We all know the struggle of beloved services slowly going downhill. What’s one service, tool, or website you’ve been using for years that’s still great and hasn’t turned to crap?
- Dropout.tv
- Davinci resolve
- Obsidian
- Jellyfin
- Airgradient air quality monitor
Which reminds me, I’ve had a few dropout shows on my jellyfin for a while but really need to drop a sub to support. They do great stuff
I swear, I feel like I’ve watched (or have shown off to people unfamiliar with dropout) A Game Most Changed like 5 times.
Or if they’re straight, Sam Says. Lol
Dropout is pretty good. I don’t think they’ve really been around enough to enshitify yet though. They’re on big up-swing. During that time they’ve been cheap, audience-focused, and fair to their cast and crew. They’ve already raised the price at least once. If they get some loans/investors involved or have a bad year, I could easily see them becoming more like other streaming services. I hope I’m wrong.
True, it’s likely too early to tell. I think I just inadvertently compare them to all the other streaming services right now. As for the price increase, that’s only for new subscribers- existing subscribers are grandfathered in at the previous price.
+1 davinci… it’s incredible what you get in the free version, and the studio version is getting more and more worth the money in a value add way rather than a need it way
Actual paid services? Basically only Steam.
FOSS is the only software you can count on to not start nickel and diming you once the subscriber count starts to level out.
Steam
30% markup. Predatory currency conversion policies. Recent scandals with Steam censoring games on behest of Australian Right nuts groups.
You missed 3 times in a row.
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The 30% cut thing has been industry standard since the dawn of time. Valve goes out of its way to make exceptions to this rule down to 10% in cases of very high volume but everyone only talks about the 30 since thats all they hear about. Only an Epic Games apologist would parrot this as a talking point. Plus, developers are not getting nothing for that 30%, especially games that use Valve’s Steam networking services. Unlike Microsoft and Sony who also take 30% cuts, Valve doesn’t charge $10,000 per game patch to have someone review and approve it to be published.
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The regional pricing goes both ways. There was literally a game recently users were complaining about NOT getting it because the publisher opted out or something, where the regional pricing would have made the game affordable but in USD (Valves country of origin and therefore default), it was exhorbitantly priced. And this one wasn’t even Valve’s fault.
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Valve did not censor games directly on behest of the Australian nutjobs, they fought back against them pretty hard, but Valve is ultimately beholden to the payment processors (who they also pushed back on). Once Visa and MasterCard started threatening to pull services, Valve was put in a “comply or die” situation. If they didn’t do as they were told they wouldn’t be able to accept money with anything but Stripe or Bitcoin. They literally lost Paypal as a payment option over this fight.
I think its very dishonest of you to frame these points as enshittification. This term means the intentional degradation of a product or service for the sole motive of increasing profits. For point 1, the whole industry literally started off like that. For point 2, it was literally an attempt at equity (valve may not get the deltas correct but in some countries they’re losing money on games). And for point 3, you might be able to argue it but ultimately it wasn’t for profits so much as it was survival.
If you wanted to shitsling at Valve, you should have mentioned how Valve invented lootboxes in TF2 and then exacerbated the issue in CS:GO/CS2, releasing that awful plague onto the industry.
Only an Epic Games apologist would parrot this as a talking point.
Why are you trying to offend me? I didn’t call you names, why are you doing that?
but ultimately it wasn’t for profits so much as it was survival.
Visa and Mastercard aren’t the only available payment options in Steam. Yielding to them was for profit.
Survival? Steam has enough profit to create it’s own payment processor and make it popular.
He didn’t. He said people who parrot it are.
Unless you do, there is no reason to be offended. Up to you.And no; realistically, if you lose Visa and Mastercard, you can close shop. Obviously it’s for profit, because a 99% reduction in turnover means all employees out of work.
Yes, I took that number out of thin air, but I know most people would never bother as that is what they have.
