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.
academic publishing. It used to be monopolized by a couple publishing company with unreasonably high fee for access on both the side of researcher and reader.
Now, though hard works of the academics and funding from the public, now many publishing company are non-profit governed by working academics. And in many fields, open access has be come the default.
I wouldn’t call it de-shitified but it is getting better. I think also Anna’s archive and syhub should not be underestimated in their effect. If students and researchers are not dependant on journals to do their work, they are more likely to publish open access.
Yes, there are many field that are still struggling, but nowadays most of the articles in my domain is published by ACM and Schloss Dagstuhl, both are academic governed non-profit that are full open access (I don’t think author even have the option to close access.
That being said, fields like medicine, biology, engineering is very much behind. I am very glad my field moved away from publishing with IEEE. They are not necessarily “behind” the entire academia, but certainly way behind my field.
i looked a biology ones(different fields under bio) most are still gatekept, while some are freebies.
Probably the biggest effect IMO is sites like arxiv.
Now, instead of paying a subscription, they charge a one-time several thousand dollar fee to the researcher for open access. Problem solved! Everybody knows those fat cat grad students and post docs have plenty of money to throw away on oat milk lattes.
I don’t think that is the case for ACM and Dagstuhl. ACM used to have this ACM open system where department pay a fixed amount subscription per year depends on the department size.
Now that all ACM paper is open access, I don’t know if they are still doing that. Dagstulh never had these, as far as I know, hosting articles are extremely cheap.
These is certainly not the norm everywhere, but our field have already navigated out the swamp of free access, I hope more fields wil.
Ok? Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer all do this.
I am not disagreeing or attempting to downplay that academic publishing is still bad in many fields. But there are fields that are now out of the dumper fire, so I sm hopeful that other fields can learn from these and escape.
I also want to highlight the solution that worked is organization, public funding, and academic governance. So if you are unhappy about the situation in the field, maybe it is a good time to organize all your unhappy colleagues and build something new and better :)
its still paywalled for the person who wants reader, its free if you are in a university either as a student or a faculty.
And all it took was for one of RSS’ authors to be murdered by MIT.
Video games
Had a huge crash around the Atari era due to an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published. Games were also extremely expensive then
Nintendo famously reversed this crisis with the introduction of the NES and their “Nintendo seal of quality”. Consumers were able to access a curated collection of quality games, and it really turned things around and basically launched the modern gaming industry
Steam, too. It was originally unpopular DRM for Half-Life 2. It had a broken offline mode that could only be selected when already online. It had no meaningful customer service and people permanently lost their accounts with no avenue for appeal (and probably no human even involved).
It was originally unpopular DRM and a launcher for Counterstrike. I think Valve was trying to take a page out of Battle.net’s book. The Half Life 2 thing came afterwards, and if it weren’t for that Steam probably would have just been yet another failed footnote in gaming history.
NES also introduced verification so you couldn’t just manufacture random games and take them to market without approval.
Walled gardens - sucky but sometimes genuinely useful to clean up messes and keep them from happening (aka Grandma on her iPhone)
Can someone make this happen with mobile games please?
We’re at the point where you can play all sorts of emulated games on mobile. There are near infinite bangers to play right now.
And best of all, even iOS has emulators now! For a while they were banned on the app store IIRC. Now there are pretty good emulators there.
I did not get very far with my first ever playthrough of Ocarina of Time personally. But I’ve played plenty of Pokemon Emerald over the years.
And I THINK there was a company out there trying to revive old mobile games that were actually good (think original Angry Birds) so they’d work on modern phones. I dunno if that took off sadly, though…
Apple did make an effort with Apple Arcade. The idea is it’s a curated list of decent indie games, none of which have monetization. But, you pay a monthly fee for them.
Not all of them Indie tbh, there are plenty of Arcade versions of popular games that normally have MTX or ads.
But yes, you also get some indie gems that normally are a one time purchase, and I believe some games specially developed for the Arcade.
Hilariously, Civ 7 is on there, but my phone has an A16 and it requires A17. And I stopped my sub a while ago
an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published
Who will save us now?
Indie games
The shovelware filling the stores by indie developers will save us? Ps Store always had some cheap mid, but they had effort put in, like ssarpbc (supersonic acrobatic rocket powered battle cars) for 1$ on sale always later became rocket league.
No? The innumerable indie games that are actually good like the Outer Wilds, Stormworks, Hades, Eco, Highfleet, Beam.NG, Avorion, 7 Days to Die, Factorio, Dinkum, Deep Rock Galactic (is that one indie?), Derail Valley, Risk of Rain, and Barotrauma just to name a few.
