We all know the struggle of beloved services slowly going downhill. What’s one service, tool, or website you’ve been using for years that’s still great and hasn’t turned to crap?
Wikipedia.
Though I could do without the endless donation blockups.
I can forgive Wikipedia and Internet Archive for the spam. Both sites are incredibly valuable and completely ad-free.
They are one of the highest achievements of humanity, imho, that even make me feel proud to be a human.
It’s hard not to try to support them.
The “spam” is for them to operate, not maximise their profits.It’s not that simple and transparent actually. Wikipedia doesn’t really need those donations to operate. They have money reserves for many years of expenses. I don’t have a great source right now but this article looks decent. I didn’t read the whole thing though.
Gotcha, it’s another anti-European (and anti-USA), anti-male, quasi-Marxist organization. This is what your donations to Wikipedia are going to. Wikipedia spends more money on left-wing causes than actually running an encyclopedia, and by a very long-shot.
Well shit, I guess I’ll start donating
I see nothing wrong with that.
I just think it’s fair to say the way they ask for donations is at least a little bit disingenuous.
yeah agreed
I came here to say both of those things about the Internet Archive, but I also hope both of those orgs get tons of donations regularly because I wouldn’t want to live in a world without them
I just pay the 52$ once a year and know I’ve done my part for knowledge.
You know what?
I’m gonna start doing that.
Just found these custom ad block filters. Seems to be working so far
wikipedia.org##.nag-trigger wikipedia.org###centralNotice wikipedia.org##[id$=“banner-nag”] wikipedia.org###frb-inline wikipedia.org##.cn-fundraisingIt’s not just the spam, there is other enshittification like the endless co-option with AI companies and private info disclosure (aka surveillance capitalism) under the self-serving excuse of being anonymized or aggregated.
You can login and it’ll stop with the pop ups for a year.
Linux
It just keeps getting better and more polished.
I think Linux enshitifcation will happen when Linus Torvalds is no longer the benevolent dictator. I assume bigtech would add more DRM crap for more usecases etc, regular (unintentional) userspace breaking for desktop users since development would be focused for server/cloud computing etc.
Well thankfully FOSS allows anyone to fork anything, so I imagine there will always be decent distros out there.
There’s still danger here. While anyone can fork, it’s painful and work-intensive. A well-funded actor could fork something useful, add a bunch of features the community wants, and do a shitty job of committing back. Once most of the community stops using the old stuff and the devs go back to their lives, we can lose control of useful stuff.
Stuff like when Signal enshittifies. It has enough inertia and spin up cost that the forks barely see any traffic.
The community is already full of so many people who would be willing to make actual, privacy-based distros and prorgrams.
FOSS exists because there are so many creative people who just want to make this shit for fun and the fuck of it. And I think most of them are not fascists.
Torvolds doesn’t make distros. The work that he’s doing isn’t highly creative. It’s boring pain and no one else really wants to take on. He doesn’t have a lot of competition, and hopefully, when he moves on, that vacuum gets another dedicated masochist and doesn’t just usher in a bunch of people bickering and at each other’s throats.
We need to protect Linus at all costs.
deleted by creator
I think Linux enshitifcation will happen when Linus Torvalds is no longer the benevolent dictator.
I hope not. Linus surrounds himself with good people (like Greg Kroah-Hartman) who will take over the reigns and most likely continue the legacy in his name.
Linux and the ecosystem are freaking amazing
Steam
This! Steam is the only proprietary program I use on my Linux machines that I’m actually happy with and don’t want to get rid of
Their size & net worth vs enshitification levels are suspiciously high!!
Gabe & co better not die out before they turn it/some parent company into a nonprofit.
I think there are three reasons for this:
- Steam is not freemium. It’s built on paying customers rather than advertisers.
- PC games, unlike TV shows and console games, don’t end up platform exclusives (and because games storefronts aren’t a subscription, there’s no reason for them to be). There are console exclusives but exclusivity has never really made sense for PC games. And without exclusivity there’s genuine competition (even if none succeed at dethroning Steam)
- Valve is a private company owned by Gabe Newell, instead of a for-profit. Shareholders are short-sighted.
That second point got me thinking about Nebula (the streaming service). I don’t believe it’ll be enshittification even though it has exclusives. I wonder why that is.
