Memes

Don't forget strong policies to keep everything from enshittifying all over again! Check out Cory Doctorow's thoughts from DefCon: https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?feature=shared

And now you've got carmakers looking to charge by the month for features.

When I reach the point at which I am forced to buy a car like that, I'd just find out from where the feature gets controlled and hack in my own controller and a good 'ol switch.

I could've sworn that they said win 10 was going to be the last windows and it would just receive updates.

Agreed on convenience being enough for most people. Unity isn't going anywhere. They are priced above Unreal now but they have the market share to justify it. There are a million other game engines with newer approaches than "coke and pepsi" but they take more work and there's less community to pull from. There are just so many assets and abilities pre built in those game engines that allow a young developer to be productive. If you don't need all of that then you have a wide pick of frameworks to apply your code chops to. I'd love for Godot to become Dr Pepper but it's got a long way to go for even that slot. If unity had done this in a year or two from now it might be a different story but it takes a long time to reach a status like Blender, and even Blender isn't the go-to for industry professionals. I love LibreOffice but I've never worked at a company that is willing to tolerate those little rough edges.

Twitter is still the centralized place for a mainstream figure/organization to engage from. They have all researched mastodon and the like, opened accounts, and can't get the same engagement. It takes people more work to find their accounts in other places and most lay-users just aren't going to put in the effort. They're only in it for the lulz. This may reach a critical mass someday like with myspace but any alternative still needs a central point to funnel them to. Reddit doesn't benefit from centralization the same way and I think Lemmy/ap will scratch the itch for major topics, but it's still harder to grow smaller communities that aren't risa.

Blizzard has been being blizzard for years, that's not just a 2023 thing!

I wish it was different. We all hate nodding to authority. But there's a certain momentum that carries with popularity and they can surf that on their enshittification for years to come.

I just think people shouldn't be chided for doing what is convenient when so much of our economy is attention based. Kind of like hating the players instead of the game.

I keep up to date with a lot of tech stuff through youtube so I genuinely don't know who can offer a service as big and reliable as google. I'm pretty sure they're offering at a loss or something right? I've tried Peertube and Oddysee but not all creators are on those platforms.

Twitter, Reddit, and Unity have not been profitable. This was fine when money was cheap (near zero interest rates). The market was awash with capital trying to find something that could turn a profit. A business plan that was basically underpants gnomes (1. Gather underpants 2. ???? 3. Profit!) was acceptable. Twitter’s and Reddit’s 1. was “gather users”, Unity’s “gather projects”. Now money isn’t free anymore, and capital is demanding that these businesses fill in 2. with something. Twitter is doing whatever Musk thinks is good, Reddit is trying to monetize its API to make AIs pay and to serve real users ads through its first party app, and Unity is trying to monetize the projects it has gathered. All of them have been offering a product below cost, and users are understandably angry that the cost is going up. (And in many cases, finding that the product isn’t really worth anything.)

Blizzard is different. It operates in a creative field and has been very profitable. Games are art as much as they are products that are sold. As such, they’re fickle: you can’t assembly line manufacture games and make a hit after hit. Artists in music that turn out bangers decade after decade are rare, as are authors, directors, etc. Blizzard’s streak of awesome games was bound to end eventually. AAA games are also extremely expensive to make: if you make an AAA game, it must be a hit or you’ll lose money. Alternatively, you can use dark patterns to monetize it, then it doesn’t have to be as good to make loads of money. Banking on your creatives to keep beating the odds is risky; infesting a good enough game with scummy monetization is a safer bet.

All these guys talk to each other, they don't really have unique ideas

I see literally no incentive for them to limit their API to just the Google version of Manifest v3. If I recall correctly they already expanded their implementation to offer more.

If they ever implement WEI (the "web DRM") then it's because the Internet forces their hand. A web browser is only as useful as the websites it can browse. If our banks will demand WEI support Mozilla doesn't have much choice. We need to worry about the website providers changing the web, not Mozilla adjusting Firefox to these changes. In the latter case it's already too late and it's hard to blame Mozilla at this point.

People wouldn’t use Firefox if it couldn’t run google and if it made bing default then you’d see a bunch of idiots making memes about how it’s so bad and they won’t use it because it’s default

Google has been worse than bing for a decade and chrome has been worse than Firefox for longer. But people still use them and think they are the best.

You even have people make jokes about edge only existing to download chrome

I feel like you vastly overestimate the audience

That would be a tragedy

While depressing, it makes sense, seeing as this market model isn’t sustainable in the long term, let alone short term.

Interest rates went up and with it the era of free money. Now the investors come knocking for profits and lots of it. As they get squeezed, they squeeze the customer harder with worse products and services for more money.