DuckDuckGo is experiencing an “outage” and searches are not rendered; YET, somehow if i turned on "AI Features", it might.
more like FuckFuckNO, amirite?
enshittification
By taking my photo in any context, at any time, you implicitly agree to the terms of this contract: You are disallowed, forever and without exception, from sharing anything containing my image or likeness with any product or service offered by Meta, or with any company that uses the image or likeness of me to train, model, or otherwise support any image capture, generation, facial recognition, AI, or yet to be invented technology. The terms of this agreement are irrevocable in the absence of explicit, written consent signed by my hand using ink and paper.
#enshittification #meta #facialrecognition #AI #generativeAI
Edited 1y ago
Ugh.
I get why two-factor authentication is important, but holy hell.
There are SO MANY services that I seldom use (mainly for work) that force me to re-authenticate EVERY TIME I USE THEM because it's passed some threshold of time since the last usage.
And why bother adding a "trust this browser" or "don't show this again" checkbox when you're obviously going to ignore it and ask again next time anyway?
Dear @timbl,
I kindly ask you to consider talking to the people at #Mozilla to keep #xml documents with human-friendly rendering via #xslt visible in #Firefox.
Not only needs the web decentralisation, but also raw, machine-readable data in human-friendly appearance. #Feeds, #RDF, etc. Dropping #w3c standards and backwards-compatibiity in this regard makes the web an unreliable medium for long-term publishing and archiving of such documents, even more so for small entities with limited resources. Big players have no problem continuously overhauling their archives to meet the viewers' habits du-jour and adapt to fast-moving, volatile practices.
Please say no to this #enshittification.
Yours,
@mro
P.S.: I pledge a monthly Euro to such a browser.
Edited 141d ago
Don't trust cloud services with your creative work.
#enshittification #privacy #infosec #security #cybersecurity #writing #art
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@mttaggart/116076953346773167
eyes rolling black
the decentralized future will be built on repurposed hardware, discarded due to Windows 11 requirements
#enshittification #hardware #westerndigital #hdd #decentralization #tech #recycle #repurpose #diy
Edited 206d ago
LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer
#tech #technology #BigTech #IT #enshittification #microslop #microsoft #LinkedIn #social #media #SocialMedia #data #security #safety #InfoSec #internet #web
"I believe GPT-5 is part of a larger process happening in generative AI — enshittification, Cory Doctorow’s term for when platforms start out burning money offering an unlimited, unguarded experience to attract their users, then degrade and move features to higher tiers as a means of draining the blood from users.
With the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI has fully committed to enshittifying its consumer and business subscription products, arbitrarily moving free users to a cheaper model and limiting their ability to generate images, and removing the ability to choose which model you use in its $20, $35 and “enterprise” subscriptions, moving any and all choice to its “team” and $200-a-month “pro” subscriptions.
OpenAI’s justification is an exercise in faux-altruism, framing “taking away all choice” as a “real-time router that quickly decides which [model] to use.” ChatGPT Plus and Team members now mostly have access to two models — GPT-5 and GPT-5-Thinking — down from the six they had before.
This distinction is quite significant. Where users once could get hundreds of messages a day on OpenAI’s o4-mini-high and o4-mini reasoning models, GPT-5 for ChatGPT Plus subscribers offers 200 reasoning (GPT-5-thinking) messages a week, with 80 GPT-5 messages every 3 hours which allow you to ask it to “think” about its answer, shoving you over to an undisclosed reasoning model. This may seem like a good deal, OpenAI is likely putting you on the cheapest model whenever it can in the name of “the best choice.”"
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittification-of-generative-ai/
After decades of experience with online dating services, I'm convinced that at this point ALL of them are deliberately making themselves useless. It's logical, by capitalist "logic"; if someone meets a suitable match and falls in love, they're lost as a customer - possibly forever.
So instead the services use sophisticated algorithms to keep good matches dangling just out of reach, teasing users with the possibility of love if they would just pay for premium.
In other words, it's classic enshittification.
So I definitely support the idea of a nonprofit Fediverse-based dating service. I don't have the technical skills to be helpful with that (maybe I should try to learn?), but I'd certainly sign up!
FediMeet, FediMeetCute...there are definitely some possibilities.
Welllllll this isn't great.
Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website
"...a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google's machine learning model thinks they should see instead."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joetoscano1/2026/03/06/google-just-patented-the-end-of-your-website
#SEO #Google #AI #enshittification
Edited 171d ago
RE: https://mastodon.scot/@patrickhadfield/116516881471978323
the gringolarchy’s obsession with “backwards colonizing” England ―not necessarily the UK, btw― is reflected on their takeover of the NHS and funding of Reform UK to expand their prison-industrial-complex.
this isn't new but it has been uncharacteristically relentless for the past 10-15 years.
gringolada, agringados are neologisms we’ve used in Latin America to refer to the OG #enshittification : the gringofication of everything.
“We’re not gringos, stop Reform UK” should be a #UKpol slogan.
LMAO
#Mastodon #DotSocial doesn’t have engagement algorithms so the concept of “ratios” really don’t exist here but this toot by @Blender is the first true pile-one i’ve see onhere:
https://mastodon.social/@Blender/116482997785333001
131 comments
33 quote-posts
yet
30 boosts
20 faves
this is amazing and well deserved.
jackasses.
Edited 135d ago
First sneakers, now toilets. We've definitely reached that point in the #AI #bubble where it's all about slapping a label on your company to attract stupid investors.
> Toilet Maker Spikes in Value as It Flushes Money Into AI. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/toilet-maker-toto-ai
(OK, OK, they are actually a semiconductor maker as well as bidets. Still, you gotta appreciate the thematic convergence of AI and, well, poop…)
Windows 12 reportedly set for release this year as a subscription-based, AI-focused OS
So there can be something worse than Windows 11...
https://tech4gamers.com/windows-12-reportedly-relasing-2026-modular-ai-focused-os/
#Microsoft #Microslop #Windows #Windows12 #Copilot #AI #enshittification #software #technology
No, an AI-focused "Windows 12" is not coming this year — false report gets the facts completely wrong
> A new report has caught the internet's attention, claiming that Windows 12 is coming this year and will be a modular, AI-powered OS. Here's why that's wrong.
Still credible from Microsoft seeing how fast their enshittification goes nowadays. Don't wait for it. Start using Linux now if you can.
#windows #technology #Linux #microslop #Microsoft #enshittification
#NeoDB ( #Fediverse alternative to #Letterboxd, #Goodreads etc) keeps embetterfying (yes, that's the opposite of enshittifying 😁 ) every day.
Just noticed the new "Recommended for you" section now on the Discover page and... it's pretty good! Except for a couple of kids' animations, all of it sounds interesting (or is stuff I already know I like but haven't logged yet).
I wonder how it's done.
Anthropic deserves mass chargebacks for predatory billing policies - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnazGJzK4UY
This is why @pluralistic is always preaching about #DRM-free digital media and software. Sony is deleting over 500 movies customers paid for through the PlayStation Store because they don’t want to renew their license with Studio Canal. #enshittification
Important monolog from the mini-series "Years and Years": she makes the point that we're all to blame, as individuals, for the mess the world is in, because we put convenience over and above things that really matter. And as a result, we got fascism, enshittification, climate change and all the rest.
Years And Years - speech (vostfr) - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbDFaW1ztww
Highly recommended series, if now dated. Ref.:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8694364/
RE: https://social.panic.com/@cabel/116553522656332225
It is true. It is hard to overstate how unpopular this technology is outside of its dedicated userbase, and tech bros trying to hype it up.
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/on-generative-ai/#consumer-sentiment
None of this fatigue is inevitable. It's the result of deliberate choices: engagement chased over #wellbeing, value extraction chased over care. That's #enshittification working exactly as designed. The internet belongs to the people who use it, not the capital that hollowed it out for profit.
Don’t Lock User Data Behind Paywalls – Online Goddess https://onlinegoddess.net/2026/08/dont-lock-user-data-behind-paywalls/ #Enshittification
I've been enjoying reading article found on Bubbles.Town - its a bit of the hacker news model of upvoting but for indie-web blogs written by real people - none of which I've seen have a monetary incentive, paywall, pop-up, or other enshittified nonsense.
Id love to see more people voting and commenting on articles, and you can connect your existing fediverse account - you don't need to create a new one or anything!
Welp - since search basically everywhere has turned into "I see your suggestion in my input field, but how about I show you a shitload of stuff entirely unrelated to it?" it just occurred to me that the young folks out there probably don't even realize that originally, a search field was for entering the thing you wanted to find *and then the engine would present you with that thing* if at all possible & if it wasn't, it would just tell you that.
My husband put 30 hours into a work project this week. He's using Microsoft. It's supposed to automatically save and there's a backup so if that fails it automatically saves anyway. It didn't automatically save & the backup also failed. 30 hours of his work, which was due yesterday, disappeared when the document crashed before he sent his project out. Seems like this should be a 1990s problem. Manual saves are back. Who knew.