Idk, plenty of companies that tick all three boxes and are not like this at all.
A single owner vs a company without a principal shareholder & how they threat humans is just a gamble.Overall it does have to do with ownership & how the company culture was built tho - in Valve there are like 20 people running a billon monies company. They all have enough, and are happy.
Oh, and Valve it’s def a “for profit” c company, being an actual non-profit is a completely different thing.
A for-profit company is a very specific thing. It means a company that’s required, by law, to put profit above everything else. Valve may be a for-profit company but as far as I know it isn’t.
Isn’t Nebula owned/ran by content creators? Or have I misunderstood what that service is entirely?
It is. And I guess that’s probably enough.
Nebula exclusives make sense and are being employed. Nebula technically has a monopoly on that content and that’s why I was confused about why I wasn’t worried about Nebula enshittifying. I guess Youtube-adjacent content is mostly interchangable so missing out on exclusive content isn’t on the same level as missing out on a cultural touchstone TV show.
Also Nebula just isn’t big enough to enshittify. It needs a far larger market share first.
Voicemeeter
Overwolf
Reaper
VLC
PCPartpicker
Ninite
There’s probably some others I’m missing.
YES to Reaper. No surprise that the original developer of Winamp makes an amazing DAW.
Doesnt overwolf rely on ads?
Isn’t Overwolf’s business model literally monetizing and profiting from modding communities? Curseforge and Overwolf are the epitome of enshittification.
Yeah… over wolf was enshittified from the start lol
At least to me, Overwolf is the third or fourth iteration, following acquisitions, buyouts, restructurings, etc. The original FTB launcher worked perfectly fine. It’s mostly just obnoxious now and I make sure not to have it running in the background. No direct rent-seeking behavior just yet, I don’t have an account on there and it’s not a problem.
Right now I have it on my computer just use it to update packs that are only available there and then yoink them straight into MultiMC.
AFAIK it is owned by Curse and I guess those guys make most of their money from those godawful wikis and their ads.
I thought I’d check this before posting it, and it turns out it’s the other way around. Overwolf bought Curse. Worse, Overwolf is a company based out of Tal Abib… that’s two discoveries in one day. I was looking into getting a CaribouMini until I learned where that comes from. Less than two hundred kilometers away from me as the
missilecrow flies (and sadly, has flown). Great. Fucking great.The shitty thing is that a lot of cool pack creators only publish through Overwolf, so I don’t want to delete it just yet, but I don’t like this at all. At best a minor security risk, at worst I don’t even want to know. I just thought it was just some shitty ad company’s Curse buyout as a billboard for more ads. For all the issues I might have with Nexus Mods, I don’t think they’re quite this bad. Concerning that this is the de facto standard repository of MC mods.
I’m ok with things relying on ads to make a product free. Someone has to pay for a product or service, if I don’t want to pay for it, then show me an ad and let someone else pay for it. The thing that overwolf and more specifically curseforge do that keeps them out of the enshitification category for me is they simplify modding of games.
I’ve been around since the early days of video game modding and know how hard it used to be. They have streamlined it to the point that if someone has created a mod it is a simple button click to download, and install, and then keep the mod up to date. You can even create and share collections of mods and mod packs. And if a modder has added a donate button, it’s a single click to donate to the modder. It’s everything I want out of the modding community with none of the headache, and it’s been like that for years.
I recently bought a replacement PC for my dad because of windows 11 (though his old computer was also over 10 years old so it was a somewhat fair upgrade, anyhow). Someone suggested I use Ninite to quickly bootstrap a lot of the programs he’d use and I was honestly surprised. It was genuinely no-nonsense and got the job done. A rare nice thing in Windows…
There is also WinGet.
Sure, I’ll add to that.
- Audacity
- Inkscape
- Notepad++
- DaVinci Resolve
- QBittorrent
- YouTube to mpe 3 convert (the command line one - can’t remember the actual name rn)
Is QR bittorent different from qbittorrent or was that a typo?
Typo. My bad!
Tenacity as the most successful Audacity fork after their Telemetry debacle.
Feel like overwolf was out of the gate pre-enshittyfied
Avoided it like the plague
Local library
i been to some that don’t have books
Those are called blockbusters and have been gone for some time.
