I’m happy to pay the usually modest sum it costs to free an app from ads if it’s useful enough. The Met Office app, for example, is vital for weather. Network Rail, things like that.
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THIS!
Sums up enshittification, perfectly concisely.
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again (pointlessly) … if only that very small open window when micro-payments (nano-payments?) were a real possibility had not passed before anyone did anything about it, there would be a large chunk of unenshittificated internet by now.
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Metcheck.com is ad-free and, IMO, far less likely to encourage you to go out in the wrong coat and experience a disaster than the Met Office.
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And it’s doubly bad when they know they can explicitly state that as their goal: https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/hp-ceo-says-customers-are-a-bad-investment-unless-they-can-be-made-to-buy-companys-drm-ink-cartridges.html
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Boing Boing is the only site that has such a heavy and mis-programmed ad load that it actually crashes my computer. Not just the browser, but the whole computer. I run an ad blocker here just because it’s literally the only way to read the site.
I don’t run the ad blocker everywhere; in fact I leave it off, and only blacklist specific sites. Right now, that list has 4 entries on it, and 2 of those entries are Boing Boing.
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The Met Office app is ad free too, once you’ve spent the £4.99. I find it pretty accurate where I live.
There’s also Accuweather, free on Android.
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Where do you live? It’s comically bad in the north east. I once got so rained on halfway to work, after being promised sunshine all day, I squelched home and took the day off. It was horrible. Then it happened AGAIN 2 days later. I’ve never trusted the Met Office since.
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West Oxfordshire. It’s pretty good round here, perhaps because we are distant from the coast
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Wait… there’s a main page!?! 
So on the whole internet, that’s the only one? Or just the ones that you personally visit? 
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a real problem, I agree. But the reality is that this is the modern internet. As much new adblockers are rolled out, corporations are serving up ways to get around our adblockers. I
As Cory Doctorow has been arguing for a long time, the answer is not to act like an one individual website can fix this problem. The solution is systemic change on how the internet works. That means organizing politically and helping to create alternatives to the corporate shit that has broken the internet, so that far more people can build websites that are larded down with ads.
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Aye, youse get all the fancy weather with the warmness and dryness. They divvint ship none of that weather up this way, like. I blame Thatcher.
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There’s been a lot of flooding round here lately. Luckily I live on top of a hill.
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When I lived in New Zealand, a soon-to-arrive visitor asked about the weather and what to bring. “In New Zealand, it makes perfect sense to leave the house wearing sunglasses and carrying an umbrella”.
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I have ad blockers on 24/7. When a site says they don’t want those, I go to another site with the exact same story. Easy.
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Are wheels the same thing as a car?
Yeah, no. But they are part of the car. And the car does not go anywhere without wheels.
Enshittification is absolutely part and parcel and a result and driver of capitalism. Profit focused business models that demand year over year growth get that money from someplace. Ads, reduced quality, smaller sizes, etc AF.
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As a small and insignificant example, whenever I need help with a quest in a modern video game, I can’t trust a single source I might once have sought out for quick and dirty walkthroughs. Why? Because they’re all written by AI now with almost no human oversight. The guides are riddled with inaccuracies from harvesting large amounts of data from forums, guidebooks, and worst of all, other AI generated guides.
If I have a question about a bugged quest in Baldur’s Gate 3, for instance, I now just automatically search the Larian, Steam, or Reddit forums. There’s no point whatsoever in using something crapped out from a content farm’s algorithm to game the search engine into driving clicks. Because it might literally tell me something completely useless, like to hoard silver because you get a crafting bench at camp in Act 3. Which is not even remotely true.
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Yup, fully agree: this is where oversight is actually needed. Reddit has always been hit-or-miss for me: some absolute gold, but it’s only judgement [1] and experience that allows my eyes to sift out the “plausible but wrong” chaff.
The AI-generated stuff is crap.
[1] something LLMs do not yet have
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I refer you to my earlier comment and suggest that there is not one ‘capitalism’.
Used to be the case that ‘capitalists’ realised the need for some ongoing creativity or added value to thrive and profit over the long term. Today, ‘capitalists’ only perceive a need to extract value as quickly as possible and there is no long term. Enshittification is a result of the second kind.
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Yeah it’s true, despite buying top of the line New Balance runners and just using them for general use what used to last 1 year craps out after 6-8 months. Even my orthotics, my uncle made some for me as a child and they lasted for about twenty years until I lost them. Then when I went to the same family business the new ones only lasted about 3 years before they were shot.
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Not in Wellington, it is Sunglasses and raincoat. Umbrella is useless against the horizonal southerly.
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