Enshittification Full Ahead

[Davide DB]

No further words

 

 

[Andrew Reid]

Absolute scumbag behaviour from these American corporate fascists.

The law and YouTube needs to stand up and say... enough.

You should not be able to abuse so many innocent people via the legal system.

It's all fair use.

[Andrew Reid]

 

[eatstoomuchjam]

Volkswagen are now selling you the whole car, but requiring a subscription to get the full performance of it.  🤮

https://fortune.com/2025/08/19/volkswagen-horsepower-subscription-economy-cost-features/

(Relevant to enshittification, not to copyright strikes)

[ND64]

8 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Volkswagen are now selling you the whole car, but requiring a subscription to get the full performance of it.  🤮

When you see even the Germans hire more bean counters than engineers to survive in a China dominated market, you know its bad. Everybody is pursuing easy money, all under umbrella of legal system. From subscriptions to patent trolling to copyright harassment.

[Davide DB]

12 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

 

 

 

The pattern is always the same: silencing those who are inconvenient to you through supposed copyright violations or lawsuits, knowing full well that 99% of the time, the people affected don't have the means or the funds to defend themselves.

This is also a classic pattern in journalism here in The Banana Republic Of Italy. The big company or industrial group, or even the wealthy politician, sues the journalist. Anyway, they have a host of lawyers already on salary, and even if they lose the lawsuit, the amount doesn't even slightly affect their budget.

[Davide DB]

I think this post is enough to understand where we are headed. Adobe's subscription model is laughable in comparison.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/15/musklemons/

Quote

 

Most modern cars have some kind of internet connection, but Tesla goes much further. By design, its cars receive "over-the-air" updates, including updates that are adverse to drivers' interests. For example, if you stop paying the monthly subscription fee that entitles you to use your battery's whole charge, Tesla will send a wireless internet command to your car to restrict your driving to only half of your battery's charge.

This means that your Tesla is designed to follow instructions that you don't want it to follow, and, by design, those instructions can fundamentally alter your car's operating characteristics. For example, if you miss a payment on your Tesla, it can lock its doors and immobilize itself, then, when the repo man arrives, it will honk its horn, flash its lights, back out of its parking spot, and unlock itself so that it can be driven away

 

 

 

[MrSMW]

13 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Volkswagen are now selling you the whole car, but requiring a subscription to get the full performance of it

If folks don't like this, the solution is easy, - don't buy a VW. Other cars are available.

But it won't happen because out of all the cars they sell per annum, a couple of hundred will complain on their favourite social media platform, a couple more hundred will buy something else purely because of this and the other near 9 million, will just shrug and accept it.

[eatstoomuchjam]

1 hour ago, MrSMW said:

If folks don't like this, the solution is easy, - don't buy a VW. Other cars are available.

 

Yes, but as long as some people still buy VW and some people buy the upgrade, other car manufacturers will be inspired to do the same.  This is how the enshittification race to the bottom works.

It used to be that if I bought a plane ticket on any airline, I got a checked bag for free.  Not only that, but overhead space was plentiful and I could be a bit chill about boarding the plane.  Then one airline started charging for checked bags.  When people didn't stop flying with them, the other airlines followed suit.  After all, people are apparently willing to accept a shittier flying experience.  Now checked bags cost money and overhead space is crammed full which makes me one of the annoying boarding buzzards circling around the boarding stanchions so that I can be sure to get on in time to put my camera bag above me and not get into an argument with the boarding agent about whether I'm going to gate check it (and no, gate agent, I cannot relocate all of the lithium batteries into my other much smaller "personal item" that goes under the seat in front of me).

Anyway, the shrugging and accepting it is basically what is at the core of enshittification.

[MrSMW]

2 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Anyway, the shrugging and accepting it is basically what is at the core of enshittification.

Indeed, but when the reality is the majority won’t do anything, except perhaps grumble on social media, the outcome is inevitable and it soon becomes the norm.

I still need to look at how I can get out of the Adobe model, but 2 things stop me:

1. Big discount due to someone I know and 

2. Not so much laziness, but rather it bores me to tears having to learn an entire new workflow that would have to replace multiple pieces of software I have used for over a decade.

Most don’t have the luxury of 1. so makes 2. even harder.

But ultimately, unless a greater majority or even simply a significant number that can cause a serious dent, act, then companies will exploit that.

[eatstoomuchjam]

16 minutes ago, MrSMW said:

unless a greater majority or even simply a significant number that can cause a serious dent, act, then companies will exploit that

Yes, this is also a symptom of late-stage unrestrained capitalism when there is no longer a lot of competition in the market, but instead there are a handful of well-established/entrenched players who can gamble with losing some sales in the short term.  Don't buy a VW this time around because they added a stupid subscription?  They'll be in the running next time after all the others add shitty subscriptions too.

The same applies to stuff like car vendors trying to move away from supporting Carplay/Android Auto because they really want to sell you subscriptions to connected features in the car, despite that you already have all of those things paid for in your phone already.

[Yannick Willox]

16 hours ago, Davide DB said:

I think this post is enough to understand where we are headed. Adobe's subscription model is laughable in comparison.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/15/musklemons/

 

 

One of the main problems is people reposting bullshit that is easy to prove wrong.

[eatstoomuchjam]

5 hours ago, Yannick Willox said:

One of the main problems is people reposting bullshit that is easy to prove wrong.

Someone loves Eeeeelllllooooonnnnnnn.  If you stan him enough online, maybe he'll be your friend and give you a billion of his dollars.  Keep it up!

[Tim Sewell]

I'd seen quite a lot of the info in that post previously as I follow Ed Neidermeyer on BlueSky, who has spent the last 10 years writing about Musk's various crimes.

But the bit at the end about newly-tariffed countries no longer having much need to emulate DMCA laws with regard to reverse engineering might just have some bearing on why Trump is suddenly threatening other countries that enact laws to regulate or tax US Big Tech companies.

[Yannick Willox]

1 hour ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Someone loves Eeeeelllllooooonnnnnnn.  If you stan him enough online, maybe he'll be your friend and give you a billion of his dollars.  Keep it up!

I really do not have any love for Elmo, but there is no way everything you read on that blog post is true. If you have proof otherwise, except that we both have a profound contempt for Elmo, be my guest. In the EU they would be open to a flood of lawsuits, both by users and control organisms.

THIS is a big part of the enshittification, the abundance of misinformation by people on the internet that have not gone completely bonkers like most have, but still fall prey to a lack of objective source and fact checking. Mainly because they have a profound dislike for something/someone, thus the things happening or being reported must be true.

eg. The Meidas network, I was a fan, but sorry, they are FAR from objective by now, and way too emotional. It comes across as fake instantly, even if I have sympathy for them.

but the OP was on a completely other matter. It had nothing to do with misinformation, but everything with abuse of legal power by the big guys.

That is the point I wanted to make. Every time as sane person makes an incorrect statement online, it adds to the problem.

[eatstoomuchjam]

1 hour ago, Yannick Willox said:

I really do not have any love for Elmo, but there is no way everything you read on that blog post is true. If you have proof otherwise, except that we both have a profound contempt for Elmo, be my guest.

I'm obviously not going to go and manually look up every single fact in that post and provide a citation for it.  That's absurd.  You said 

8 hours ago, Yannick Willox said:

One of the main problems is people reposting bullshit that is easy to prove wrong.

So now the burden is on you.  Prove that bullshit wrong. It's apparently easy.