Increased Enshittification

Has anyone noticed the crazy enshittification going on lately? 

okay if you aren't familiar with the term enshittification, it's when online services/platforms are really good and attract a bunch of customers at first then slowly decay and abuse advertising and such. 

A good example of this would be spotify. At first spotify seems great and gives all these features like playlists made for you, seeing what you're friends are listening too, tracked listening stats, but then you start to get 5 advertisements in a row. Spotify only promotes big artist's songs and what's popular right now AND they only pay their artists about $0.005 per play. This is a horrible rate. This means 10,000 plays is around $30-50. Also when you get spotify premium the only perks you get is listening offline and no advertisements, but when you think about it after you cancel your premium subscription what do you end up with? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. When you buy a record, CD, or casset you have physical media you can play over and over again with no ads and when you're done with it you can sell it!! Spotify premium is a sham or "larp". 

I am starting to see enshittification everywhere now. Google search, Instagram, Disney+, even the billboards in my neighborhood are becoming shitty. 

Google search no longer displays the relevant websites first they display the websites that give them the most money at the top of their page along with that all of our searches are being replaced by Google's Gemini AI bot. Instead of showing the sites we were actually looking for they show AI's take on our search. Why is AI becoming the default? I see this not just online but in my local neighborhood advertisement. There is a realtor company billboard near my neighborhood and they always make funny puns and dress up for the pun on the billboard but they have started using AI to dress themselves up in the billboard. It's not that hard to put on a funny costume. 

This is absolutely horrible and you may be thinking there is no way for us to stop this, but actually there is something we can do about this. We can vote with our wallets. Now what does this mean? Buy from your local stores, only buy what you need, try not to act on impulses when shopping take a step back and make sure it's something you absolutely need, and when you're on the web think about their monetization strategies. 

As a consumer that's the main thing we can do, as a worker you can choose not to help them. Enshittification exploits people's labour, causes monopolies(when a company becomes the only provider of a product/service and there is no other substitutes), and overall it destroys the internet as a whole.