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 2 months ago by sunglocto to c/[email protected]

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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] 20 points 2 months ago (17 children)

I use an ad blocker on my notebook, always have. When I browse on my phone I am often shocked by the amount of ads on websites. I clicked on a link from Lemmy yesterday and the website was 95% ads. It was one sentence of the story followed by one or two large ads, then another sentence of the story and another one or two ads. The whole site was like that. I don't want to read your story that badly. Unfortunately, many of the ads had already impressed by the time I left so the shitty website got their $0.001 of ad revenue from my visit.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (4 children)

When I browse on my phone I am often shocked by the amount of ads on websites.

This is why iPhones are an immediate nonstarter for me. Can't run Firefox with ublock origin on iPhone while you can on Android.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

AdGuard has a good Safari plugin. There’s also stuff like Consent-o-Matic for cookie popups and Amplosion to get rid of AMP pages (if they’re still a thing - completely forgot about them after installing Amplosion).

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