everything is worsening in ways that weren't computationally possible a couple decades ago
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Started 3h ago
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Started 3h ago
The year is 2006. You are bored. You whip out your phone and play Tetris. Everything works fine. Once you're done with that, you decide to watch TV. You don't have to make an account or install an app or anything. You just flip through the channels and see what's on. Most of it is vapid trash by 00s standards but hey, it's all made by humans on at least a moderate budget. When you're finished watching television, you spend some time listening to music. You peruse your CD collection or scroll through your iPod or whatever and pick a record. You have your own curated library full of music you've largely familiarized yourself with to the point where you remember it all like the back of your hand. You pick a record and listen to it. Quality is good, there's no ads. Later, you order a pizza over the phone, eat some of it and go to bed.
....
The year is 2026. You are bored. You whip out your phone and play Tetris. The program now weighs 6 GB and interrupts the game every 90 seconds to show you ads for erectile dysfunction pills. The game is laggy as fuck and makes your phone run hot for unknown reasons. You no longer have access to physical buttons so the controls are also all fucked up and you keep making accidental inputs. This isn't fun. You decide to watch TV instead. Well, "TV" as you knew it no longer really exists in the same form. Traditional "TV" still technically exists but the quality has nosedived since everyone stopped watching it and you likely don't own the hardware required to pick up a signal. The closest free equivalent would be YouTube, so you watch that. The YouTube app is no longer allowing you to watch as a guest and is now urging you to sign in, but this is the living room TV and you do not live alone. You don't want your family fucking up your recommendations, but you've learned a trick to remedy this: uninstall and reinstall the YouTube app. Once you're done doing that, you spend 30 minutes perusing through the home menu until you find something that doesn't look too bad only to discover is a 45-minute video consisting of piss yellow AI-generated images presented in slideshow format while a text-to-speech program recites a shitty script written by a chatbot that always writes everything the same way.
Whatever. You're too apathetic to find something good or even passable.
Later, you spend some time listening to music. The album you enjoyed last night and wanted to listen to again is no longer available. You give up and just let the algorithm bring you an endless conga line of music it guesses you'll like. 80% of it was made by one guy in his bedroom with just a laptop. The other 20% was generated by Suno and clearly sounds like it. Your earbuds die 30 minutes later because you forgot to charge their case.
You order a pizza. The software client you usually use to do so is malfunctioning. You try calling but no one picks up, only an automated system that you've only ever had negative experiences with. Fuck it, you get off your ass and drive to the pizza place. No one's at the counter. There's only a couple giant touch screens people have been swiping at all day. You put your order in there and take your pizza home.
...
The point being made here is that things that have always existed in some form are getting worse in ways that weren't even technologically possible until recently. That long story isn't meant to be an accurate account of the average day in a modern person's life. It's just a hodgepodge of examples of problems people didn't have 20 years ago.
Sure, you can listen to as much music as you want, but the tech you use to do so is worse than it would've been a while ago. Even if you choose not to use streaming services and stick to wired headphones, the music scene has been drastically altered by the proliferation of the tech you're choosing to opt out of. Look at what the shift from music discovery via community to discovery via algorithm has done to 4chan's /mu/ for example. You're going to be negatively affected by these changes one way or another.
You can "watch content" all day now, sure, but the quality of that content has clipped through the floor of hell because anyone can make anything nowadays. You can still watch the same quality movies and tv shows that have always existed, but the signal to noise ratio is worsening because of the flood of nonsense enabled by technological progress. As a result, the average person ends up watching hot garbage instead of regular tolerable garbage that had to be produced and greenlit because there was no other way to get it made.
The gaming industry is abysmal as a direct result of computational advancements. Microtransactions, bloat and unfinished releases were absolutely not the baseline 20 years ago but they certainly are now, because they're possible now.
Everything is the same. You can still do the things you've always done, it's just that the standards have collapsed. Technological development has enabled things to get worse in new ways. It does always translate to improved experiences.
....
