Yes, I’m so angry and salty that I checks notes wrote a detailed and even-handed analysis of the situation with appropriate caveats. How dare I state facts with sources and explanations of my reasoning.

I’m just absolutely raging. It’s embarrassing, frankly. I’m making a fool of myself. I can’t believe I lost control like that and said words that I believe to be true. Who does that? Unhinged behaviour. Just wild. I should be banned.

That’s one way it happens, but in general the term appears to be about decline in quality for the purposes of profit-seeking, regardless of whether services were offered for free or not.

The wiki article starts with this:

Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

Other articles I looked at seem to agree with this basic concept.

And like I said, spam from scammers and inbox spam are examples of shittiness that seep in regardless of if you engage or not. There is no “no marketplace plz” option, and even if there were scammers can still send you friend request spam.

The steam marketplace is an attempt to monetise the user base by creating a bunch of microtransactions and taking a cut for the store. They have created a speculative market, which is essentially gambling, and made it available to minors. This market is designed to exploit people’s psychological weaknesses.

Yes, users and devs get a cut too, and that’s better than some sites will do to you, but creating a market also has a bunch of externalities - extra problems that are offloaded onto other people and not borne by valve.

So suddenly we’ve got a bunch of scammers creating accounts to make money, which obviously can scam users, plus it generats spam, and it creates a need for user-hostile security. Now I can’t friend my kid’s account without spending money on it for instance,

Also there’s the item spam. Now when I get a notification I don’t know if it’s a community forum reply, or just more worthless junk in my inventory. The inventory could have just been a way to store game gifts and other things of actual value, now I never look at it because it’s just full of trash.

Some of these are minor inconveniences, but that’s how enshittification happens. It’s little, creeping annoyances that get worse and worse until it starts to make people look for alternatives.

And like I said, it’s not as bad as other places. Steam is still the best distribution platform out there, but it has enshittified a little bit. It has to, because the interests of the owners and the interests of the users are fundamentally at odds - more money spent means more money for the owners.

You can’t do whatever you want with open source either. One big stipulation of copyleft licenses is the share-alike clause, which means you can’t make modifications and then decide your program is now closed-source, so it protects the code from being enclosed again.

I mean yes you can make whatever modifications you want, generally, but it’s not totally unrestricted.

I would say the marketplace is a form of enshittification. They’re not burrowing headfirst into the shit like some platforms, but it’s an inevitable trend regardless.

Plus who knows what happens when gabe isn’t around any more. Best case scenario is he leaves the company to the workers as a co-op and then it has a chance to be a lasting legacy, but maybe it goes to someone who puts it up to be publicly traded and that’s game over.

That’s the thing, thank you! I tried looking before and couldn’t find anybody doing it. Maybe I discounted obsidian because it wasn’t free or foss. If it’s free now and the format is open then that helps a lot.

So does obsidian support nonlinear spatially organised notes the way onenote does? I’ve been using joplin but without that onenote feature it’s been a bit underwhelming tbh, and I can’t find any software that does it.

https://epubor.com/3-ways-to-remove-drm-from-kindle-books.html

It’s astonishingly easy tbh. I think this might be the main reason why they’re trying to stop you from getting the files on your PC.

Edit: that link is apparently promoting their own software, but the calibre plugin works very well, and as a bonus calibre is a great foss ebook manager.

I’d say what he actually did was deflect the question and refuse to acknowledge that it was about appearance at all. He just talked about function over form, and that it works well and is intuitive.

I actually agree with that, I like the big buttons, and context menus usually have whatever I’m looking for, but you can take the deflection as an admission he knows it’s ugly and doesn’t think it’s even important enough to directly address.

I mean honestly just a beauty pass that softened the colour palette and gave it a less harsh appearance overall would make a big difference. He could even just create a skinning system, that’s one way that this has been addressed in the past, and it’s a job an engineer should be able to do just fine.

I don’t think that’s it at all. Wealth and power makes people stupid, and in order to keep believing in their own superior status, they have to believe we are stupider than them, which is very stupid indeed.

Like it or not, even “monsters” have to have a model of the world and a theory of mind in order to operate. If they didn’t think about us, they wouldn’t be able to exploit us. If they didn’t treat us with contempt, they wouldn’t be able to exploit us. So, contemptuous consideration it is.

It’s just that is a poor model of reality, so it’s going to be part of their downfall. They are going to keep treating us as idiots until we surprise them by suddenly not acting the part anymore. These abuses are clear and they are piling up. We remember the panama papers and what happened to those journalists. We remember what happened to Snowden, Manning and Assange. This has an undermining effect on the legitimacy of the system.

You don’t see the termites until the house is already falling down around you.

They think we are so fucking stupid, don’t they?

What info got spies killed exactly? Aspersions were cast but no actual information ever came out about that, and presumably if they’re already dead then it can be released.

If that had actually happened, the government would have been howling from the rooftops about it, we’d all know their names.

But the reports on what damage it did were entirely redacted, and the worst thing they could say was “likely to have lethal consequences”, which presumably means it hadn’t had lethal consequences. Pretty weak shit, and even then we’re just supposed to trust them when they relay the contents of blacked out pages to us?

Also they’re bitching and moaning about how it will weaken their ability to do spy shit and like… good. Why do we want them to do that shit? Everything we know about what they do is basically universally evil, so maybe Snowden is a hero actually.

Nah, it’s bullshit, they’re just trying to assassinate his character and it sounds like you fell for it.

I’m curious about how they handle retracting the quote in an open source federated model where the behaviour of other instances can’t be ensured. Does the instance hosting the quote simply refuse to honour the quote link?

And I suppose if an instance uses a hostile workaround like simply embedding a copy, that would be seen as a bad mark against the instance which could lead to defederation?

I’m not saying it’s impossible, just interested in the specifics.

Right but the specific issue with the Pinto was that it would explode into flames on a rear impact, so this is the appropriate metric.

Like deaths from other accidents would skew the numbers anyway because 70s cars were death traps compared to today, but even in that context, the Pinto’s explosions were alarming.

Beating it on that isolated metric is a very special kind of achievement.

They know that liberation is a threat to them.

It’s not. Why do you want it to be? It’s one of the most enduring social media monopolies, and it should be brought down. The more they lose revenue, the more they are forced to squeeze, the more they enshittify, the more people are pushed to make and use alternatives, and the stronger those alternatives get.

Honestly once youtube’s network can be usurped by something like peertube, I think that might be the ballgame for centralised social media. It is the hardest one to topple because of bandwidth costs, which means once it goes the case for needing a corporation to fund our networks kind of collapses with it.