I’m thinking even for cases of like shrinkflation.
I saw an article about potentially cheaper RAM here, so it got me curious if things ever really get better on occasion.
I’d say American car companies. Due to market consolidation and car brands being a symbol of national pride, they were able to enshitify in the 1970’s and 80’s, producing low-quality expensive cars. Competition from Japan in the late 80’s and 90’s forced them to improve. American cars still trail behind Japanese cars in quality, but they’ve gotten much better.
Free and fair competition is essential to any economy. The gutting of antitrust laws in the USA is partly to blame for whatever you call this system we have now (I can’t confidently say it’s capitalism anymore).
I’d argue that the big
32 never recovered. Car design peaked in the 1920s and never recovered when the larger corps lobbied/wrote safety and fuel standards to force the mass consolidation of companies down to 3. Innovation slowed down so much and it is why China is going to eat our lunch through the transition to BEVs.Cronyism is the system we have
Japanese cars are currently in a state of industrial shittiness. If the US is still trailing them, there is no hope for the US car industry.
They’ve been a bit more spotty on a couple engines and transmissions, but dollar for dollar they’re still averaging above US on reliability most of the time. Pretty much every car company has had a few complete disasters over the past decade.
I wonder how many companies love the cyber truck for making their failures look good?
Tesla in general. BYD is going to absolutely crush the global market, though. Anywhere they’re allowed to sell, they’re going to dominate. Better battery tech for way cheaper. Tesla won’t shake the global market much, but China will do it.
Hard disagree lol, the American OEM standard is a bar so far down you can see the sparks of hell. The improvement was just their initial attempt to catch up before they gave up.
They nuked the EPA regulations which is why everything in the US is an SUV now and they bypassed competition with Japenese OEMs by lobbying congress to make anti import laws (exactly like what they are doing right now for Chinese EVs) which is how we got all these hodpe podge 90s era hybrid deal brands like diamond star or mazda & ford.
By the time those brands finally entered the US market with local production in full, they had already learned the gg ez system from their American counterparts and began to follow the same crappy practices of reducing cost and quality on every possible corner.
I wouldn’t buy a Ford vehicle of this decade even if it ends up being cheaper because the thing is made of ABS plastic and Chinese aluminum glued together with the freshly harvested tears of their yearly department layoffs.
This is on top of warping the entire US transit system so that many cities require cars to do anything, and most places aren’t walkable. And, intentionally designing those SUVs to look “tough” in a way that completely ruins their pedestrian visibility from the drivers seat. That shittification definitely hasn’t been walked back.
I agree with you. Ford still sucks though. if only for the awful interiors.
I once heard a take that American cars prioritized a great experience under the hood (spacious, easier to work on, fun to show off) …but cramped, uncomfortable cabins, while Japanese cars did the opposite.
My old Honda Element (RIP) seemed to support this theory: Interior passenger comfort? SO much leg room and dude, the back was basically luxury theater seating! That thing was ROOMY.
Working on it though? Half the time it legit felt like the only way to get to The Thing You Had To Fix was to run it through a Honda assembly line backwards.
…Or have a VERY strong octopus friend who could work a socket wrench…
That engine compartment was not made for human mechanics once the thing was put together. The starter location was EVIL.
Pour one out for the Honda Element IYKYK!
Helped a friend replace the alternator on a 1990 Honda Prelude once. The official procedure was to disconnect one of the engine mounts and jack the engine up a few inches to create a path to get the alternator out. Crazy.
American beer. Used to be just be the macro brews with corn, rice and other adjuncts.
Not exactly, but Runescape3 went hard into microtransactions (which arguably generated the revenue needed so they didn’t need to be implemented in OSRS) but they did a pivot abd are rolling back microtransactions, removing gambling loot boxes in some cases and leaving things as direct purchase, etc
https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/the-future-of-mtx-our-approach--your-involvement
They’ve even gone as far as to launch cosmetic free worlds so mtx cosmetics are disabled. Which I, for one, have always enjoyed the visual progression of gear in games, getting cooler gear as you get more powerful and knowing of the really cool items which are hard to get.
https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/mtx-experiment-cosmetic-free-worlds-live-now
I got curious and did a bit of searching since I couldn’t really think of anything. Apparently Fender (guitars) was originally amazing, was sold to another company and really degraded in overall quality, and then was purchased back by some of its engineers and returned to a better quality. Pretty nice to see that people who were actually passionate about something regaining control and saving something they loved.
https://www.soundunlimited.co.uk/blogs/articles/fender_timeline
This is similar to how many of the big names in the video game industry were built. Disgruntled designers leaving companies like Atari to start their own company. It’s how Blizzard got their start, and I believe Ubisoft, EA, and at least a couple of the other big names were founded the same way.
Then, of course, the bean counters started taking over and it all went downhill from there once they went from keeping the designers on task with realistic goals to maximizing profits.