Plz, bro.
Where can I haz shares?
Need lambo.
- VLC
- Winamp
- Audacity
- 7Zip
- Openoffice
- Steam
- Firefox
- Wikipedia
- Duckduckgo (the search engine)
Most of those are programs rather than services.
That’s kind of telling in itself to be honest. Services for most people these days mean subscription (or some kind of recurring cost). The nature of the overwhelming majority of businesses means they will be looking to increase profits. One extremely common way is to degrade the service you provide slightly. Increasing ads, lowering quality, etc.
One of the only exceptions I would say is Steam. But people could argue that Steam isn’t a true service because it’s closer to a store front, at that point you’re arguing semantics though.
There’s also self hosting a service to consider? How would that count in this instance. I self host a few things like nextcloud, Plex, and others. Yes it’s still a program and technically a service as well?
If you’re self hosting Nextcloud, you don’t have to worry about the server operator (i.e. you) enshittifying it against you. There is still some concern towards the software supplier, as we keep seeing with Firefox, but users can react to that.
I’m not really familiar with the situation around Plex since I’ve heard some mixed things, but I don’t use it and have lost track of what is what.
I would consider Firefox to be a bad actor but it’s a bit more nuance than the situation with, say, Chrome. Firefox is involved in the server side as well (i.e. evolving standards that enshittify the web more and more). I would like to have had the web standards frozen some years ago. BIFL should apply to software as well as to physical products.
You’re still using Winamp?
Which version? I never really moved on to Winamp 3 (migrated to foobar back then), has it evolved further from that? Does it run on Linux?
I still sometimes miss my Winamp 2 days with a Calvin & Hobbes skin and spending hours with its visualization features as a young teenager.
WACUP is the nice new alternative unless you want WinXP support retained
on linux i use audacious, works well
On Linux I have found my audio player of choice (Sayonara Player), I’m specifically asking for Winamp because I have nostalgia for it; and because I don’t know any player that has its extensive visualization features.
i see. in that case wacup on wine would do the job. (it’s basically a slow wip winamp reverse engineering job, based on the last aol version and slowly replacing parts of it with updated/reimplemented stuff)
Yes forgot about it for some time when i saw someone still using it. Will tell you which version and if it works on Linux as soon as i’m done setting up Bazzite. Yeah the skins where a blast back in the days, nowadays i’m only using the vanilla one :)
WinAmp is long gone, no? Audacious is the closest looking replacement. I’m sure it’s what you probably meant? maybe? lol.
Still working on win10, didn’t set up Linux fully yet, still dual-booting but i’ll give updates when i figured everything out.
7zip and VLC.
Signal is good so far. Firefox is teetering on the edge, but it’s also good so far (poor little fox). Lemmy and Mastodon are both great, but maybe that’s EZ mode because they’re built as alternatives to proprietary social media sites.
I pay for ArsTechnica and I feel that I get a lot of value out of doing so. And keep in mind, being a paying subscriber of a service does not safeguard the service from enshittification, so that’s quite great
Firefox is teetering on the edge
Get LibreWolf . They take FF builds and rip out the telemetry/ads/AI/enshit.
It’s… beautifulSome people miss this but Librewolf uses most of the code from Firefox…so its still VERY dependent upon Firefox developers/services to do its thing. Its still better, but if Firefox suffers, then Librewolf does too.
Theres an excellent graphic here: https://codeberg.org/librewolf/source
I used to compile and contribute a long time ago. Its pretty easy to get it working and make adjustments…when you know what Firefox does in the background.
I used to compile and contribute
Thank you for your past service o7
(I want to normalize open source contributors getting the same kind of recognition for providing a Public Good that we currently give to teachers, de-escalatory police, and following-legal-orders military)
My regular open source tools:
- Inkscape
- GIMP
- OpenShot
- Synfig
- Firefox/derivatives (currently using Waterfox)
- Terminal emulators
- OpenSCAD
GIMP is SO much better than it used to be, too!
I love OpenSCAD and also realize it is a super backward way to make 3D models, according to most other people. I don’t bother even mentioning OpenScad as an option for most people, I know it is only for certain people.