Maybe it’s different in your country.Me:
30% markup
Them:
everyone only talks about the 30 since thats all they hear about. Only an Epic Games apologist would parrot this as a talking point
You:
He didn’t. He said people who parrot it are [Epic Games apologist]
Confused noises.
Semperverus said anyone who says that 30% is too much is an Epic Game apologists, whatever that is.
Semperverus is insinuating anyone who says that 30% is amount taken by Steam is wrong, and saying that is parroting, and should be instead thought as “Poor Steam is forced to take 30% because this is industry standard”, but Valve, and I quote here, “goes out of its way to make exceptions to this rule”.
And no; realistically, if you lose Visa and Mastercard, you can close shop. Obviously it’s for profit, because a 99% reduction in turnover means all employees out of work.
Doesn’t change the fact that bending over backwards for Visa and Mastercard and banning some content because of their whims is enshittification. The service is worse than it was before, in the name of profit.
No, again, he said anyone that parrots it. If you keep repeating that argument over and over, then your are parroting it. That’s what parrots do; they repeat stuff.
If you are offended, then it’s time for some self reflection. That is not an ad-hominem, but a blanket statement and opinion.And no, you’re being selective with the truth. You cherry pick bits of what he said to present your argument in a better light. I don’t entertain that, my friend.
Your last point is true, but again you are being selective with how you present it.
If I point a gun at you and say you die unless you do something against your personal morality, you’d most likely still do it. That is in the name of survival.
Yeah, you’ll be able to go to work tomorrow and make money because you’re not dead, but nobody can accuse you of doing it for profit. That is what you are in essence doing here and it’s a bad take in every possible way except morally.
Steam fought back and lost. They could morally tell Visa and MasterCard to pound sand and die with their heads held high, but I’m guessing they like you as my potential murder victim above, chose to keep existing instead.
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1password, Fingers crossed though
Is this a joke? 1Password’s switch from “lifetime license with local vaults” to “Fuck you/pay me subscription-based, cloud-only vaults” is the poster child for enshittified software. Version 8 is the main reason Bitwarden/KeepPass/VaultWarden are so popular now.
I only started using it after the introduction of the subscription model. So from my point of view it hasn’t gotten worse, yet…
Ah. For those from the Before Times, Versions 1 through 6 were absolutely amazing. Version 7 included VC-inspired “improvements” that set off early-warning alarms, and Version 8 is the Stephen Miller of password managers.
Wikipedia.
Though I could do without the endless donation blockups.
Just found these custom ad block filters. Seems to be working so far
wikipedia.org##.nag-trigger wikipedia.org###centralNotice wikipedia.org##[id$=“banner-nag”] wikipedia.org###frb-inline wikipedia.org##.cn-fundraisingIt’s not just the spam, there is other enshittification like the endless co-option with AI companies and private info disclosure (aka surveillance capitalism) under the self-serving excuse of being anonymized or aggregated.
I can forgive Wikipedia and Internet Archive for the spam. Both sites are incredibly valuable and completely ad-free.
They are one of the highest achievements of humanity, imho, that even make me feel proud to be a human.
It’s hard not to try to support them.
The “spam” is for them to operate, not maximise their profits.It’s not that simple and transparent actually. Wikipedia doesn’t really need those donations to operate. They have money reserves for many years of expenses. I don’t have a great source right now but this article looks decent. I didn’t read the whole thing though.
Gotcha, it’s another anti-European (and anti-USA), anti-male, quasi-Marxist organization. This is what your donations to Wikipedia are going to. Wikipedia spends more money on left-wing causes than actually running an encyclopedia, and by a very long-shot.
Well shit, I guess I’ll start donating
I see nothing wrong with that.
I just think it’s fair to say the way they ask for donations is at least a little bit disingenuous.
yeah agreed
You can login and it’ll stop with the pop ups for a year.
I came here to say both of those things about the Internet Archive, but I also hope both of those orgs get tons of donations regularly because I wouldn’t want to live in a world without them
I just pay the 52$ once a year and know I’ve done my part for knowledge.
You know what?