Sadly though with the recent cease and desist stuff they’ve been involved with it seems like they’ve turned scummy.
Disappointing :( It seemed like their overall production quality is what made them popular and revered, so going after someone who won’t be able to source the same materials and match the same production scale does seem super low.
Could be that they don’t want people selling knock off shit as real and tanking their reputation. Or it could be assholery.
I could so understand that! I’m not super familiar with their products beyond looking into things for this post, but I feel like their branding would be on their official products 🤔 If another company is making something similar and using their branding, that would be pretty disastrous.
Their Stratocaster shape is public domain in the US. They won a court case in Germany for copyright of it and immediately went after any builder selling to Germany.
It was a total asshole scumbag move. No silver lining, just finance bros destroying a brand.
Ironically, they are now sending cease-and-desist letters to guitar manufacturers that build guitars with the s-style that their stratocasters have, and they are public enemy number one in the guitar community right now.
https://www.guitarworld.com/gear/electric-guitars/fender-cease-and-desist-lsl-instruments
That was a nice read, thanks for sharing
They then proceeded to not innovate at all for a couple decades and now they’re serving cease and desists to any builders making guitars remotely similar to the Stratocaster with demands to recall and destroy sold guitars.
Fender is dogshit ass like Gibson. Both companies have behaved like entitled nepo-babies for decades. These companies deserve to die as punishment for their hubris.
Newman’s own seemed on track to go through the same thing, but the original family bought it back before things got too far.
I mean if you’re talking about in a case as limited as RAM, SSDs and HDDs have gone through supply shortages and price increases, then come back down again in the last 10 years.
Yeah that’s not really the same thing as enshittification imo. That’s just classic supply/ demand disruption in a product that is difficult to scale up production on. It usually balances back out in the end.
The need to constantly show growth makes me wonder if it’s worth doing crazy stuff that tanks the business just to show growth by getting it out of the ditch back to where it was before.
Cable TV was replaced by early streaming, although that is now well on its way to enshitification too
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That’s not the same thing.
but cable didn’t improve which is what the question asks for
“How people watch media at home” improved
Not as long as the owner or anything is an investment fund. And they tend to be.
That’s why in most of the examples, the goodness returns after something like a market collapse that scares off the investors leaving only the people with instrinsic interest in doing it right.
Book stores come to mind. Barnes and Noble killed local book stores and then Amazon killed Barnes and Noble which left an opening for local independent book stores to come back
And now the ones in my area are shutting down because B&N somehow is able to open new branches.
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B&N did this huge push to Nook which has now been pretty much abandoned.
I’ll see if I can invoke Cunningham’s Law, here -
No, I don’t think it happens. There’s not enough financial incentive to un-enshittify, and often the companies that turn their products to crap were bought/sold to investors. To un-enshittify the product, the new owners would have to care about a long term investment and actually spend time & energy to learn whatever business they just bought up. Just doesn’t make sense when their end goal is to quickly sell it for a profit, even if it means stripping the otherwise-healthy business for parts.
It happens, but it generally takes financial failure to drive off the people with pure money motives and yet still be alive enough for interested parties to keep it going out of actual interest and passion.
These comments don’t leave room for much hope…
That’s because no one’s actually answering OP’s question lol
Lemmy’s slowly approaching peak reddit Q&A format: “Where can I find X?” “X is stupid, use Y.”
AFAIK internet access was very siloed in the 90s - AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and the like, which weren’t quite ISPs, since they allowed access only to their own services and networks. Then, in 2000s, these companies evolved and ISPs started providing access to the WWW, whick you could call “deshittifying” internet access.
Probably before my time… What I remeber from using AOL was that their browser and keyword structure was like an idiot-proof version of the Internet that was accessible for the entire family. I guess they thought that typing www.something.com was for techies… But that ultimately they were still providing you an internet connection and you could use other software to access the actual internet.
Yeah, unless it was different in the very early days, we used AOL and it was basically a glorified homepage. Opening the browser and choosing your own sites to visit felt very advanced, but worked just the same.
telecommunications before and after AT&T was broken up
Domino’s pizza turned itself around.
I am pleasantly surprised by the quality shift. Managed to unseat my local pizza joint
When i was a kid, soft drink cans were 280mL or something like that. Then we got the 355mL cans. Product inflation. I think its the only thing i can think of that’s never been shrinkflated.
Now they have the smaller cans for portion control reasons, but they still havent shrinkflated the normal cans
Here they tried to introduce 400ml beer cans, explaining that this is what people actually want. The anger quickly removed that crap from the shelves.
400ml to pint size cans are common in the UK. But I noticed in Sweden for example smaller 330ml cans are available - also available in UK but no where near as common.
330ml was already a thing. But introducing 400 is just a way to remove the 500ml, then increase prices
