EDIT: Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
I deleted my other comment because I realized this is about tech in general and I thought it was websites.
But yeah, hard agree and one of the biggest culprits of shit nobody wanted on their computer was absolutely windows 8. Of course tween/teen me thought it was kinda cool, but hindsight is 20/20 after all.
Can’t really remember that many other examples, but it was at least slightly better than now. I mean, just look at the old interface for Audacity with the faux 3D circular buttons at the top from around 2013-ish compared to the crummy flat and dull ones we have now! We used to be a civilized society!
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It peaked when only decent people knew about the internet
This. Before corporations became involved and it was just hobbyists.
2013 is too late, the machinations of the Cambridge Analytica scandal had already begun at that point.
I think about 2010 was when big tech peaked at being at least viewed as a predominantly utopian force (if not necessarily actually being one). Social media was still mostly social, rather than a side effect of an advertising business. Recommendation algorithms were relatively rudimentary, where they existed at all. Smartphones apps were not dopamine factories designed to be psychologically addictive.
After that was roughly the beginning of “disruptive” tech and a big expansion of surveillance tech.
I’d go even earlier I think, to pre-smartphone.
Around 2007, perhaps.
You could message your friends and family on your feature phone and keep in touch, but the Internet was still something you had to sit down at the computer for.
Social interactions were uninterrupted by apps, and it was still impossible to cheat on pub quizzes.
Capitalism hadn’t worked out yet how to make money from the Internet.
Forums and imageboards were in full swing, and the web was a glorious mess of bizarre small sites with niche content. IRC was the peak of online chat.
It was the best of times.
Phones were still fun to mess with and hack back then. Now I just try to use my phone less overall. They’re all the same garbage gilded in fools gold.
I agree with the date of 2010. That is when Web 2.0 started and the internet really started to be shitty. Now they are talking about Web 3.0, whatever that means.
Yeah, Web 2.0 was when they started walling everything off and displaying only a few posts or lines of text at a time. They already viewed your posts and info as theirs and were actively trying to make CTRL+F and CTRL+C useless for the average non-technical person. This war on copying and pasting led to all sharing being pushed towards their sharing frameworks on Android and iOS. No longer were we sharing links, but rather apps and info inside of apps. Comments were only shown few lines at a time, or collapsed entirely to make it harder to find info.
I think I agree. Still in the period when facebook’s userbase was mostly teenagers, and before smartphones became ubiquitous.
In my opinion it was facebook buying instagram in early 2012 that signalled the beginning of the end. Of course they were only following in the footsteps of google and yahoo before them, but it was the first domino in the enshittification of social media specifically.
For me it started in 2006 when OLGA went offline. OLGA was a community of people who transcribed how they played songs on guitar, and the music industry decided that they held the rights to that and sent a takedown request.
I’m some people. Yes, it was about 2012, 2013, in my lesser populated area where we were 10 to 15 years behind in tech. But sometimes I think earlier depending on the tech. I have made this comment on Lemmy so much people probably know me for it so I’m not gonna detail it much more.
It was peak tech before it got gross. Yes there was corpo shit, but it hadnt infiltrated every single aspect of life. There was less surveillance because it wasnt technically possible yet. There was still physical media. There were less subscriptions and if there were, they were actually decent. Social media was still eh, people weren’t absolutely addicted like now (due to corporate addiction tactics and dark patterns). You could fucking talk to someone without them looking at their phone.
Tech is also now WAY too overpowered (and expensive) for normal folk, and so programming lean is straight out the window. Programs and webpages have more bloat than ever and are never going back. You can do 99% of your daily tasks on a 2013 PC with Linux thats actually programmed efficiently, probably with 4 GB of ram. Now, win 11 needs 8GB just to run in the background. Trash.
So yes,I stand by the fact tech has gone downhill very fast, due to capitalism.
One minor thing, I do think vr tech is cool and fun. About the only new thing I find interesting besides emulation .
There’s no way to answer this really. Depends on what you’re referring to. The actual technology is pretty great right about now, or at least a few years back before the RAMpocalype. The accessibility to technology is high, the learning curve is pretty low and Ui pretty good no matter what OS you choose. Little troubleshooting is required. You don’t need antivirus, just best practices for app sources and to update your OS regularly. Internet connections are fast. Pirating is easy and plentiful if you want to dodge DRM bullshit.
