Everyone in the commercial software industry works that way - you buy a license to use a product, not the actual product. Epic, MS, GoG, Novell (when they existed) - everyone. It’s not enshittification as such, because it was always like that.
I have not had such discussions. But one likely factor enhancing musicians’ quality of life is nationalized health care. I’m often curious what factors enable musicians to tour internationally - when I perceive the challenges they face domestically.
The folk I am familiar with play bluegrass and oldtime music. Only a very few performers at the very top make really good money. Especially harder for a backup musician.
A couple of months ago I was talking to one player who commented on how fortunate she feels to be able to “bring beauty into the world.” So, that is likely some compensation for the monetary challenges. Not something i can say about MY career! 
Right? It’s an atrocity how much CEOs get paid relative to musicians, artists, teachers, etc.
Even in the software space, a developer or artist or voice actor can pour their heart and soul for a decade into a series and then be unceremoniously laid off a few weeks later. Meanwhile some random MBA type waltzes in for a couple years, destroys the brand, and walks away a multi-millionaire. It’s all fucked. I wish we saw more co-operatives in tech — there’s a few, but not very many, especially in the US.
… recordings were cylinder shaped.
I find the paid version of Spotify a pretty solid product, from the user perspective. It does what I want, I have music and podcasts sorted and ready to go whenever I want. Commercials are only those inserted by the artists into the recording.
I agree about Valve/Steam being good. I hated the idea until I tried it, and discovered Steam did a better job of keeping my old games playable than I could. It’s a very consumer oriented platform which seems to actually be trying to keep me happy.
In a technical legal sense, maybe. But in a real, practical sense, no. With a game I bought from GOG, or on a CD back in the 90s, I can still load up the game and play it any time I want, and the game publisher can’t do anything to stop me. When I bought my copy, they ceded control of that copy to me. With almost all game publishers nowadays, that’s not true any more: They can, if they want, change how my game works, or deactivate it, or delete it entirely, and I can’t stop them. They still have control, not me. Even Steam could do this, though in practice they mostly haven’t and I have the reasonable expectation that they’ll continue to not screw me over.
This is why I have a huge amount of respect for Taylor Swift, even though her music isn’t my style: She saw a system that was designed to exploit people like her, and figured out how to work within that system, to change it so that she was the one benefiting from her own creative work.
I didn’t know this about her (and I even like her music). How did she fight the system and change it?
I don’t know the details, but largely by first creating her own recording company, and then re-recording new versions of all of her songs that she owned completely, to replace the ones the other recording companies owned. That’s what “Taylor’s Version” is about. Eventually, she got so rich by doing that that she was able to buy back the rights to the originals, too.
Hell, DRM existed and was often more intrusive on games purchased on physical media in the days before Steam…
Yeah, our laws still really haven’t caught up to the realities of today. Our copyright laws mostly predate the current era of our IP-dependent economy, were ghostwritten (or straight-up written) by the industries they were supposed to regulate, and then passed by lawyers a few generations too old to even know what they were regulating (if they bothered to read the bills at all, or even used the products). That wasn’t so much an example of “all commercial software is evil”, just of regulatory capture and a government that long ago failed its everyday constituents in favor of its elites.
Meanwhile, if you put aside the legal semantics, there ARE substantial and meaningful differences in the way different software is sold: Not just Steam vs GoG, but also Path of Exile in Asia (pay to win) vs the West (cosmetic lootboxes), Adobe vs itself a few years earlier, Microsoft vs itself every few years, Jetbrains vs Oracle, Redhat before and after IBM, games publishers before and after acquisitions and mergers… all of those make noticeable differences in the way a consumer is able to pay for and keep a product, or not, even if they’re all just strictly “software licenses”.
We may not yet have clear enough legal verbiage to differentiate between “owner” and “'licensee” when it applies to digital products (at least not to the common person), but despite that, there ARE real and meaningful differences in the actual real-world way software is sold or rented. Companies don’t HAVE to be assholes towards their consumers. Many just choose to be because they CAN.
But even back then, it varied widely between companies. One company might check for a physical hardware dongle connected to the printer port. Another might just have you type in a code from the back of the instruction manual. And yet another would give you 1/3 of the game as free shareware, and if you paid for the rest, they’d just send you the floppies without any DRM. On the other extreme, there was also those self-destructing DVDs that disintegrate after a few plays.
Books, music, movies, games… they’ve all been subject to unauthorized distribution and piracy for as long as they’ve been around, and for sure that has a toll on their profits, but despite that there have always been less evil and more evil companies. It’s not a universal that software can only be rented with super-intrusive rootkit DRMs.
There was a time when the most common form of DRM was “The game is on a CD, and you can’t copy it, because it’s not possible to copy CDs, and who owns a hard drive big enough to dump an entire CD worth of data on to it?”. Seems kind of quaint, now, with hard drives big enough to store a thousand CDs on them.
