this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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This is literally not an example of enshittification and the article is intentionally misleading.
First of all, all of the original Notepad functions are unchanged and still free.
Literally nothing got shittier.
Which is why describing Notepad as getting a paywall is quite frankly flat out disingenuous.
They are adding new, cloud running, AI features to Notepad that are locked behind a paywall. You can not like that for whatever reason, but that's not an example of enshittification. That's an example of them charging for new functionality.
Even if you're right, why the fuck add in unnecessary features to a simple word program?
the same reason why every program gets an ai feature: data farming, and reason to ask money for it
It's not even a simple "word" program - that's what write/WordPad was. Notepad is supposed to be just a bare bones text editor, like for altering an .ini file or writing a website in 1997.
I love wordpad. Still used it when I sucked Bill Gates' chesticles on the Windows machine
Why not? Who cares what they do? It's not enshittification to add new features.
It is, especially when no one needed it
You are conflating yourself, with every other person.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean.
Notepad is a basic product users expect to use for the most minor edits. It has established expectations for over 2 decades, changing how or what it does won't benefit more people if not frustrate them.
From a product design point of view it has been made harder to access, by adding a whole login procedure justified by feature additions that no one asked for. This drastically reduces the privacy too.
Depends whether it qualifies as enshittification, but they definitely didn't do any favors.
Don't use them if you don't want them. A paywall even helps you stick to that.