We all know the struggle of beloved services slowly going downhill. What’s one service, tool, or website you’ve been using for years that’s still great and hasn’t turned to crap?
Wikipedia.
Dreamwidth.
Wikipedia.
Though I could do without the endless donation blockups.
I can forgive Wikipedia and Internet Archive for the spam. Both sites are incredibly valuable and completely ad-free.
They are one of the highest achievements of humanity, imho, that even make me feel proud to be a human.
It’s hard not to try to support them.
The “spam” is for them to operate, not maximise their profits.It’s not that simple and transparent actually. Wikipedia doesn’t really need those donations to operate. They have money reserves for many years of expenses. I don’t have a great source right now but this article looks decent. I didn’t read the whole thing though.
Gotcha, it’s another anti-European (and anti-USA), anti-male, quasi-Marxist organization. This is what your donations to Wikipedia are going to. Wikipedia spends more money on left-wing causes than actually running an encyclopedia, and by a very long-shot.
Well shit, I guess I’ll start donating
I see nothing wrong with that.
I just think it’s fair to say the way they ask for donations is at least a little bit disingenuous.
yeah agreed
I came here to say both of those things about the Internet Archive, but I also hope both of those orgs get tons of donations regularly because I wouldn’t want to live in a world without them
I just pay the 52$ once a year and know I’ve done my part for knowledge.
You know what?
I’m gonna start doing that.
It’s not just the spam, there is other enshittification like the endless co-option with AI companies and private info disclosure (aka surveillance capitalism) under the self-serving excuse of being anonymized or aggregated.
Just found these custom ad block filters. Seems to be working so far
wikipedia.org##.nag-trigger wikipedia.org###centralNotice wikipedia.org##[id$=“banner-nag”] wikipedia.org###frb-inline wikipedia.org##.cn-fundraisingYou can login and it’ll stop with the pop ups for a year.
Linux
It just keeps getting better and more polished.
I think Linux enshitifcation will happen when Linus Torvalds is no longer the benevolent dictator. I assume bigtech would add more DRM crap for more usecases etc, regular (unintentional) userspace breaking for desktop users since development would be focused for server/cloud computing etc.
Well thankfully FOSS allows anyone to fork anything, so I imagine there will always be decent distros out there.
There’s still danger here. While anyone can fork, it’s painful and work-intensive. A well-funded actor could fork something useful, add a bunch of features the community wants, and do a shitty job of committing back. Once most of the community stops using the old stuff and the devs go back to their lives, we can lose control of useful stuff.
Stuff like when Signal enshittifies. It has enough inertia and spin up cost that the forks barely see any traffic.
The community is already full of so many people who would be willing to make actual, privacy-based distros and prorgrams.
FOSS exists because there are so many creative people who just want to make this shit for fun and the fuck of it. And I think most of them are not fascists.
Torvolds doesn’t make distros. The work that he’s doing isn’t highly creative. It’s boring pain and no one else really wants to take on. He doesn’t have a lot of competition, and hopefully, when he moves on, that vacuum gets another dedicated masochist and doesn’t just usher in a bunch of people bickering and at each other’s throats.
We need to protect Linus at all costs.
we also need a worthy successor lined up
I think Linux enshitifcation will happen when Linus Torvalds is no longer the benevolent dictator.
I hope not. Linus surrounds himself with good people (like Greg Kroah-Hartman) who will take over the reigns and most likely continue the legacy in his name.
Linux and the ecosystem are freaking amazing
Voicemeeter
Overwolf
Reaper
VLC
PCPartpicker
Ninite
There’s probably some others I’m missing.
YES to Reaper. No surprise that the original developer of Winamp makes an amazing DAW.
Doesnt overwolf rely on ads?
Isn’t Overwolf’s business model literally monetizing and profiting from modding communities? Curseforge and Overwolf are the epitome of enshittification.
Yeah… over wolf was enshittified from the start lol
At least to me, Overwolf is the third or fourth iteration, following acquisitions, buyouts, restructurings, etc. The original FTB launcher worked perfectly fine. It’s mostly just obnoxious now and I make sure not to have it running in the background. No direct rent-seeking behavior just yet, I don’t have an account on there and it’s not a problem.
Right now I have it on my computer just use it to update packs that are only available there and then yoink them straight into MultiMC.
AFAIK it is owned by Curse and I guess those guys make most of their money from those godawful wikis and their ads.