The internet culture as a whole is garbage now though. Privacy is worse than Big Brother could ever hope for. Trying to exploit people with technology is at an all-time high. Selling licenses that can be taken back at any time, attaching internet to devices that havw no business needing an internet connection that inevitably break. Drop shipping garbage even on bigger sites. Social media was pretty fun at first, at least forums were. Now it is cancer. Ai is melting people’s brains and the atmosphere.
If you want to average out the decline of those completely disparate things, sure, late 00s early 10s is where it is at. Corporate OSs like Windows 7 and Snow Leopard were at their leak. iPhone and Android were good enough but nobody demanded accessibility to you with them. Social media wasn’t COMPLETE cancer yet. Lower component pricing especially for DIY PC gaming.
But the thing is, it’s not inevitable. We can have the better tech without shittiness. Tech is neutral. It is PEOPLE that ruin it. If we stop rewarding influencers and enforce regulations upon corporations to stop abuse of Ai, increase worker’s rights, and stop surveillance, we’d be just fine. We’re here because we have allowed the slow decline of western culture with its emphasis on personal freedoms and rule of the people. Now it is just “freedom for me to fuck you over with no consequences”. The solution is not going back in time, it is fixing our bullshit.
Before Google turned evil and GitHub got bought by ms, after valve started funding proton
Software tech peaked in the late 80s / early 90s. We still don’t have an equivalent to Ada or Eiffel with safety and shit. Rust could be an equivalent, but the quality of software engineering has been dropping every year and I am not proud to be a developer. We used to care about quality, now its vibe coded shit written in JavaScript, the worst language ever created.
We do have an equivalent to Ada. It’s Ada. The open source GNAT compiler is actively maintained. Eiffel, too has a maintained open source implementation, but with a weird one-year release delay (probably not a big deal with a 40 year old language).
If you’re not choosing them for your own projects, then you are part of what you perceive to be the problem. You probably have a good reason, like lack of libraries or general inconvenience compared to popular modern languages. That’s fine; maximizing safety over velocity is the right call for avionics and safety-critical public infrastructure control systems, not the average software project.
I was always skeptical about cookies, it was around 2004 when I first noticed advertising cookies. So I’d say 2003.
I’m not going to try and pinpoint a specific year, but my off-the-cuff answer is 2015.
It’s just a rough estimate, so 2013 is in the ballpark.
Right now! And no, I don’t mean corporate software and services or generative AI bullshit…
The hardware market sucks right now for sure, and it’s the AI bubble’s fault. The rate of advancement of hardware is also slowing down. But at the same time $2000 still gets you a significantly better PC today than what you had 10 years ago. Hardware isn’t as affordable as it was just a couple years ago, but it’s still good.
On the software side, you really just have to embrace FOSS. The Linux ecosystem is going wild, and it feels like the entire thing is snowballing, growing at an accelerating rate. I now run Linux as my main OS on all of my PCs, including gaming PCs. I have a Linux home server with self-hosted services that are accessible to me whever I go thanks to tailscale. I feel pretty much immune to service and software enshittification, because I have almost no subscriptions and mostly to use free and open source software.
I really feel like I’m getting more out of my technology than I ever have before, and it’s a lot less corporate.
Free Software is better than it’s ever been, but that doesn’t outweigh the enshittification going on in the rest of the world. Way too much of my effort using Free Software is spent actively defending myself from surveillance, propaganda, and other threats.
The year someone discovered that if he alloyed copper and tin, he could put a durable edge on his whacking stick.
My Radio Shack Tandy 4000, ca 1991
It had a hard drive. It had color and sound. I could make it do anything I wanted, down to the individual registers using assembly language or high level with Object-Oriented Turbo Pascal.
I’d say 2013 is approximately accurate. That’s about when seeking recurring income started really becoming a thing, and software started going SaaS, and renting cloud servers started taking off.
Gawd, the fucking cloud buzzword days. Not as bad as ai, still damn annoying for us nerds.
Everything after fire was probably a mistake.