I remember the seal as a kid, I had no idea why they were doing that though. Thats a cool piece of history.
If anybody wants to know just how bad the crash was, Atari buried about 700,000 game cartridges and consoles in a landfill in New Mexico after the release of the infamously bad ET game for the Atari. A game that supposedly had more cartridges manufactured than there were existing consoles for them to be played on at the time.
It was so bad that the home console effectively disappeared from the US market as investors and customers believed that the fad had run its course and companies went back to focusing exclusively on arcade cabinets until Nintendo came in about 3 years later and proved that there was still a market for home consoles. It was so bad that Nintendo changed the name of the NES for the Japanese market to the Famicom - advertising it as a “family computer” system, not a game console.
I have a copy of ET my dad got for my older brother when he was a kid. Dunno if it or the Atari even still work.
You should hang onto it. They dug up some of the ones that were buried a few years back as part of a documentary and sold some of them at auction while the rest were donated to museums for preservation.
I used to have an old shareware floppy of wolf3d as well.
Very briefly, after the CEO of United Health was killed, insurance companies were accepting claims they otherwise would have rejected.
Is that verifiable? Claims are all PHI and kind of a black box. To be fair, there has been a shift in prior auth rules which could be influenced by the killing.
I’ve seen a few anecdotal claims that people with severe conditions got okayed after the killing.
Unfortunately, the ultimate fallout is less accountability, as they’re now unwilling to release any information about the “doctors” supposedly reviewing cases.
Shouldn’t that be prosecutable as practicing medicine without a license? They have to prove they have licensed practicing doctors making these calls.
Sure, lawyers are cheap
I went to pick up a prescription the next morning. It was mysteriously free.
Fuckin awesome
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Don’t do that. Don’t give me hope.
And some of those were literally life-saving claims.
Luigi saved more lives than he (allegedly) ended.
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
That was a nice read, thanks for sharing
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
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.
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.
nursing, bad example. but a while ago it was getting so bad with the shortages, there still is and still bad. but they can go the travelling nursing route which is more lucrative and payout is more massive than a standard hospital. they make way more if not as much as some MDs. Hosptials/networks thought they can enshittfy by staffing less, but they realized more patients were getting maimed, died due to neglect. and they are apparently paying out the ass in underserved areas just to attract nurses back.
not so for MDs, apparently many insurance, or hospitals are forcing them go through more patients per hour/day then before.
Physicians have a lot of problems preventing us from demanding our worth because we can’t collectively bargain like nurses can. I wish I’d gone the other route but I think if I had I would have regretted it too.
if you can tolerate patients, thier excretions, thier attitude nursing is for you, or hours. nurses do get shit from MDs they are working under, once while i waiting at an ENT waiting room, the ENT i was seeing went off on a poor nurse, CNA? for apparently making me only do a phone call with him and wasting his time by going in person(if he indicated first lol, how was i suppose ot know that) then i realize he was just a very jaded MD lazy.(thats when his attitude change towards me very passive aggressive.
Yes! Nursing really is having a resurgence. Pay is keeping up with cost of living in my area and travel contracts show promising wages in the areas I’m going next. Much better than it was 2019-2023. Those were some PTSD inducing years.
Cable TV was replaced by early streaming, although that is now well on its way to enshitification too
That’s not the same thing.
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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.
Video games… Once. They enshittified in the late 70s, and then unenshittified in the 80s with Nintendo’s Seal of Approval. Unfortunately, they also re-enshittified again after the 2000s.
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.
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.
B&N did this huge push to Nook which has now been pretty much abandoned.
Barnes and Noble is profitable again
Not sure about your definition of “enshittified” if it includes memory prices going up and down.
Coffee perhaps. I think previous generations were more apt to just get a tub of Folgers or Maxwell House and not care too much about what they were drinking. Then third wave coffee shops started emphasizing quality, process, and flavor nuances. These days, you can find specialty coffee in most areas or get high-quality beans delivered and brew it yourself.
Beer, too
I got a nice local shop which was part of a chain but the manager bought out the location and has been doing pretty well.
I used to not understand why people liked coffee until I had a real espresso.
i think starbucks started the trend, and then better coffe chains became available. and then maybe coffee shops, that arnt in gentrified areas(the ones in these areas often go under very quickly).
plus french presses, and makers are cheap now.
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
Shrinkflation is not really related to enshittification. It’s a symptom of inflation, which has been severe, and real wage growth not keeping up.
Is RAM being enshittified or just demand driving up prices? (Like lack of supply is driving up fuel prices)
Either way inflation and real wage growth comes and goes in cycles. Usually in an upward spiral. We’re living through harder times right now, but I’m cautiously optimistic for the world as a whole.