I thought I’d check this before posting it, and it turns out it’s the other way around. Overwolf bought Curse. Worse, Overwolf is a company based out of Tal Abib… that’s two discoveries in one day. I was looking into getting a CaribouMini until I learned where that comes from. Less than two hundred kilometers away from me as the
missilecrow flies (and sadly, has flown). Great. Fucking great.The shitty thing is that a lot of cool pack creators only publish through Overwolf, so I don’t want to delete it just yet, but I don’t like this at all. At best a minor security risk, at worst I don’t even want to know. I just thought it was just some shitty ad company’s Curse buyout as a billboard for more ads. For all the issues I might have with Nexus Mods, I don’t think they’re quite this bad. Concerning that this is the de facto standard repository of MC mods.
I’m ok with things relying on ads to make a product free. Someone has to pay for a product or service, if I don’t want to pay for it, then show me an ad and let someone else pay for it. The thing that overwolf and more specifically curseforge do that keeps them out of the enshitification category for me is they simplify modding of games.
I’ve been around since the early days of video game modding and know how hard it used to be. They have streamlined it to the point that if someone has created a mod it is a simple button click to download, and install, and then keep the mod up to date. You can even create and share collections of mods and mod packs. And if a modder has added a donate button, it’s a single click to donate to the modder. It’s everything I want out of the modding community with none of the headache, and it’s been like that for years.
I recently bought a replacement PC for my dad because of windows 11 (though his old computer was also over 10 years old so it was a somewhat fair upgrade, anyhow). Someone suggested I use Ninite to quickly bootstrap a lot of the programs he’d use and I was honestly surprised. It was genuinely no-nonsense and got the job done. A rare nice thing in Windows…
There is also WinGet.
Sure, I’ll add to that.
- Audacity
- Inkscape
- Notepad++
- DaVinci Resolve
- QBittorrent
- YouTube to mpe 3 convert (the command line one - can’t remember the actual name rn)
Is QR bittorent different from qbittorrent or was that a typo?
Typo. My bad!
Tenacity as the most successful Audacity fork after their Telemetry debacle.
Feel like overwolf was out of the gate pre-enshittyfied
Avoided it like the plague
Steam
This! Steam is the only proprietary program I use on my Linux machines that I’m actually happy with and don’t want to get rid of
yeah I just hope they can stay this good. I like them but am always thinking about when I have to ditch it when they get some fool at the helm.
I may need a plan if the Australian government bans me from having an account with Steam without giving them my ID because it’s “social media” (this isn’t confirmed, the brain fart has been carelessly thrown into the world by the national e-Karen, Steam might be exempt).
Their size & net worth vs enshitification levels are suspiciously high!!
Gabe & co better not die out before they turn it/some parent company into a nonprofit.
I think there are three reasons for this:
- Steam is not freemium. It’s built on paying customers rather than advertisers.
- PC games, unlike TV shows and console games, don’t end up platform exclusives (and because games storefronts aren’t a subscription, there’s no reason for them to be). There are console exclusives but exclusivity has never really made sense for PC games. And without exclusivity there’s genuine competition (even if none succeed at dethroning Steam)
- Valve is a private company owned by Gabe Newell, instead of a for-profit. Shareholders are short-sighted.
That second point got me thinking about Nebula (the streaming service). I don’t believe it’ll be enshittification even though it has exclusives. I wonder why that is.
Isn’t Nebula owned/ran by content creators? Or have I misunderstood what that service is entirely?
It is. And I guess that’s probably enough.
Nebula exclusives make sense and are being employed. Nebula technically has a monopoly on that content and that’s why I was confused about why I wasn’t worried about Nebula enshittifying. I guess Youtube-adjacent content is mostly interchangable so missing out on exclusive content isn’t on the same level as missing out on a cultural touchstone TV show.
Also Nebula just isn’t big enough to enshittify. It needs a far larger market share first.
Idk, plenty of companies that tick all three boxes and are not like this at all.
A single owner vs a company without a principal shareholder & how they threat humans is just a gamble.Overall it does have to do with ownership & how the company culture was built tho - in Valve there are like 20 people running a billon monies company. They all have enough, and are happy.
Oh, and Valve it’s def a “for profit” c company, being an actual non-profit is a completely different thing.
A for-profit company is a very specific thing. It means a company that’s required, by law, to put profit above everything else. Valve may be a for-profit company but as far as I know it isn’t.
Local library
i been to some that don’t have books
Those are called blockbusters and have been gone for some time.
Plz, bro.
Where can I haz shares?
Need lambo.
- VLC
- Winamp
- Audacity
- 7Zip
- Openoffice
- Steam
- Firefox
- Wikipedia
- Duckduckgo (the search engine)
Most of those are programs rather than services.
That’s kind of telling in itself to be honest. Services for most people these days mean subscription (or some kind of recurring cost). The nature of the overwhelming majority of businesses means they will be looking to increase profits. One extremely common way is to degrade the service you provide slightly. Increasing ads, lowering quality, etc.
One of the only exceptions I would say is Steam. But people could argue that Steam isn’t a true service because it’s closer to a store front, at that point you’re arguing semantics though.
There’s also self hosting a service to consider? How would that count in this instance. I self host a few things like nextcloud, Plex, and others. Yes it’s still a program and technically a service as well?
If you’re self hosting Nextcloud, you don’t have to worry about the server operator (i.e. you) enshittifying it against you. There is still some concern towards the software supplier, as we keep seeing with Firefox, but users can react to that.
I’m not really familiar with the situation around Plex since I’ve heard some mixed things, but I don’t use it and have lost track of what is what.
I would consider Firefox to be a bad actor but it’s a bit more nuance than the situation with, say, Chrome. Firefox is involved in the server side as well (i.e. evolving standards that enshittify the web more and more). I would like to have had the web standards frozen some years ago. BIFL should apply to software as well as to physical products.
Open Office? It hasn’t been touched in a decade. LibreOffice is the true continuation of Open Office, which was forked off after Oracle bought Sun and OO had been left with poor governance and slow updates.
Open Office finally ended up under the Apache foundation but hasn’t been maintained since 2014.
LibreOffice has had continual development with both bug fixes and new features, and the Open Document Foundation gives it good governance and independence as an open source project…
Honestly, switch to Libre Office.
Thanks for the heads-up. Got both on my pc but i instinctively open up OO when i need to do writing. Will give Libre another chance now :)
honestly I assume when someone says open office they mean libre office.
I’ve tried so many times to switch to LibreOffice, but as far as I can tell it’s just not made for novelists. It regularly shits itself when dealing with a 300k manuscript that Word has never given me problems with.
I genuinely tried using it for a full year, using it on Linux even, to see if it was just me being cranky about changes to my writing routine…and maybe it’s still just me, but I eventually went back to Windows and my old copy of Microsoft Word 2010.
As far as I can tell, using Libre Office (or Open Office) as an actual writer seems to be a niche enough use case that developers don’t fix some of the issues that crop up that are specific to the needs of a novelist. It also gets laggy and unreliable for long word counts.
But if you need to make a basic sign to be printed out, or letters, or use it for short things like so many people use Word for in an office setting, it probably is ok.
I just had trouble with it behaving poorly with my long-format works in ways that MS Word never crapped out on me for.
You’re still using Winamp?
Which version? I never really moved on to Winamp 3 (migrated to foobar back then), has it evolved further from that? Does it run on Linux?
I still sometimes miss my Winamp 2 days with a Calvin & Hobbes skin and spending hours with its visualization features as a young teenager.
WACUP is the nice new alternative unless you want WinXP support retained
on linux i use audacious, works well
On Linux I have found my audio player of choice (Sayonara Player), I’m specifically asking for Winamp because I have nostalgia for it; and because I don’t know any player that has its extensive visualization features.
i see. in that case wacup on wine would do the job. (it’s basically a slow wip winamp reverse engineering job, based on the last aol version and slowly replacing parts of it with updated/reimplemented stuff)
Yes forgot about it for some time when i saw someone still using it. Will tell you which version and if it works on Linux as soon as i’m done setting up Bazzite. Yeah the skins where a blast back in the days, nowadays i’m only using the vanilla one :)
WinAmp is long gone, no? Audacious is the closest looking replacement. I’m sure it’s what you probably meant? maybe? lol.
Still working on win10, didn’t set up Linux fully yet, still dual-booting but i’ll give updates when i figured everything out.
7zip and VLC.
Actual paid services? Basically only Steam.
FOSS is the only software you can count on to not start nickel and diming you once the subscriber count starts to level out.
Steam
30% markup. Predatory currency conversion policies. Recent scandals with Steam censoring games on behest of Australian Right nuts groups.
You missed 3 times in a row.
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The 30% cut thing has been industry standard since the dawn of time. Valve goes out of its way to make exceptions to this rule down to 10% in cases of very high volume but everyone only talks about the 30 since thats all they hear about. Only an Epic Games apologist would parrot this as a talking point. Plus, developers are not getting nothing for that 30%, especially games that use Valve’s Steam networking services. Unlike Microsoft and Sony who also take 30% cuts, Valve doesn’t charge $10,000 per game patch to have someone review and approve it to be published.
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The regional pricing goes both ways. There was literally a game recently users were complaining about NOT getting it because the publisher opted out or something, where the regional pricing would have made the game affordable but in USD (Valves country of origin and therefore default), it was exhorbitantly priced. And this one wasn’t even Valve’s fault.
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Valve did not censor games directly on behest of the Australian nutjobs, they fought back against them pretty hard, but Valve is ultimately beholden to the payment processors (who they also pushed back on). Once Visa and MasterCard started threatening to pull services, Valve was put in a “comply or die” situation. If they didn’t do as they were told they wouldn’t be able to accept money with anything but Stripe or Bitcoin. They literally lost Paypal as a payment option over this fight.
I think its very dishonest of you to frame these points as enshittification. This term means the intentional degradation of a product or service for the sole motive of increasing profits. For point 1, the whole industry literally started off like that. For point 2, it was literally an attempt at equity (valve may not get the deltas correct but in some countries they’re losing money on games). And for point 3, you might be able to argue it but ultimately it wasn’t for profits so much as it was survival.
If you wanted to shitsling at Valve, you should have mentioned how Valve invented lootboxes in TF2 and then exacerbated the issue in CS:GO/CS2, releasing that awful plague onto the industry.
Only an Epic Games apologist would parrot this as a talking point.
Why are you trying to offend me? I didn’t call you names, why are you doing that?
but ultimately it wasn’t for profits so much as it was survival.
Visa and Mastercard aren’t the only available payment options in Steam. Yielding to them was for profit.
Survival? Steam has enough profit to create it’s own payment processor and make it popular.
He didn’t. He said people who parrot it are.
Unless you do, there is no reason to be offended. Up to you.And no; realistically, if you lose Visa and Mastercard, you can close shop. Obviously it’s for profit, because a 99% reduction in turnover means all employees out of work.
Yes, I took that number out of thin air, but I know most people would never bother as that is what they have.
Maybe it’s different in your country.Me:
30% markup
Them:
everyone only talks about the 30 since thats all they hear about. Only an Epic Games apologist would parrot this as a talking point
You:
He didn’t. He said people who parrot it are [Epic Games apologist]
Confused noises.
Semperverus said anyone who says that 30% is too much is an Epic Game apologists, whatever that is.
Semperverus is insinuating anyone who says that 30% is amount taken by Steam is wrong, and saying that is parroting, and should be instead thought as “Poor Steam is forced to take 30% because this is industry standard”, but Valve, and I quote here, “goes out of its way to make exceptions to this rule”.
And no; realistically, if you lose Visa and Mastercard, you can close shop. Obviously it’s for profit, because a 99% reduction in turnover means all employees out of work.
Doesn’t change the fact that bending over backwards for Visa and Mastercard and banning some content because of their whims is enshittification. The service is worse than it was before, in the name of profit.
No, again, he said anyone that parrots it. If you keep repeating that argument over and over, then your are parroting it. That’s what parrots do; they repeat stuff.
If you are offended, then it’s time for some self reflection. That is not an ad-hominem, but a blanket statement and opinion.And no, you’re being selective with the truth. You cherry pick bits of what he said to present your argument in a better light. I don’t entertain that, my friend.
Your last point is true, but again you are being selective with how you present it.
If I point a gun at you and say you die unless you do something against your personal morality, you’d most likely still do it. That is in the name of survival.
Yeah, you’ll be able to go to work tomorrow and make money because you’re not dead, but nobody can accuse you of doing it for profit. That is what you are in essence doing here and it’s a bad take in every possible way except morally.
Steam fought back and lost. They could morally tell Visa and MasterCard to pound sand and die with their heads held high, but I’m guessing they like you as my potential murder victim above, chose to keep existing instead.
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Signal is good so far. Firefox is teetering on the edge, but it’s also good so far (poor little fox). Lemmy and Mastodon are both great, but maybe that’s EZ mode because they’re built as alternatives to proprietary social media sites.
I pay for ArsTechnica and I feel that I get a lot of value out of doing so. And keep in mind, being a paying subscriber of a service does not safeguard the service from enshittification, so that’s quite great
Firefox is teetering on the edge
Get LibreWolf . They take FF builds and rip out the telemetry/ads/AI/enshit.
It’s… beautifulSome people miss this but Librewolf uses most of the code from Firefox…so its still VERY dependent upon Firefox developers/services to do its thing. Its still better, but if Firefox suffers, then Librewolf does too.
Theres an excellent graphic here: https://codeberg.org/librewolf/source
I used to compile and contribute a long time ago. Its pretty easy to get it working and make adjustments…when you know what Firefox does in the background.
I used to compile and contribute
Thank you for your past service o7
(I want to normalize open source contributors getting the same kind of recognition for providing a Public Good that we currently give to teachers, de-escalatory police, and following-legal-orders military)
It’s… beautiful
Until sites don’t work because they block too much.
I’ve settled on Waterfox.
Linux has become better and better and now its incredibly good, better then windows and mac OS if you just spend a few weeks learning the small differences.
Yeah I have to say I should have moved over earlier but it is literally better. Like osx initially was massive as its unix base gave it a great gui with unix terminal power but linux now blows that away (and apple enshitified since but even comparing to its heyday)
Removed by mod
My regular open source tools:
- Inkscape
- GIMP
- OpenShot
- Synfig
- Firefox/derivatives (currently using Waterfox)
- Terminal emulators
- OpenSCAD
I love OpenSCAD and also realize it is a super backward way to make 3D models, according to most other people. I don’t bother even mentioning OpenScad as an option for most people, I know it is only for certain people.
I tried my hand at modeling and designing using more traditional CAD programs that work more visually. I have good spatial reasoning and visualization abilities but I could never get the breakthrough to a point where I felt literate in those tools.
Constructive Solid Geometry approaches just work for my brain. Now when I need a part designed, I can quickly sketch it out in rough code and I feel confident seeing myself as a ‘designer’ now. Other more ‘visual’ tools waste my time as I get sucked into finger painting instead of working out the fundamentals of the design.
With the code-first framework, I have to really think about what the part needs to do before I tweak the code.
I’ve worked with 2D CAD programs like Autocad for years, I enjoy working with them. Once I tried 3D modeling, I found the experience frustrating–half of my time was spent typing in parameters anyways. I’m sure with enough practice I could get familiar with it, but modeling 3D shapes with a 2D tool just seems like a losing battle.
There are times when the sculpting ability would be nice, but it doesn’t come up that often for me. When I need more complex shapes, I’ll use Inkscape to make a 2D profile and import it into OpenSCAD. So far it’s been working well for me.
I do like Inkscape a lot, but GIMP simply isn’t a viable alternative for photoshop for most users. The interface is horrid and the capabilities are limited. Adobe knew what they were doing with their strategic buyouts of developers.
There are definitely some things PS can do that GIMP can’t, but I’d argue it’s fine for anyone who isn’t coming from Photoshop expecting all those features. I’ve only ever used GIMP, so it seems great to me.
Someone on the fediverse awhile back had mentioned with the right plugins its much better. https://gimp.cc/plugins.html they even had something that makes the interface more like ps. Not sure what all they were though.
GIMP is SO much better than it used to be, too!
Kiseido Go Server (KGS)
If KGS’s UI looks like it hasn’t been updated in 20 years, that’s because it’s already perfect. There’s no ads, it’s purely functional, it does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. If you click on “KGS Plus” you have the option to spend money on lectures given by human pros. Otherwise it’s completely free, and it’s still an active go server that’s been around forever.
Is that where Sai played the Meijin
Based on time of the anime’s development, and of course the fact that it is japanese, more likely IGS was the thought process at that time. KGS was the standard in america… but not the primary choice for China/Japan.
The Pirate Bay
That’s plain wrong that site is littered with viruses and ads these days. 1337x is much better.
Also snowfl and eztvx haven’t let me down yet
Is it? I use https://piratebayproxy.info/ these days, as well as uBlock on “medium mode” so maybe I just don’t see any of it.
It’s littered with uploads which are plain viruses and other garbage. And lacking many things I searched. I found 1337x much better. Rarbg too but I think that was taken down.
