No it isn’t. It is shoveling AI generated slop down its users throats, whether they want it or not. Bypassing the real artists that need the money. And it is not a new phenomenon, see for instance:
An unfortunately no, I can’t think of any dotcom company that is not enshittificating. Some more, some less, but all the companies I have contact with (as a user - and FTR, I am not a gamer) seem to do it. I am glad for those of you who have had better experiences.
I’ve tried all of the music streaming services (Spotify, Pandora, Amazon, Apple and YouTube). Every few years I try them all again. I have found YouTube Music (formerly Google Play) to be superior. A lot of that may be the way that I use it and my particular genres and also because it’s most familiar to me. As a bonus a subscription to it is part of YouTube Premium (not YouTube TV) so you get commercial free videos. I don’t think it’s gotten worse over time but YouTube overall certainly has.
Interesting, I’ll have to look into that. My uncle has a vast repository of games and we usually at least try the same stuff. It would be cool if we could share libraries.
At some point i realized that i spent more time watching YouTube videos than any other source of “TV”, and i subscribed to YouTube. (Not YouTube TV ) I’ve been really happy with the service ever since. Yes, many of the people i follow embed ads for sponsors. But it’s otherwise commercial free, and there’s an awful lot of content out there.
My husband listens to YouTube music, with ads. So i guess it’s his choice, too.
Google has enshitified search quite a lot. But their other services are still surprisingly okay. I use Google docs a lot, Google forms, YouTube, Google calendar, and Google meet.
Can’t your husband use your account for music ad free? It’s normally $13/month for all of it which is the same you would pay for Spotify alone. I get it for $10/month bundled with my Verizon phone plan.
I live in a Google world. I like Google Meet much better than Zoom. My thermostat, smoke/CO detector and doorbell cam are all part of Google Home. I’m very happy with all of them although I can’t say that I’ve exhaustively tried other brands. I hated the Ring doorbell and returned it. The Google Nest is great.
Same. And for some reason YouTube doesn’t trigger the compulsive overuse for me that most social media does. I learned some great cross-stitching techniques on YouTube, and my husband and I often watch funny and interesting stuff before bed. Right now it’s Taskmaster and Cinemastix. I also love Hank Green. There is so much cool stuff on YouTube, some of it rising to the level of great art.
I agree. I enjoy YouTube, and then i walk away from it when i have someone else to do.
I’ve been told that if you just watch the first thing it suggests over and over you fall into a rabbit hole of right wing conspiracy theories. I’ve never actually tried that. But in fact, when it suggests new content creators to me, they are usually in a category i already watch (Minecraft, cooking) or something that’s a reasonable stretch (history of cooking → history of fashion, knife-making → cabinetry) and i get close to zero political content in my feed.
I’ve also been told the comments are a horrible quagmire, but that’s not my experience, either. I’ve seen lots of constructive discussions about things like the use of sour cherries, and only a little weirdness.
Imgur is also continuing to offer an easy-to-use, unobtrusive service. The big problem with them lately is being blocked in the UK, but I feel like that’s more on the UK than on Imgur themselves.
Sure but this and the fact that you’re only purchasing a license aren’t a degradation of service. Steam has always had those as part of the core function. If you liked Steam in 2007, there’s little reason to complain about it now.
YouTube (not TV) has a family plan too. It’s $23/mo for up to 6 accounts. They don’t really have to be family members per se, just people that you like…
But then again (much to my surprise) some people don’t seem to mind ads at all. I hear a single one and go into a screaming rage, but apparently some people don’t even notice them…
That’s a good point. Aside from Gemini everywhere (and not quite as intrusively as Copilot), Google Workspace (or Apps, or whatever it’s called these days) is still pretty solid and as useful as it was when it launched. Not much has really improved or changed, but then again, maybe that’s a good thing. The unlimited data they once offered (on paid plans) did go away, though, along with their free nonprofit subscription.
As for Google Home/Nest, there was a painful period around 2019 when they were transitioning a bunch of devices away from the Nest app, and you needed three apps to configure them… the Nest App, the Google Home app, and a third one that I forget now. Some settings were only in some apps, and no app had all the settings. It was quite painful and made me give up that ecosystem altogether. Hopefully they’ve fixed that now?
I have the Google Home app on my phone which has my Nest Thermostat, Nest Protect (smoke/CO) and Nest Doorbell on it. It’s seamless.