The year is 2026. You are bored. You whip out your phone and play Tetris. The program now weighs 6 GB and interrupts the game every 90 seconds to show you ads for erectile dysfunction pills. The game is laggy as fuck and makes your phone run hot for unknown reasons. You no longer have access to physical buttons so the controls are also all fucked up and you keep making accidental inputs. This isn't fun. You decide to watch TV instead. Well, "TV" as you knew it no longer really exists in the same form. Traditional "TV" still technically exists but the quality has nosedived since everyone stopped watching it and you likely don't own the hardware required to pick up a signal. The closest free equivalent would be YouTube, so you watch that. The YouTube app is no longer allowing you to watch as a guest and is now urging you to sign in, but this is the living room TV and you do not live alone. You don't want your family fucking up your recommendations, but you've learned a trick to remedy this: uninstall and reinstall the YouTube app. Once you're done doing that, you spend 30 minutes perusing through the home menu until you find something that doesn't look too bad only to discover is a 45-minute video consisting of piss yellow AI-generated images presented in slideshow format while a text-to-speech program recites a shitty script written by a chatbot that always writes everything the same way.
Whatever. You're too apathetic to find something good or even passable.
Later, you spend some time listening to music. The album you enjoyed last night and wanted to listen to again is no longer available. You give up and just let the algorithm bring you an endless conga line of music it guesses you'll like. 80% of it was made by one guy in his bedroom with just a laptop. The other 20% was generated by Suno and clearly sounds like it. Your earbuds die 30 minutes later because you forgot to charge their case.
You order a pizza. The software client you usually use to do so is malfunctioning. You try calling but no one picks up, only an automated system that you've only ever had negative experiences with. Fuck it, you get off your ass and drive to the pizza place. No one's at the counter. There's only a couple giant touch screens people have been swiping at all day. You put your order in there and take your pizza home.
...
The point being made here is that things that have always existed in some form are getting worse in ways that weren't even technologically possible until recently. That long story isn't meant to be an accurate account of the average day in a modern person's life. It's just a hodgepodge of examples of problems people didn't have 20 years ago.
Sure, you can listen to as much music as you want, but the tech you use to do so is worse than it would've been a while ago. Even if you choose not to use streaming services and stick to wired headphones, the music scene has been drastically altered by the proliferation of the tech you're choosing to opt out of. Look at what the shift from music discovery via community to discovery via algorithm has done to 4chan's /mu/ for example. You're going to be negatively affected by these changes one way or another.
You can "watch content" all day now, sure, but the quality of that content has clipped through the floor of hell because anyone can make anything nowadays. You can still watch the same quality movies and tv shows that have always existed, but the signal to noise ratio is worsening because of the flood of nonsense enabled by technological progress. As a result, the average person ends up watching hot garbage instead of regular tolerable garbage that had to be produced and greenlit because there was no other way to get it made.
The gaming industry is abysmal as a direct result of computational advancements. Microtransactions, bloat and unfinished releases were absolutely not the baseline 20 years ago but they certainly are now, because they're possible now.
Everything is the same. You can still do the things you've always done, it's just that the standards have collapsed. Technological development has enabled things to get worse in new ways. It does always translate to improved experiences.
It's because of consumers bending over due to having no alternative .
This enshitification happened because there is no alternative and therefore no competition so the programs you use basically have a monopoly on you
This is further worsened by investors putting their money in the companies behind those programs and expecting to get their money back + interest
Aka one way or another this company has to make profit and continue to profit no matter what to please their investors. This also means reducing the cost of maintaining everything by cutting corners and lowering the overall quality of the user experience and the quality of the product to maximize profits.
A good example of this would be the recent drama with shitblox making terrible decisions to try and please their investors
How do we combat this?
By Having an alternative aka competition
The reason why polytoria (a small crappy roblox alternative) exploded in popularity was because users were WILLING to play polytoria in spite of it being worse in terms of quality compared to roblox in almost every way just to have a good experience while playing the game
This enshitification happened because there is no alternative and therefore no competition so the programs you use basically have a monopoly on you
This is further worsened by investors putting their money in the companies behind those programs and expecting to get their money back + interest
Aka one way or another this company has to make profit and continue to profit no matter what to please their investors. This also means reducing the cost of maintaining everything by cutting corners and lowering the overall quality of the user experience and the quality of the product to maximize profits.
A good example of this would be the recent drama with shitblox making terrible decisions to try and please their investors
How do we combat this?
By Having an alternative aka competition
The reason why polytoria (a small crappy roblox alternative) exploded in popularity was because users were WILLING to play polytoria in spite of it being worse in terms of quality compared to roblox in almost every way just to have a good experience while playing the game