And of course, even then, often the only reason that the game entirely filled up a CD was because of the full-motion video cutscenes between the actual gameplay levels, and so you could still dump the entire game onto a hard drive, just by skipping over the cutscenes. Though some games figured out ways around that, too.
Came here to say what @bump said about eBay. I’ve been a member since 1998 and the tools they offer are so much better now. Listing is so dang easy. I didn’t even mind it when they were glued to PayPal (they aren’t anymore). Their fees are crazy but I am pretty sure every selling platform has fees in line with theirs but nobody’s tools come close. And I am not any sort of “power seller” so I don’t even get deep into their tools. Just the basic stuff for making listings is great. Heck you used to not be able to upload photos you had to find somewhere to post them! So their fees seem to at least be going in to R&D.
I think eBay has a very strong user base and know they are nothing without their sellers so while they’re not all “the customer comes first” they know that they really can’t be pissing off their sellers too much so they try not to enshittify themselves.
As to the OP…Vanguard is known as a nice platform. I’ve only been using it for about a year but it does make investing extremely easy. Has it always been good?
Yeah, I’ve got a sort of feeling that due to the way that eBay directly connects buyers and sellers, they’re either unwilling to enshittify it, there’s not much opportunity to enshittify it, or that possibly enshittifying it also somehow works to enhance it for the buyers and sellers anyway.
I’ve recently got back into photography (I’m not even a talented amateur; I just like taking pictures of stuff) and have been getting older stuff off eBay. I was surprised at how buying had become more streamlined, but it didn’t really stand out as dramatically easier- I figured I had just got some on-the-ball sellers who promptly sent me the tracking info. But selling was WAY easier- very streamlined and efficient. So much so that I’m considering selling other stuff on there because of how easy it is; it’s approaching the ease of donating stuff to charities.
The way middlemen enshittify is to increase their percentage of the deal. Which it seems they’ve been doing. While also inhibiting direct contact between buyer and seller. Which it seems they’ve been doing. Although I’m hardly an expert.
eBay annoyed me enough that I deleted my account with them, but in their defense, at least they created a marketplace where there really wasn’t one before. In the past you had to go to your neighborhood flea market or garage sale to get rid of secondhand sales… eBay turned that into a global audience.
Today there’s Mercari, Etsy, Amazon, Alibaba, AliExpress, etc., but back in the day, eBay was the only realistic option for individuals to occasionally sell something online to somebody they’ve never met. Their two-way reputation system did a lot to protect both sellers and buyers.
Their fees are still not that high… up to 13.25%, but less for high-value items. That’s even less than, say, digital storefronts that skim 30% off the top and don’t even do any sort of validation. eBay has to deal with real-world shipping, customer mediation across hundreds of item types, cultural differences, different laws and regulations… it’s not a trivial thing to set up.
I guess it just seems like such a different attitude compared to someone like, say, Microsoft, who just sits on their laurels from the 90s and adds shitty subscriptions and AI spam everywhere, create no actual value, and hurt productivity everywhere. By contrast eBay might be occasionally annoying, but as far as enshittification goes, I’d argue they’d somehow managed to stay pretty clear of it… kudos to them!
GitHub still manages not only to give away its core product for free, but has added a few other free offerings as well. Though it’s true that they’ve attempted too many feature offerings and have ended up with some that are weak or neglected, and there have been some uptime issues in recent years.
But by and large, thanks to GitHub, we’re in a golden age of free, comprehensive, advanced software project hosting, collaboration, and AI acceleration. Few if any features have degraded or disappeared, if anything they need to kill some peripheral features to strengthen the core productivity suite (imo).
Their CEO resigned recently, though, and it’s being absorbed into the rest of Microsoft’s AI crap. It will lose its independence. I hope it doesn’t get too bad…
At least Microsoft does a (much) better job on their dev tools than their consumer ones.
The rumors of absorption have been flying since it was acquired 7 years ago, but it hasn’t happened because the brand has value that would be torched by putting a Microsoft logo on it. So it remains independent except for some sales-related functions.
Honestly a little more Microsoft oversight wouldn’t go amiss, as GH has a tendency to chase the Next Big Thing, but has shown poor judgment in determining what that is.
I’m not sure their goal is to minimize contact; I think it’s more to grease the wheels. By providing the mechanisms for listing, paying, and shipping, they enable the whole transaction to progress with less friction than if the seller/buyer had to negotiate all that themselves.
I’d think that fees would have to be extortionate to qualify as enshittification though, along with some sorts of monopolistic behaviors like discontinuing some of the more costly features, no matter how convenient.
Locally we have a service called Gumtree where you can list stuff to sell or give away for nothing. Whether it has any international presence I have no idea but I don’t see any signs of enshittification there.