#enshittify — Public Fediverse posts

In its unwavering efforts to further #enshittify what remains of the free and open #internet, #google has kindly decided to bring back #AOL online! And this time you don't even need a #CDROM!

Those of you old enough to remember clueless relatives screaming for help to get on the *cough* "information superhighway" or even *shudder* Besenkammer-Boris' "Ich bin drin!" will be endlessly grateful.

For the youngsters, here's an illustration...

#fckgoogle #enshittification #slop #googleio2026

In its unwavering efforts to further #enshittify what remains of the free and open #internet, #google has kindly decided to bring back #AOL online! And this time you don't even need a #CDROM!

Those of you old enough to remember clueless relatives screaming for help to get on the *cough* "information superhighway" or even *shudder* Besenkammer-Boris' "Ich bin drin!" will be endlessly grateful.

For the youngsters, here's an illustration...

#fckgoogle #enshittification #slop #googleio2026

In its unwavering efforts to further #enshittify what remains of the free and open #internet, #google has kindly decided to bring back #AOL online! And this time you don't even need a #CDROM!

Those of you old enough to remember clueless relatives screaming for help to get on the *cough* "information superhighway" or even *shudder* Besenkammer-Boris' "Ich bin drin!" will be endlessly grateful.

For the youngsters, here's an illustration...

#fckgoogle #enshittification #slop #googleio2026

In its unwavering efforts to further #enshittify what remains of the free and open #internet, #google has kindly decided to bring back #AOL online! And this time you don't even need a #CDROM!

Those of you old enough to remember clueless relatives screaming for help to get on the *cough* "information superhighway" or even *shudder* Besenkammer-Boris' "Ich bin drin!" will be endlessly grateful.

For the youngsters, here's an illustration...

#fckgoogle #enshittification #slop #googleio2026

In its unwavering efforts to further #enshittify what remains of the free and open #internet, #google has kindly decided to bring back #AOL online! And this time you don't even need a #CDROM!

Those of you old enough to remember clueless relatives screaming for help to get on the *cough* "information superhighway" or even *shudder* Besenkammer-Boris' "Ich bin drin!" will be endlessly grateful.

For the youngsters, here's an illustration...

#fckgoogle #enshittification #slop #googleio2026

Ok, #enshittify as much as you want your #UI, #AppleMusic on #Tahoe, but could you still _please_ recognize the connected sound device without requiring zillion on/off clicks on sound icon sub-settings, and sometimes app restarts?

You. Have. One. Job.

#macos #music #woes

if #apple doesn't fix their stupid ios keyboard with gemini, i'm sending a thousand ducks to #enshittify their spaceship

Don’t #enshittify where you eat. #IoT #Samsung #Fridge #ai #CoryDoctorow

A great post by Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic) "The 40-year #economic mistake that let #Google conquer (and #enshittify) the world"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/06/vertical-blinds/#invest-dont-acquire

#enshittification #monopoly

@TheDutchChief @BjornW it may be still useful. Until they manage to get you hooked and dependent. Please also check the #enshittify strategy as articulated by Cory Doctorow. Maybe best to explore ways to track your biking while keeping controç over your data and integrations?

Of the four triggers that #ChatGPT says might cause the #AIBubble to collapse more quickly, "a key LLM vendor fails" seems by far the most plausible to me, but I guess we will see.

In terms of the aftermath, I think it is 100% correct about the consolidation. No one will make money on #LLMs until the majority of the competition is gone and the remaining companies have the near-monopoly they need to jack up prices and #enshittify their products.

Name something horrible, and Zuckerberg will find a way to #enshittify it.

"When prompting the AI, you can share and publish a post about your query. But if some of what's being shared is any indication, many aren't realizing that it makes their questions — about tax evasion, detailed information about legal troubles, or requests for a picture of pregnant big belly Mark Zuckerberg getting married to a bug — are being widely shared."

https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/the-meta-ai-app-is-a-privacy-disaster/

@WrenArcher peak #enshittify amiright?

@Some_Emo_Chick the frustrating part for me on this is that a lot of it is shuffling deck chairs on the titanic. Deezer/Tidal are SSDD just 'not google’. The music industry is now a double edged scam, artists are being fleeced and listeners are being fleeced and Deezer/Tidal participate.

Same could be said for twitter -> bluesky. Sure bluesky is ok now, but it's owned by VC which will #enshittify soon.

It's called Project 2025 because they couldn't spell #Enshittify

@muz4now I'd take that 'no ads' statement with a grain of salt.
Bluesky is run by former Twitter ceo's,
it's just a matter of time before Bluesky will #enshittify itself.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/

First personal spotting in the wild of #LLMs used to #enshittify the #copyediting of #academic #publications: in an absolutely unsurprising development, the resulting disfunction is offloaded onto the authors, who are required to do more (#unpaid) work to clean everything up. #Monopolistic #concentration in the #publishing #business extracting #rents under guise of #technological #innovation— just like it says on the tin.

