Most websites have always had incredibly poor search functionality. It’s more complex than people realize and that’s why so many companies started using google search or some paid plugin for their website.
Sure, but we figured out ways to make it work incredibly well, and then decided ads were more important than a functional search engine.
It’s also amazing because Lucene was created over 20 years ago and made available for free. It’s an incredibly powerful full text search algorithm suitable for most website content except the largest scale. Elasticseaech was built on top of it to make it easier to use and is also available for free.
These technologies power Wikipedia’s search, for example, and you know how much content Wikipedia has.
My point is… There are free technologies that make search excellent.
- Thing gets made
- It gains popularity
- Everyone wants to be #1 on the thing, so people begin working hard at “solving” how the thing really works
- People get really really fuckin good at “solving” the thing now. Learning how to utilize the thing and get in even the top 25% now requires months of learning and understanding.
- People literally are writing papers, documentation, guides, books, you name it on how to min max the thing. Getting into the top 10% requires years of knowledge and skill.
- This one is optional. If utilizing the thing is remotely profitable, it becomes P2W. People make the thing their whole career. Companies pour billions of dollars into the thing. Normies are gated off and resign themselves to the bottom of the barrel.
The downside to humans being so fuckin good at min maxing shit, and is being infinitely curious, and our brains are hard wired to shit out dopamine whenever we progress at something, is nothing is sacred
You name it, some random fucker has min maxed it competitively into a career somewhere.
Recently listened to a podcast going into how platforms get worse with age/similar issues that the folks here might enjoy.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/90401267?utm_campaign=postshare_fan
Enshittification:
A meaningless buzzword used by nostalgia blinded thirty year olds.
Nobody likes a contrarian with no further contribution.
And yet here you are.
I understand the fatigue of the buzzword especially as people use more as a general critique of capitalism. But it is a very real phenomenon. Subscription costs go up, functionality gets worse, and usability takes a back seat as competition decreases
Part of that is the trade-off that society accepted for a long time by using the popular services for free or at a steep discount. The end result of a free lunch is always “enshittification”.
On the opposite side of it, we are all here because there is competition; the fediverse. Everyone I know are tired of big tech/social media and are deleting their accounts. The old web is shrinking. Eventually the fediverse will grow to take its place. We are already seeing it happen for tech users, it will happen for normal users eventually
You hit the nail on the head with why I hate the term. It’s meaningless
It’s always used to describe the “old” when a new thing shows up. Regardless of the history of the “old”
Part of that is the trade-off that society accepted for a long time by using the popular services for free or at a steep discount. The end result of a free lunch is always “enshittification”.
On the opposite side of it, we are all here because there is competition; the fediverse. Everyone I know are tired of big tech/social media and are deleting their accounts. The old web is shrinking. Eventually the fediverse will grow to take its place. We are already seeing it happen for tech users, it will happen for normal users eventually
These statements contradict each other.
I’m glad we are on the same page as far as “enshittification” goes l. Although I’m curious what you think is the contradiction between my last two paragraphs are. I did say that mainstream social media has become enshittified because of competition decreasing, and then said that the fediverse was competition.
But I was hoping that would be understood as the competition between the for profit platforms. As X/Twitter or Facebook gained critical mass and its competitors like Google+/Myspace/LiveJournal/tumblr went away or greatly were diminished then it had to start making a profit and the profit was everything people complain about when they say it’s enshittified.
Mastadon/Firefish/Fediverse-at-large won’t be enshittified because they aren’t free as in free lunch. If the fediverse reaches critical mass, there is no profit motive because the costs are distributed and users either contribute or mooch. Instance admins can project their costs and open/close signups accordingly.
If I didn’t see the term enshittification being used to describe Lemmy after the Reddit fiasco then your last point would convince me.
Because it’s always users of the enshittified product that use the term whenever any change occurs. I remember when YouTube allowed for longer videos that was derided. Wasn’t described as enshittification, we didn’t need to make up words back then to seem smart.
It will make sense once you’ve gained a bit of world experience.
I like how you just admitted to being a nostalgia blinded 30 years old. But not only that, you assume everyone else is the same type of miserable bastard.
Excuse me, this has nothing to do with nostalgia.
It is more to do with, I knew how things worked, they changed how things work, and now I have no fucking clue how things work.
So… Nostalgia? Or just getting old and wanting the past back. Which is called nostalgia.
Or Disney’s entire marketing strategy for the last decade
TROLL, TROLL IN THE COMMENTS
