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] 24 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (13 children)

Let me just step back here, away from the fact that they’re obtrusive, annoying, and waste your time you didn’t sign away.

Malvertising is a serious risk these days. Every week we see new malware kits, phishing and increasing complexity. Now, Google’s search algo source code has been leaked. You can bet your shiny ass that the attacks will get more dangerous and even harder to discern.

Block the fuck out of ads, JavaScript, frames, xhr. Use a secure browser that doesn’t have ad revenue at their forefront and use hardened configs where possible.

This isn’t tin foil hat, and it’s not hard. Plenty of people out here want you safe and for corpos to eat shit.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (11 children)

I can attest to this. I'm a security analyst / incident responder for a large organization. 9 out of 10 times we get a "malware domain" hit on our network sensors, it's due to malware being pushed in ads. It's real and it's dangerous. Our entire organization runs adblockers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It’s gotten worse I feel like, I had a post in infosec somewhere talking about how hovering over google sponsored results don’t even show the first level url - they resolve them

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Using a DNS for blocking some ads I've noticed often the first couple links on Google are unusable, literally won't pass me through lol

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

Yeeeeah, I find dns is hit or miss - so easy to stand up a new one or use an open resolver to skip around

Ultimately it’s up to preference but I find blocking at the browser level to be most effective

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