First personal spotting in the wild of #LLMs used to #enshittify the #copyediting of #academic #publications: in an absolutely unsurprising development, the resulting disfunction is offloaded onto the authors, who are required to do more (#unpaid) work to clean everything up. #Monopolistic #concentration in the #publishing #business extracting #rents under guise of #technological #innovation— just like it says on the tin.

First personal spotting in the wild of #LLMs used to #enshittify the #copyediting of #academic #publications: in an absolutely unsurprising development, the resulting disfunction is offloaded onto the authors, who are required to do more (#unpaid) work to clean everything up. #Monopolistic #concentration in the #publishing #business extracting #rents under guise of #technological #innovation— just like it says on the tin.

First personal spotting in the wild of #LLMs used to #enshittify the #copyediting of #academic #publications: in an absolutely unsurprising development, the resulting disfunction is offloaded onto the authors, who are required to do more (#unpaid) work to clean everything up. #Monopolistic #concentration in the #publishing #business extracting #rents under guise of #technological #innovation— just like it says on the tin.

With #facebook, #tiktok and #musktwitter all saturating the news, it's a relief that #mastodon / #fediverse is not a household-name style mainstream outlet. There are two ways a platform can #enshittify : one is when *everyone* joins it, stupefying and ruining it that way; the other is when its owners gradually degrade its services, ruining it for profit.

I'm grateful for Brother, a company that seems to have resisted most impulses to #enshittify their printers the way their rivals have.

I recently discovered that they have super fancy label printers with cool tapes, including super sticky ones and flexible ones for labeling cables.

It's been a while since a tool made me this happy. I am aware this makes me a huge dork, tnks

Arrrgh, why the hell did I think Velux would do any better with their cloud BS than anyone else…? It’s a freaking window, ffs!

Learn from my mistakes: “Smart Home” is a scam.

#enshittify by #cloud

@GualTRex
Thanks, I took a quick look and looks likes its limited to only one platform, windows. That may be why I've never heard of it. Did I miss something?

We only use tools that run on many platforms. Its a risk management thing in a world subject to rapid change. We try to avoid corporate lock-in. The corps have a bad tendency to #enshittify everything they touch .

Thanks for the update, we are always looking for new solutions.

@firebreathingduck There are many great observations in the post by @baldur, and in this video from @codesections (about the goals of programming groups at big tech vs developers creating "free software").

I see similarities in the tool stacks used in the #DataScience / #DataEngineering realm. It feels like there is a push to use no/low code, cookie-cutter, closed sourse, costly, inefficient, obfuscating tools that make it difficult to verify you're getting the "correct" answer, and a purposeful move away from craft and excellence. Commoditize, commercialize, and cross-#enshittify is the credo.

I am sickly fascinated by how awful and weird mobile game ads have become. I'm part of a Facebook group where we share terrible ads and make up lore for the recurring characters. My phone is full of screenshots like this. Some actors from Eastern Europe, who appear in some of the ads, are also in the group. #enshittify #roteconomy #capitalism

refs just should have done the manual stop watch. this is so sloppy! this is what happens when you let techbros get into #sports. they #enshittify everything they touch.

#GS #LAL #NBA

My problem with #typescript is that it has #microsoft all over. I tend to avoid that filth wherever I can. And yes, I'm emotional about this stuff. "Nazi made but useful" does not compute in my book.

Also, not caring about portability of my scripts to #windows. It's a #surveilance & #enshittify OS. I'm not touching it with a stick.

I mean, the Letter to hobbyists is kind of it for me. Even if they never did what they kept doing and do and plan to do.

@bangskij
I agree with every point in this article. I haven't flown commercial since 2002 and I will die a happy man if I never have to fly again; Our #Amtrak corp, a corp owned and operated by us the voting public, is your friend although they are starting to #enshittify too.

My toot about #neovim being my #IDE got some traction.
I'm curious why others are using it over something more popular like #VSCode.
Especially as VSCode has a vim plugin.
Personally I don't trust Microsoft to not eventually #enshittify it. Plus there was that whole thing with #telemetry. And I won't pretend to fully understand, but it seems like a sneaky version of #opensource.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Neovim, and I believe most if not all the plugins, appear to be more truly open source... if that makes sebse. Again, there are complexities there I'm only beginning to figure out.

The calendar year 2023 was a miserable one in countless ways — wars, abortion rights, record high temperatures, the decline and fall of Twitter/X — but it was the best of times for the mainstreaming of strong language. At the American Dialect Society’s 34th annual word of the year vote, held on the evening of January 5 in New York City, no fewer than six sweary lexical items — a historical record — were nominated for WotY honors. Two of them won in their respective categories, and one, enshittification, was named overall word of the year.