However:
Google recently stopped supporting the older Thermostats in September. I had an old Gen 2 model which was before the Google purchase. It actually was on a separate app. After the shutoff, the thermostat still worked perfectly fine manually but could no longer be controlled or monitored on your phone. I got something like 50% off on a new Gen 4 model which is a better product.
I have a Nest Protect which will go end of life in June but that’s because it’s ten years old and would be the same for any modern smoke detector. I got this before Nest was purchased as well. Google killed this excellent product. All of the existing ones will be supported until they expire which will be in around nine years for the last ones. If you want a new detector that is supported you have to get a specific model from First Alert. It lacks the super cool night light feature of the Protect and doesn’t look as nice.
Oh, sad! I forgot I still have (and like) one of those. I hadn’t touched it in years and totally forgot it was up there, but earlier this week it gently said “I’ve detected smoke in the kitchen. The alarm will sound soon. It may be loud.”, giving me time to take the burnt burrito out of the oven and skip the alarm before it sounded. Nice. I’ll miss it 
If you take it down and look at the underside, you can see the month and year of manufacture. That will tell you how long you have left. I got one of the first ones when they came out. It had some kind of defect that became apparent after two or three years and they replaced it for free. You should start getting increasingly less gentle warnings when you have a month left.
Looks like 3 years from now, so still a bit of time.
I think by that time, if society is still around, I’ll want to have moved everything over to Home Assistant anyway. I don’t trust these cloud hardware services anymore. (Talk about enshittification and rentals! Ownership of these things, even in hardware, is meaningless since they’re all tied to fickle cloud providers.)
I’ve used this a few times to post photos to the Dope and for the life of me I can’t figure out how the interface works. I always manage to post a photo somehow but I couldn’t tell you how I got there.
You’re not alone. It may be user error but getting the right link that works here or on reddit consistently is by some arcane process that seems to involve luck.
It’s deliberate enshittification on their part. Imgur was a lot easier to use in its early days, when it was still trying to grow its user base. But then too many people started directly linking to the images themselves instead of the preview page, thus bypassing all their ads and recommendations and turning them into a free image host (and thus huge bandwidth sink). In response, they made it harder (but not impossible) to hotlink images directly.
It’s worse than that, even. Even some games that could otherwise be single-player, like Diablo IV or Last Epoch, have always-online requirements.
In the case of Diablo IV, there is no bypassing it at all. They designed the world to be a shitty MMO, so even if you want to play by yourself, there’s no avoiding other players in the wild.
In the case of Last Epoch, there is a “fake offline” mode which is still-online single-player with chat. Then there’s a “true offlne” mode with a completely different client that is actually offline altogether… for now. That game was recently bought by Krafton, who is going “all in on AI” and laying off humans left and right, so further enshittification is probably right around the corner. (Sad; it was quite a good game)
We’re back to the Napster days… only the pirates (playing a copy of the game with the DRM and server checks stripped out) have a good experience. The people who buy the game the proper way suffer.
In between, a lot of games will now release with day 1 uber-intrusive DRM, but then remove it a few months later once initial sales have stabilized. It’s sort of a “sliding scale of shittiness”… the early adopters who want it ASAP can pay max money and live with the DRM. Later buyers get it on sale without the DRM. Pirates still win, regardless…
I don’t think this part has to be true. GOG.com has been around for a long time now and offer a similar digital distribution service, but all their games are DRM-free. They even go out of their way to bundle emulators for very old games so you can play them on modern systems. In some rare cases they’ll also work with the publisher to completely remaster certain oldie-but-goodies.
Once you buy a game there, you can back it up anywhere and it’ll always be available to you. You can also redownload it as long as GOG itself is still around, which hopefully it will be because it’s a subsidiary of the company behind The Witcher. There are no DRM checks anywhere.
It’s a good middle ground.
But TBH I still prefer Steam… the client is better and the download experience is much smoother. GOG has good intentions, but their Galaxy client is a festering turd compared to the Steam client, and I’d rather pay (and potentially lose) a game on Steam than to deal with it on GOG.
Steam also has a kind of (unintentional? intentional? hard to say) lock-in in terms of the Steamworks APIs… game developers can choose to use Steam’s own matchmaking and multiplayer services to save time. But then that makes cross-play (with Epic, Xbox, and PS players) more difficult, and crossplay with GOG players is all but impossible because they don’t have their own multiplayer layer.