I’m gonna start doing that.
Procreate. I have payed for it once and it gives me to this day free updates. I had still so much fun drawing.
For a moment there I did not know that word is the name of a software application. Reading your sentence literally is… odd.
Tailscale
Craigslist
Hasn’t changed much at all, and their app is exactly what it needs to be, nothing more–i think the only thing I wasn’t able to do in the app was clear a saved search, but there’s no bloat, no ads, don’t need an account unless you’re posting or saving searches.
The site still looks like it came right out of the late 90’s and that’s all it needs to be
Every few years I’ll look for something on craigslist and every time I’m amazed that it’s still going strong and it’s still exactly the same.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a search engine that would bring up sites and services like those in this thread, and exclude enshittified trash like youtube, amazon, etc etc.
With some manual configuration, that’s something you can do with Kagi!
Good point. I would prefer to crowdsource the whitelist I think. Also, it would be cool to do stuff like search youtube but bring up a link to a dis-enshittified youtube intermediary.
That is also something you can do with Kagi. 😆 I have it set up so that all YouTube results redirect me to Invidious, as well as Reddit and Twitter for their respective frontends.
Care to share how you are doing this in Kagi?
To create a redirect:
- Go to https://kagi.com/settings/redirects
- Click “Add Rule”
- In the bottom box, use the following format to create your redirect:
^https://original.domain.tld/|https://new.domain.tld/For example, to replace www.youtube.com with inv.nadeko.net (an Invidious instance), you can use the rule
^https://www.youtube.com/|https://inv.nadeko.net/I’ve also created a copy of this rule for any youtu.be results, as well as X/Twitter and Reddit for their respective frontends. This will work for any pair of websites if you can simply replace the domain in the URL and have it pull up the correct content on the alternative website.
Thanks for this!
Where the heck is this advanced page linked to? Maybe it’s not shown by default on mobile, but there is no advanced menu section or button in the settings page for me when I view it on my phone.
Directly typing the advanced url works of course but this is super frustrating that it’s not visible for me otherwise. I wonder what else I’m not seeing as I mostly interact with Kagi on mobile
You sould be able to get to it under settings > advanced > “Open Redirects”
If only they didn’t pay Yandex, a company affiliated with Russian govt
It comes down to the fact that Kagi’s first priority in search is providing the best results, so they’re not going to turn down access to another search api based on politics.
Edit: Stract.com it is what Google was like in early 2000s. It’s not perfect, but its free till the dude dev running it in his basement needs paid support
that looks like some kinda weird consultancy site. maybe that ship has sailed already?
Ah crap, my bad. I misspelled it. https://stract.com/
much better!
Not an overly surprising one, but the arch wiki has been an incredible source of info with no ads, tracking, or any of the modern web bullshit for as long as I’ve used it.
They’ve been hit with some pretty major DDOS attacks recently and they’ve done a really good job of keeping the important parts of the service as accessible as possible - they haven’t resorted to buying into cloudflare’s monopoly or blocking vpn users despite either or both being the easy way out.
For anyone else who’s relied on them as much as I have, now would be a great time to donate!
I’ve never used Arch yet still use their wiki quite a lot.
For real. The number of times I’ve been working problems on a Raspberry Pi and my searching ends up there is wild.
Piratebay.
Playing cards. More or less unchanged from 30 years ago. Real nice, games still play the same too.
Oh also my local electric company is still providing well for not too much money.
nixos/nixpkgs
Kiseido Go Server (KGS)
If KGS’s UI looks like it hasn’t been updated in 20 years, that’s because it’s already perfect. There’s no ads, it’s purely functional, it does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. If you click on “KGS Plus” you have the option to spend money on lectures given by human pros. Otherwise it’s completely free, and it’s still an active go server that’s been around forever.
Is that where Sai played the Meijin
Based on time of the anime’s development, and of course the fact that it is japanese, more likely IGS was the thought process at that time. KGS was the standard in america… but not the primary choice for China/Japan.