Here’s how it went down. (Note: I was not present at the vote but followed along as best as I could via various Bluesky accounts.)

Enshittification

Digital word of the year, overall word of the year

Back in February 2023, when I wrote about enshittification for Strong Language, I predicted that the noun and its verb counterpart, enshittify, were “primed for neologistic success.” Both were popularized by the journalist and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow, whose January 21, 2023, post on “Tiktok’s enshittification” was quickly picked up by Wired and then spread far and wide. Doctorow put it like this:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Doctorow didn’t coin enshittification: As language researcher Barry Popik pointed out on Twitter/X, the word has appeared sporadically since 2013. But as Strong Language contributor and ADS “Among the New Words” editor Ben Zimmer observed in an email, “it was Doctorow’s specific framing of the word in terms of (shitty) digital platforms that made the word catch on.” In the ADS press release announcing the WotY vote, Ben put it this way: “Enshittification is a sadly apt term for how our online lives have become gradually degraded. … From the time that it first appeared in Doctorow’s posts and articles, the word had all the markings of a successful neologism, being instantly memorable and adaptable to a variety of contexts.”

Enshittification was the resounding choice of the attendees at the WotY voting session, receiving 158 votes. The runner-up, (derogatory) —a “parenthetical comment humorously appended after a word that might not be
expected to be derogatory” — received 121 votes.

FAFO

Acronym/initialism of the year

The initialism for “Fuck Around [and] Find Out” wasn’t new in 2023 — Jesse Sheidlower, author of The F Word, has traced it back to 2007. (The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks extremist movements in the U.S., says FAFO is a slogan associated with the neo-fascist Proud Boys.) But 2023 was a year in which FAFO met the ADS criterion of “newly prominent”: A lot of folks FA’d and, too late, FO.

In a January 2023 op-ed, the Washington Post’s Amanda Katz chided the ADS for not making FAFO its word of the year for 2022: It was in December 2022, she reminded readers, that Elon Musk kicked Kanye West off Twitter, as it was then known, “for tweeting an unflattering photo of the platform’s memelord-turned-overlord.” Musk explained his decision “[i]n a four-letter tweet that forced the actual adults following this squabble to look up what FAFO meant.”

Although generally speaking FAFO is a “warning that foolish actions will result in unwanted consequences,” as the ADS press release puts it, there has been at least one attempt to turn that meaning on its head. In 2023 an Anaheim, California, brewery called Bottle Logic introduced a bottled stout called FAFO; its creators assert that “the amount of fucking around you’re willing to do is directly proportional to the amount of finding out you’ll accomplish.”

AITA

Runner-up, acronym/initialism of the year

The initialism for “Am I the Asshole?” received 47 votes to FAFO’s 177, putting it in second place in the category. It has gained prominence from a popular Reddit forum in which questioners ask the online audience to determine whether they are at fault in a particular situation.

LFG

Honorable mention, acronym/initialism of the year

I admit I was a little surprised to see the initialism for Let’s Fucking Go! among this year’s nominations: I associate it with the 2020 election season, when U.S. senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren made it her unofficial slogan. (See my January 2020 post.) Spelled out or shortened, it’s an exhortation to action, and it came in third in its category.

Cunty

Nominee, most useful/most likely to succeed

Cunty was one of two nominees in this category that originated in LGBTQ ballroom culture. (The other was mother as a term of endearment.) It’s an example of word reclamation: Whereas cunty has historically meant unpleasant or disagreeable, it may now mean “having an audaciously exceptional appearance or displaying fierce femininity.” For more on the C-word, see Michael Adams’s 2016 guest post, “Making Friends with ‘Cunt’.”

Assholocene

Nominee, most creative word of the year

Here’s what I wrote about assholocene in my own words-of-the-year post, on Substack:

Technically speaking, the era we’re living in is the Holocene, a word coined in 1897 from Greek words meaning “entirely new.” But thanks to enshittification you could also call it something bleaker, as Kyle Chayka reported in a “2023 in Review” essay for the New Yorker. What new label could we apply to “our chaotic historical moment”? Chayka’s suggestions include “the Terrible Twenties, the Long 2016, the Age of Emergency, Cold War II, the Omnishambles, the Great Burning, and” — my favorite — “the Assholocene.” I don’t often give thumbs-up to a portmanteau, but this one is a pretty great blend. The earliest citation I’ve found is from a June 25, 2023, Urban Dictionary entry: “the current period of human history in which people in power tend to be assholes.”

See all of the ADS WotY nominations here. Were any important words overlooked? Let us know in a comment.