I tried my hand at modeling and designing using more traditional CAD programs that work more visually. I have good spatial reasoning and visualization abilities but I could never get the breakthrough to a point where I felt literate in those tools.
Constructive Solid Geometry approaches just work for my brain. Now when I need a part designed, I can quickly sketch it out in rough code and I feel confident seeing myself as a ‘designer’ now. Other more ‘visual’ tools waste my time as I get sucked into finger painting instead of working out the fundamentals of the design.
With the code-first framework, I have to really think about what the part needs to do before I tweak the code.
I’ve worked with 2D CAD programs like Autocad for years, I enjoy working with them. Once I tried 3D modeling, I found the experience frustrating–half of my time was spent typing in parameters anyways. I’m sure with enough practice I could get familiar with it, but modeling 3D shapes with a 2D tool just seems like a losing battle.
There are times when the sculpting ability would be nice, but it doesn’t come up that often for me. When I need more complex shapes, I’ll use Inkscape to make a 2D profile and import it into OpenSCAD. So far it’s been working well for me.
I do like Inkscape a lot, but GIMP simply isn’t a viable alternative for photoshop for most users. The interface is horrid and the capabilities are limited. Adobe knew what they were doing with their strategic buyouts of developers.
There are definitely some things PS can do that GIMP can’t, but I’d argue it’s fine for anyone who isn’t coming from Photoshop expecting all those features. I’ve only ever used GIMP, so it seems great to me.
The Pirate Bay
That’s plain wrong that site is littered with viruses and ads these days. 1337x is much better.
Also snowfl and eztvx haven’t let me down yet
Is it? I use https://piratebayproxy.info/ these days, as well as uBlock on “medium mode” so maybe I just don’t see any of it.
It’s littered with uploads which are plain viruses and other garbage. And lacking many things I searched. I found 1337x much better. Rarbg too but I think that was taken down.
Kiseido Go Server (KGS)
If KGS’s UI looks like it hasn’t been updated in 20 years, that’s because it’s already perfect. There’s no ads, it’s purely functional, it does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. If you click on “KGS Plus” you have the option to spend money on lectures given by human pros. Otherwise it’s completely free, and it’s still an active go server that’s been around forever.
Is that where Sai played the Meijin
Based on time of the anime’s development, and of course the fact that it is japanese, more likely IGS was the thought process at that time. KGS was the standard in america… but not the primary choice for China/Japan.
PiHole
Not an overly surprising one, but the arch wiki has been an incredible source of info with no ads, tracking, or any of the modern web bullshit for as long as I’ve used it.
They’ve been hit with some pretty major DDOS attacks recently and they’ve done a really good job of keeping the important parts of the service as accessible as possible - they haven’t resorted to buying into cloudflare’s monopoly or blocking vpn users despite either or both being the easy way out.
For anyone else who’s relied on them as much as I have, now would be a great time to donate!
I’ve never used Arch yet still use their wiki quite a lot.
For real. The number of times I’ve been working problems on a Raspberry Pi and my searching ends up there is wild.
Agnostic:
- VLC
Windows:
- TotalCommander (Android too!)
- Irfanview
Mac:
- A better finder rename
- Daisy disk
- Iterm2
- Dropout.tv
- Davinci resolve
- Obsidian
- Jellyfin
- Airgradient air quality monitor
Dropout is pretty good. I don’t think they’ve really been around enough to enshitify yet though. They’re on big up-swing. During that time they’ve been cheap, audience-focused, and fair to their cast and crew. They’ve already raised the price at least once. If they get some loans/investors involved or have a bad year, I could easily see them becoming more like other streaming services. I hope I’m wrong.
True, it’s likely too early to tell. I think I just inadvertently compare them to all the other streaming services right now. As for the price increase, that’s only for new subscribers- existing subscribers are grandfathered in at the previous price.
+1 davinci… it’s incredible what you get in the free version, and the studio version is getting more and more worth the money in a value add way rather than a need it way
Which reminds me, I’ve had a few dropout shows on my jellyfin for a while but really need to drop a sub to support. They do great stuff
I swear, I feel like I’ve watched (or have shown off to people unfamiliar with dropout) A Game Most Changed like 5 times.
Or if they’re straight, Sam Says. Lol
