End of an era. Used to use Hobbes all the time.
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Users took the opportunity to share their own IT travels involving the operating system, with many noting that OS/2 represented a gateway into the Linux world. ®
Brian, are you moonlighting at El Reg?
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Great article. If I may add to,
…when you are inside of it you are surrounded on pretty much all sides by garish product packaging, promotional displays, and Mega Bargain Discount Sale signage.
…they also never fail to interrupt a favorite song (i.e., my only solace in this hell) to pump yet more advertising directly into my brain (no way to avert my gaze). In the grocery store, the messaging sometimes just boils down to “we’re so great, we love serving you!” 
How the internet reshaped itself around Google’s search algorithms — and into a world where websites look the same.
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perfected the web
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Google did perfect the web. Just for themselves, not people.
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I used to lift weights, but the end of grad school and then the pandemic pushed it out of my schedule. I’m getting back to it now, so I want to make sure I have enough protein in my diet. Macro tracker apps were a good way to do that.
Except that while I’ve been away, they’ve all gone to shit.
I’m not paying $80 a year for basic functionality that used to be a free part of the app. The app isn’t doing anything a paper notebook wouldn’t do just as well, and I can buy a lot of notebooks for $80.
I think where these subscriptions rub me the wrong way is two-fold. First, making it worse and then having the gall to charge to fix it is an insulting level of rent-seeking, and second, it’s not what a subscription is for.
I have a subscription to a magazine. I get a new magazine, with new articles, every month. My collection grows, and becomes a useful reference. I keep paying, but I also keep getting more. With apps, it isn’t a subscription, it’s just a “don’t be shitty garbage” fee. I keep paying, but I don’t get more, I get a barely worthwhile app, and sometimes it gets worse.
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I’m torn on software service subscriptions. On the one hand, someone has to pay the bills for the computers, electricity, staff who does security and updates to keep it safe, etc. Selling an app gives them a one-time injection of some trivial amount, but not enough to keep the lights on indefinitely. And most apps never see the volume of new users needed for sales to keep the systems running forever.
Developers know this, so once the app is released and starts becoming popular they scramble for ways to monetize it. And the pressure is really on to produce money if you took venture capital. Typical revenue streams are to shove ads into it, or to sell your data to data brokers. We see this as a classic first warning sign of enshittification.
A less bad (in my opinion) way is to charge subscription fees for access to premium content. Leave the free tier alone, but charge for features needed by businesses or higher-end users. But in most cases it would be less disappointing to start with paid subscriptions than to try to add them later.
There is another revenue stream: ask for donations. This seems to work for open source projects, where people who are able to pay some amount do so. Now, nobody expects to get wealthy from these kinds of projects, but it’s nice to think that the app developers aren’t going broke. And nobody thinks poorly of an app that is voluntarily funded. (Unless you’re the CEO of Mozilla and are taking home $7m annually.)
But the best approach? Sell an app, not a cloud service. You don’t need money to pay for a cloud if there’s no cloud. Many users don’t want clouds at all. And most apps don’t need them.
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I had an interesting moment with a sprog the other day. He had Googled for material for his physics assignment and come up empty handed. I used Duck Duck Go and got far more relevant material on the first try. As much as I love lifting the veil for my kids and showing them the crappiness of the current internet, I wish I didn’t have to do it so often.
I’ll use Google Scholar, mostly out of a lack of alternatives.
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Roku is providing exactly what no one asked for: more ads – including interactive ads – on the home screen.
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I’ve probably been turned on to more new music by Pitchfork than just about everything else put together. So of course Conde Nasty have decided to fuck it up.
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Later in the interview, he added: “Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.”
I guess I’ll improve their investment portfolio by buying a printer from someone else.
Current HP motto: ”The customer is always right milked bled dry.”
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Never buy devices that depend on a company mothership to work. There are only two outcomes: They continually maximize profits while holding users hostage, or they pull the plug and turn your purchase into landfill.
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I posted about this elsewhere, but I forgot this thread existed. The American Dialect Society selected enshittification as their 2023 word of the year.
https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/
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