*

For some background on how words of the year are chosen by the ADS and other voting bodies, see my January 2023 story for Medium, “Words of the Year, In and Out.”

https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2024/01/07/the-sweary-wotys/

#AITA #assholocene #cunty #enshittify #eshittification #FAFO #LFG

If dishwashers were invented today

🔵 you would have to buy special packets only usable by that brand of washer
🔵 the washer would have to maintain a connection to the internet
🔵 only approved brand dishes could be washed - they would have a special ‘wash chip’ in them to enable
🔵 you would have to purchase a wash subscription service to allow the washer to run longer than 10 mins
🔵 the washer would play an ad between every session
🔵 the washer could only be serviced by approved vendors
🔵 every 6 months you would have a special filter that would expire and you have to purchase a new one
🔵 in order to to buy a new house you are required to purchase an approved dish washer
🔵 if you want to wash forks you must purchase a forking upgrade subscription
🔵 you cannot sell the dishwasher to anyone else as the geolocation built in to the device will brick the machine
🔵 if you use unapproved soap the washer will seize up and require an approved technician to reset it for a fee

#enshittfication
#enshittify

If dishwashers were invented today

🔵 you would have to buy special packets only usable by that brand of washer
🔵 the washer would have to maintain a connection to the internet
🔵 only approved brand dishes could be washed - they would have a special ‘wash chip’ in them to enable
🔵 you would have to purchase a wash subscription service to allow the washer to run longer than 10 mins
🔵 the washer would play an ad between every session
🔵 the washer could only be serviced by approved vendors
🔵 every 6 months you would have a special filter that would expire and you have to purchase a new one
🔵 in order to to buy a new house you are required to purchase an approved dish washer
🔵 if you want to wash forks you must purchase a forking upgrade subscription
🔵 you cannot sell the dishwasher to anyone else as the geolocation built in to the device will brick the machine
🔵 if you use unapproved soap the washer will seize up and require an approved technician to reset it for a fee

#enshittfication
#enshittify

If dishwashers were invented today

🔵 you would have to buy special packets only usable by that brand of washer
🔵 the washer would have to maintain a connection to the internet
🔵 only approved brand dishes could be washed - they would have a special ‘wash chip’ in them to enable
🔵 you would have to purchase a wash subscription service to allow the washer to run longer than 10 mins
🔵 the washer would play an ad between every session
🔵 the washer could only be serviced by approved vendors
🔵 every 6 months you would have a special filter that would expire and you have to purchase a new one
🔵 in order to to buy a new house you are required to purchase an approved dish washer
🔵 if you want to wash forks you must purchase a forking upgrade subscription
🔵 you cannot sell the dishwasher to anyone else as the geolocation built in to the device will brick the machine
🔵 if you use unapproved soap the washer will seize up and require an approved technician to reset it for a fee

#enshittfication
#enshittify

If dishwashers were invented today

🔵 you would have to buy special packets only usable by that brand of washer
🔵 the washer would have to maintain a connection to the internet
🔵 only approved brand dishes could be washed - they would have a special ‘wash chip’ in them to enable
🔵 you would have to purchase a wash subscription service to allow the washer to run longer than 10 mins
🔵 the washer would play an ad between every session
🔵 the washer could only be serviced by approved vendors
🔵 every 6 months you would have a special filter that would expire and you have to purchase a new one
🔵 in order to to buy a new house you are required to purchase an approved dish washer
🔵 if you want to wash forks you must purchase a forking upgrade subscription
🔵 you cannot sell the dishwasher to anyone else as the geolocation built in to the device will brick the machine
🔵 if you use unapproved soap the washer will seize up and require an approved technician to reset it for a fee

#enshittfication
#enshittify

If dishwashers were invented today

🔵 you would have to buy special packets only usable by that brand of washer
🔵 the washer would have to maintain a connection to the internet
🔵 only approved brand dishes could be washed - they would have a special ‘wash chip’ in them to enable
🔵 you would have to purchase a wash subscription service to allow the washer to run longer than 10 mins
🔵 the washer would play an ad between every session
🔵 the washer could only be serviced by approved vendors
🔵 every 6 months you would have a special filter that would expire and you have to purchase a new one
🔵 in order to to buy a new house you are required to purchase an approved dish washer
🔵 if you want to wash forks you must purchase a forking upgrade subscription
🔵 you cannot sell the dishwasher to anyone else as the geolocation built in to the device will brick the machine
🔵 if you use unapproved soap the washer will seize up and require an approved technician to reset it for a fee

#enshittfication
#enshittify

DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Ensh*ttification - Cory Doctorow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

> The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things b...
#defcon #enshittification #enshittify #internetofshit #internethistory

And while the world may be ending, it's still super important to #enshittify life as deeply as possible for as many people as possible.

At first I thought this was sorted (descending) by Last Modified. No, it's a dropdown that lets you change which field is shown. There is another arrow next to it to show the sort order.

#gdrive #enshittify

(ibm/redhat decided to #enshittify #ansible with #LLMNonsense and i am pissed…)