deweydecibel @ deweydecibel @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

At the cost of space for the actual content on screen.

It's not a choice, here, so much as it is the result of our smartphone culture.

In the US, using the default messaging app on your phone is the norm for most people. Third party messaging apps like WhatsApp simply never caught on over here, so we've let Apple, Google, Samsung, etc determine how we talk to each other. Vendor lock-in tactics run rampant, with barely any regulation.

The default messaging apps on iPhone is iMessage. It's locked down and can not communicate with any other messaging app except via SMS. Therefore the other apps have to use it to communicate with iPhone users.

Conversely, Google has a messaging protocol they're trying to get Apple to adopt called RCS, but Google also refuses to let RCS be used by third party apps. So SMS becomes the fallback for communication between them.

It's partially corporate bickering, partially consumers being tech illiterate and staunchly opposed to using anything third party. Particularly in the case of iPhone users, there's a strong culture of entrenchment in the Apple ecosystem, and for some people, not being in it is actually seen as worthy of derision. There's actual cases of bullying in schools if a kid doesn't use iPhone, and that's having an increasingly detrimental effect on the market.

You have to appreciate, in Europe, you're mostly using Android, a (somewhat) open ecosystem, and that mentality is stronger over there.

But here in the states, iPhones are extremely prominent, and with them comes the mentality that Apple has spent decades programming into its consumers: don't use anything non-Apple, and if that creates problems for other people, too bad, they should just buy Apple too.

"Modern" (i.e. Apple-chasing) design seems to be hellbent on wasting as much screen space as possible.

Also the repeated use of only referring to the game as DND in the article is very odd, nobody calls it that maybe DnD is ok but not in a professional setting where either Dungeons and Dragons or maybe D&D is the standard. It sets off my hearsay alarm massively.

It's a site based out of Beijing, written in English, reporting on a story published on another Chinese site, that was written in Chinese. It's completely believable that they wouldn't know this. There is no & in Chinese, they just write their word for "and", and not thinking to leave the middle N uncapitalized is hardly an odd mistake.

A lot of them aren't actually implementing anything, they're just changing words on their product description.

Like a spell checking addon suddenly rebranding itself as "AI".

From the very start of all this, it never made sense to call any of this "artificial intelligence", but that marketing stuck, and now we're trying to retroactively apply it to very basic things like text suggestion, further diluting the meaning of the term.

I don't think it does.

Hasbro is an Western company, DnD is an a Western IP and cultural touchstone. Hasbro is as greedy as any corporation that owns an IP, but at the very least, I trust Hasbro to be staffed with people that have a greater respect for it than Tencent.

There's just no good reason why a Chinese company needs to be buying up Western IPs. It's bad enough we have American conglomerates doing it, but at least they still reside where their roots are.

Few things are more pathetic than someone that edits their original comment to whine about downvotes. It's sad you genuinely believe only a bot could explain them all.

We're really just going to lay a blanket statement down like this? Every single one, everywhere, run by sociopaths? No room for nuance here at all?

Reminder that schools are often run by former teachers. You know, those severally underpaid and overworked people that do one of the hardest and most important jobs there is.

My guess is this is a response to the removal of Confederate statues.

I also wouldn't put it past them to be thinking of ways they can take advantage of identity verification schemes. The idea of everyone needing to have Microsoft Authenticator installed to verify their age for any site they want to visit must make them salivate. Makes me wanna puke that they'd get away with it, too.

Is there a fork being maintained? I haven't seen one. Was just poking around for one yesterday.

All of which begs the question why are we bothering to pretend any of this is actually democratic or that the fediverse is truly unified across instances.

On a fundamental level, this "choose your voters" thing breaks the integrity of the voting system. I understand why it needs to happen to combat rogue instances, but the level of manipulation and silent curation that is possible, without the average user's knowledge, means no one can trust the numbers they see on any instance.

There's just so many avenues for abuse here, and it's disheartening to not see more acknowledgement of that from the devs.

In my mind the UI should make this very obvious (honestly I think there should be a pop-up that warns new users of this every time they vote until they check a box to disable it), because it's not what people expect. But votes are very public.

Which de-incentivizes voting, choking off the thing needed to aggregate the content. Kind of underlining the problem with the votes being public.

We want a web where users are in control. That means a web where we freely choose our online services from a wide menu and stay with them because we like them, not because we can’t afford to leave. We want a web where you get the things you ask for, not the things that corporate shareholders would prefer that you’d asked for. We want a web where willing listeners and willing speakers, willing sellers and willing buyers, willing makers, and willing audiences are all able to transact and communicate without worrying about their relationships being held hostage or disrupted to cram “sponsored posts” into their eyeballs.

I feel this deeply, but I worry we're long past it. A platform has to facilitate these things. which means you have to surrender to the way the platform works to participate. And the truth is, no matter if it's volunteers or a corporation, there is going to be an interfering element that you have to trust not to fuck with you.

The fediverse feels like it's part of the solution, but not all of it. There are still gatekeepers here who are capable of abusing that position to "disrupt", maybe not for "sponsored posts", but for other reasons.

The original "article" isn't an article, it's just an announcement.

https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/

As for this article, it's a blog post attached to a book store, expanding on Doctorow and their book. There's a lot more context being added in this blog post than in that announcement. There's ads but they're just ads for the books available in this store. I.e. relevant to people who are visiting a book store's website.

Not saying shitty sites don't lazily re-write articles all the time to harvest views, but this isn't a good example of that.

Language evolves. What he described refers to a specific pattern relating to specific platforms, but it also speaks to an overarching pattern that can be applied to most tech and digital markets nowadays.

User entrenchment and the rise of oversized tech companies dominating the industry on multiple fronts has brought us to a tech space where companies no longer need to fear backlash or consequences for most anti-user decisions they could make, as users will simply never leave, and competition is sparse. The "Free Market" is effectively neutered because users will complain but not change their behavior if the cost for doing so means moderately less convenience.

Enshitification, to me, is when a tech company realizes this and takes advantage of it by eroding what made the thing worthwhile, knowing full well they can disregard all criticism and complaints.

It basically speaks to a moment when tech companies shift from thinking "how do we attract users?" to "What can we get away with?"

It's also very obviously an attempt by Google to scare non-tech savvy people away from third party app stores and sideloading. Regardless of the actual risks involved, it's very beneficial to their bottom line if people fear anything "unofficial", so they're going to maximize every chance to reinforce that fear. A tactic Apple and Microsoft also use to great effect.

Ok cool, didn't realize they'd added this.

If they can find a solution for Android not being able to run Tailscale and a different VPN at the same time, I'd finally be able to commit to it fully.

All good stuff, but I should clarify, the friends and family in question are not tech literate people. They call the internet "the wifi", get the shitty gateway from Spectrum and plug it in.

Assuming I can apply any sort of configuration to that device in the first place, the second something breaks, either I'm getting a call, or they'll call Spectrum and their rep will reset the gateway to defaults.

I'd also be hesitant to employ a VPN to cloud solution, because I have no idea what that's going to do to the speed.

Basically I was just asking if there was a free method of doing this securely and discreetly where the only thing they ever have to do is put an IP address into Jellyfin. I'm perfectly aware there may not be, I was just curious if there was a method I hadn't heard of.

Something I've kind of thought about is maybe, at least for my parents and closest friend, buying a cheap local machine (or repurposing an old OptiPlex or something) for them to keep in the house that I would mirror my library to, or least be able to manage remotely. "Sure, mom, you wanna see this? I'll tell your box to fetch it."

I mean, that was never seriously in doubt. The days of massive site migrations happening overnight are long over.

What matters is the momentum.