Enshittification

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What is enshittification?

The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source

The lifecycle of Big Internet

We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.

Embrace, extend and extinguish

We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.

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The Internet is becoming genuinely unusable without an ad blocker (self.enshittification)

submitted 6 months ago by sunglocto to c/[email protected]

124 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I don't know if it's just me, but browsing virtually any mainstream website without an ad blocker or with alternative frontends is becoming harder and harder to justify. It's getting to the point where adblocking isn't an optional luxury - it's a requirement to effectively get basic information about things.

Yesterday, I was trying to search some information about Ghouls from Fallout. This lead me to this Fandom wiki page which had ads on almost every corner of the website, autoplaying video in the corner, asking for my age as soon as I clicked on the site, injecting polls and random unrelated videos into the communty wiki content and being incredibly slow to browse. A query that in the past that took 5 seconds now takes 50, for what? Money?

I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Why do you not adblock on your phone?

AdAway is good and has both root and non-root modes

[–] solarvector 18 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Firefox now supports uBlock Origin on mobile too

No solution for Apple I'm aware of though, since it's forced to be a shitty reskin of Safari

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

iPhones have had AdGuard for years and it works on apps outside the web browser as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Plus you can configure to default to reader mode. Generally no ads, no stupid formatting, just what you want to read!

Unfortunately that’s why so many sites have their “click to continue” button, so I don’t see the full article unless I click to hide reader mode

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

And has for a few years now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Yea, but doing it at the system level is WAY better. I'm always rooted, so I can't speak for how well it works on non-root phones. But my phone is like 99% ad-free even across apps, the Google news feed and browsers incl Chrome

Between that on my phone, network level ad blocking, and ad blocker browsing extensions I can go days or even weeks without seeing an ad. And when I do, it's usually because it was on a TV at a store or something and rarely the odd ad that somehow leaked through

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Thank you! Had no idea this existed. Just downloaded and donated so you just helped the dev!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

The last time I looked there wasn't anything worth running on my Pixel. I haven't looked since.