keeps squeezing the alg and pumping ads, which are already declining in profit due to AI tools
• LLMs have a couple years of life left until people finally see the limitations/understand the way it works. Many will still use them, but I think it's peaking right about now.
• AI/tech bubble pops and increases the pressure of profitability for the surviving companies
• People start getting spent on AI fucking everything as the recognize it's limitations, and as the tech advances enough that it is difficult to tell what is even real.

I think the above ingredients will lead to some substantial "logging off", but also offer a fertile environment for a new underground Internet that has a lot more self-hosting of content. It won't start until Discord peaks and starts to cannibalize its product for profit (coming soon^TM). I am thinking a lot more Lemmy/mastodon type stuff, and probably deeper down than that.

🎶 Ads... I've seen enough 🎵

🎵 Ads... There's far too much 🎶

🎶 Ads... Who buys this stuff? 🎵

🎵 Because I'd rather skip Ads and watch my show is all... (I want) 🎶

:party-sicko: SICK GUITAR DROP :party-sicko: