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.
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.
I just pay the 52$ once a year and know I’ve done my part for knowledge.
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-fundraisingIt’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.
You 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.
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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.
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.
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.
Isn’t Nebular 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.
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.
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.
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)
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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)
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.
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.
The Pirate Bay
That’s plain wrong that site is littered with viruses and ads these days. 1337x is much better.
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.
PiHole
Not an overly surprising one, but the arch wiki has been an incredible source of info with no ads, tracking, or any of the modern web bullshit for as long as I’ve used it.
They’ve been hit with some pretty major DDOS attacks recently and they’ve done a really good job of keeping the important parts of the service as accessible as possible - they haven’t resorted to buying into cloudflare’s monopoly or blocking vpn users despite either or both being the easy way out.
For anyone else who’s relied on them as much as I have, now would be a great time to donate!
I’ve never used Arch yet still use their wiki quite a lot.
For real. The number of times I’ve been working problems on a Raspberry Pi and my searching ends up there is wild.
- Dropout.tv
- Davinci resolve
- Obsidian
- Jellyfin
- Airgradient air quality monitor
+1 davinci… it’s incredible what you get in the free version, and the studio version is getting more and more worth the money in a value add way rather than a need it way
Dropout is pretty good. I don’t think they’ve really been around enough to enshitify yet though. They’re on big up-swing. During that time they’ve been cheap, audience-focused, and fair to their cast and crew. They’ve already raised the price at least once. If they get some loans/investors involved or have a bad year, I could easily see them becoming more like other streaming services. I hope I’m wrong.
True, it’s likely too early to tell. I think I just inadvertently compare them to all the other streaming services right now. As for the price increase, that’s only for new subscribers- existing subscribers are grandfathered in at the previous price.
Which reminds me, I’ve had a few dropout shows on my jellyfin for a while but really need to drop a sub to support. They do great stuff
I swear, I feel like I’ve watched (or have shown off to people unfamiliar with dropout) A Game Most Changed like 5 times.
Or if they’re straight, Sam Says. Lol
Craigslist
Hasn’t changed much at all, and their app is exactly what it needs to be, nothing more–i think the only thing I wasn’t able to do in the app was clear a saved search, but there’s no bloat, no ads, don’t need an account unless you’re posting or saving searches.
The site still looks like it came right out of the late 90’s and that’s all it needs to be
My local ISP. They are not a monopoly, they are local only, they provide fiber and great customer service. You call and they answer instantly, they don’t treat you like an idiot when you call. They don’t restrict anything and you have unlimited data. It’s very simple.
Last month T-mobile bought them after years of great service so I expect the enshittification to come any day now, but so far nothing has changed.
I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone who loves their ISP since the early days of transitioning from 56K modems.
It’s increasingly rare.
