This is news? What do I do with this information? Did something change? Are you selling something? So fucking confused.

Was there supposed to be a link in this "news story", or is /. doing short form op-eds now?

Serious software written by serious people for serious use is often in-house work and rarely has marketshare beyond the developers and their immediate target audience within a single organization. Sometimes it's OSS'd but often it isn't even marketed outside the organization it's created in.

As such it is crowded out by software written for the hoi polloi by businesses whose model depends less on functionality and more on not getting a reputation as too hard or too geeky for broad appeal.

Often enough it gets so big and bloated with occasionally useful features it displaces the aforementioned useful software, on the grounds that in house stuff is expensive so let's just pay someone else to worry about it.

This is one of the reasons it takes me about 5 minutes to log into a conference room computer at work, and why I have to click through a half dozen signin screens to get to my slide deck every single time.

I'd say the days of overhead projectors and vuegraphs were better, but I'm just old enough to remember the smell of transparencies going through a laser printer to not actually make that claim.

We just have absolutely no power to change it.

It's bestowed upon us by greedy bastards who want to sell us worthless things against our will and who know that the only way to make us pay up for all the ridiculous subscriptions and features is bully us into compliance.

I know it's an unpopular opinion, but.. why are we so willing to enter into dependency on software, clouds, and suppliers?

Convenience is killing us. Truthfully, we are lazy and when a shortcut is offered, we take it. Makes sense, right?

Only up until the point of total dependency.

Once you've been trained to think within the idioms of Apple, Microsoft, etc, you can't even imagine alternatives. Sad.

Good for making $$, bad for society.

It sounds like you're using proprietary software in an era of late-stage capitalism. Would you like me to help you find open source alternatives that leave you the hell alone while you work?

The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporters were talkative elevators (lifts) in the offices of Hitchhiker's Guide... and they were afraid of heights.

Whenever I install new app on my tablet or phone, one of the first things that happens on first startup is request by the OS "Do you want to allow this app to send you notifications". By default I say no, unless it's specifically a messaging app.

Windows also has this for notifications in system tray.

So does at least KDE for Linux desktop environments.

You can also change these settings later if you first give the permission and then start getting too many notifications.

I know that when I installed Booking.co

Some slimy sales manager, which I liken to a Soviet "Political Officer" character in a mid-80s cheesy novel, said, "What if we did $this during normal operation, so we could insert some ads and 'improve' the 'user experience'?" Meanwhile, the actual developers are like, "WTF? Who would want that?" But the Political Officer has a higher rank, and the CEO listens to him more, so users are left with a shitified experience.

Fk these managers. Every last one of them.

> we've normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else

It has been 'normalized' because it works. You may hate it, users may hate it...but enough people do give their email address any time someone asks for it, and enough people do activate new, paid features because they were prompted to do so, and enough people do start using new features that they didn't know were available because they were pushed in front of them, which makes these practices profitable and a routine way of doing business. It's psychology and you can either have your product fit psychology or you can go out of business.

You may hate it, but most of the world prefers to download freemium software and buy 'coins' and 'access' as they go, rather than pay $89.99 one-time and have all the features ready instantly, even if that means they eventually spend much more than $90 in total.

That's human psychology and while it works for the majority, many of us in the minority can hate it but there's little we can do about it.

props to this post. totally true!

We joke about this happening to cars of course but it car manufacturers thought they could get away with it we'd be bombarded with the same kind of enshitification in vehicles. They're already trying in car advertising on for size, it won't be long before "we've noticed you're near a Turd Burgers, stop in for a double colon blocker now, we will automatically redirect your navigation in 3... 2... 1..."

Of course the part of me that enjoys driving will say that cars have been on the enshitification track for years. Automatic transmissions, soft suspension, computerisation, drivers aids with their useless bings, bongs and warbles, SUVs, cars getting bigger and lardier with each iteration. It's hard to find a drivers car these days, a nice, simple, RWD, lightweight 6sp manual (they don't even need to be that powerful, my 140 HP MR2 never failed to put a smile on my face). Kids these days have no idea of the unadulterated joy of nailing the perfect gear change (You are welcome on my lawn, just don't make a mess, K, I can still remember being young).

This is why whenever I install software on my phone, I immediately disable notifications from it. I'm not interested to know that I can get five gold stars if I play 10 more levels of a game! STFU!

"It blocks your speedometer"

My vehicle already does this with a giant box that tells me I have my seatbelt on (I know I'm the one who just put it on). I have to click Ok on the steering wheel to get to go away. The computer requires a lot of excessive interaction when I'm driving, it's unbelievable really.

all the intrusive ads and overlays. “me! me! me! look at me!!!”

All enshittified services now beg for engagement, to make lines go up for investor. This is just the typical progression that one would expect, as our society approaches one or more episodes of Black Mirror.

Here's what happens if they don't nag you to rate their app.

If left to their own devices, only the complainers will bother to rate apps. The only way to counteract this tendency, is to regularly ask people to rate your app. It's the app-maker's way to drown out the negative reviews with positive ones.

My company just went through this, their app ratings were like 1 or 1.5 stars. When they added the nag messages to rate the app, the ratings immediately went up to 4.5 or so.

So like it or not, we drove the app

I use an ad blocker on my browser. Seemingly every few days it pops up it's own interruption telling me how many ads it has blocked and begs for money.

Do the creators really not understand?