Dollar Tree.
It used to have been an unreal experience witnessing the existence of these stores when they came out. Everything for a $1. No joke. The quality of some things have had corners cut and the quantity might’ve been laughable, but there was a good solid purpose for these stores.
And then I started seeing the signs after a few good solid years of shopping there. The first sign was how they stopped selling eggs. This was before the Bird Flu. They stopped selling eggs because they simply couldn’t afford to buy stock and then the price hike to $1.25 happened.
And now they’ve hiked the prices again to $1.50 for some products in a handful of stores. Additionally, they’ve incorporated items going from $2 ~ $15 so they have long lost the role and title of being the most affordable places to shop.
Gone were the days.
Private messaging. We used to all use an open protocol to message each other (email) and now everyone is fractured into proprietary closed centralized messengers.
For most of the 2010s I was optimistic about how cool cell phones were going to be. Instead they’re almost all basically the same phone/camera/web browser and I can’t find anything that even has the same features as my 2016 model let alone new ones. There’s foldables I guess but from what I’ve seen that’s not particularly useful.
Is this enshittification or the convergence of objects into the same design due to regulation/demand/function/etc. (I’m sure there’s a name for this but I can’t recall it)?
Cell phones are certainly enshittified with planned obsolescence or incompatible text messaging protocols or ‘walled gardens’, but what else should a cell phone be besides a cellular networked pocket computer with a camera?
What features (besides a dedicated headphone jack) is missing from a modern cell phone that your old one had?
There’s plenty of stuff dropped, a lot of it is dubious tbh.
My older phones had: IR blaster for controlling TVs FM radio tuner Replaceable battery’s Headphone jack (as you noted) Expandable microsd storage Physical Keyboards (no real loss imo)
Probably some others I’ve forgotten. Honestly, I slightly miss the IR blaster on occasion. I haven’t listened to FM radio in ages, but could see it being useful. Replaceable battery’s would be nice from a longevity perspective, but I prefer battery packs to device specific batteries for longer life in general and battery life is more than a day for me anyway unless I’m going nuts. The lack of SD storage is the one that bothers me the most.
Keep in mind phones have gained at least a few things in that time. Simple reliable waterproof is a huge one.
Hitting a button and the TV turns on.
Idk what your setup is, but one of my favorite things about my TVs (and most newer TVs) is that they have HDMI-CEC enabled, so if I hit the power button on my Chromecast or PlayStation, the TV turns itself on/off too and I didn’t even have to program the remote, or worry about pointing the remote toward the TVs IR receiver like back in the day.
can you not do that? or are you talking about it playing something immediately and not picking something?
I can but the elderly struggle. They’ve got these satellite reciever boxes from dish that give them too many options.
Peace
Flying. Ever seen those pictures where people would dress their sunday best and climb into a dual turbo prop prestine silver tube up stairs on the tarmak? Beautiful stewardesses dressed in blue with matching hats.
Compare to now. Last I “flew” they gave my seat away and I had to fly the next day with a 3 hour layover. Perhaps I’m romanticizing, but I’d love to try the old way.
Just pay for it. The glamour is from the price being out of reach for most people.
Cadbury chocolates, Fuck Kraft Carmelo doesn’t taste good at all, and their eggs have gone from the size of a chicken egg to the size of a Robin’s egg while somehow tasting worse
In that time period the costs of cocoa have skyrocketed due to blight, climate change, and legal efforts to reduce slavery in the harvesting of cocoa. Most mass market chocolate brands were harmed by this.
OkCupid used to be the best for finding matching people: they crowdsourced thousands of relevant multiple choice questions from which you built your search filter: which answers you accept, how important each is to you, and a voluntary explanation. The questions and match results were factored into friendship, dating, and sex.
Then Match Group bought it. First they let it be, but then they:
- removed the factoring - no more looking for friends or sex, only complete packages
- removed search - no more finding the best matches anywhere on the planet, now you just swipe like Tinder
- removed the search filter - now everything has to be the same to match: both of you must have or not have tattoos for example, never mind what you like - one of my likes went from 95% to 50% match
- deleted the voluntary explanations without warning, so no one could back theirs up
- deleted ~95% of the match questions without warning
- deleted all accumulated likes, which were my best matching people around the world with the maximum couple/friend/sex partner potential except location for now. I had the links saved, but they broke all of them.
- they delete matches (mutual likes) if they haven’t been messaging in a while, as if that meant they’re not a match - no, we’re just distant for now
- they police inconvenient statements in the users’ introductions as the political situation evolves - the day after the mass murderer CEO got shot, the section in my profile containing “fuck the healthcare system - make a better one” was deleted without sending me a copy to edit
Avoid the whole Match Group.
Oh snap, I met my wife on OKC before these changes. I believe Match had already bought them out but it was before the changes like you mentioned.
I remember it being the superior online matchmaking service at the time.
RIP
Since I started using Lemmy, I’ve wondered if a federated dating platform could ever work. Obviously you would have to solve the problem of low user numbers though…
There’s an open source one called Alovoa. I haven’t tried it yet myself, but it’s there.
I know it’s on FDroid, though I haven’t checked any other app store for it yet
Unless it is a dating platform for tech savvy gay/bi men specifically, it would also have to solve the problem of even lower numbers of women who are users. Even non-fed dating platforms struggle to reach a 10:1, men:women ratio of active, non-bot users.
As a woman (just have to phrase it that way), good luck to any who try. Personally, I can’t think of anything that would entice me to sign up for a federated dating platform.
Make the men moderate each other’s first messages. You need 3 out of five thumbs up before that first message even goes through. You have to rate five messages before you can try to send one. Make them see how many fucking weirdos there are and hopefully make them behave a little better to begin with by being self conscious about what five other dudes are gonna see. You want five other dudes to see your dick pic on the off chance 3/5 will upvote it? Good fucking luck. Don’t listen to me I just worked for a week in a hospital without running water my brain is a smoothie.
You have way more faith in humanity than I do. I think after 1-2 and the novelty wears off, a lot of people would just thumbs up without reading.
And even if people stay diligent in rating first comments, it will take 0.2 seconds for bad actors to realize they can just save their bullshit for message #2.
I don’t hate this.
In the us they used to be called 5&dime stores. A big chain known as woolworths was one but had to raise prices of the decades.
Inflation happens .
Dating. Everyone’s idea of it now is so to-the-point.
They want instant gratification, more like. Suckered into the whole “finding the perfect one” and thinking a dating app will help. Some dating apps fucking charge you to read inbox messages, the nerve.
I blame the dating apps.
I think as phones have sort of plateaued we take for granted the joy in more mechanical devices like a calculator, ipod, radio, calendar, etc.
My last phone and tablet weren’t used for anything greater than the one before it. I have no need for more powerful devices.
Yeah. App devs want their products to work on as many phones as possible, so 6yo $100 budget phones can run 99% of apps just fine. The main thing that slows down is the homescreen UI as the manufacturer pushes updates designed to make you want a new phone.
On Android, one can fix that pretty easily with a different launcher.
People using real words instead of saying things like “skibidi” and “enshittified.”
“enshitification” is an objectively fantastic word. Coined by the great Corey Doctorow, I feel it truly describes our era. Word of the decade.
Most of the examples given aren’t enshitification though.
Well, I’m not going to go to the mat for every comment in this thread… but some of them are good examples of enshitification.
Oh no, you’re definitely right on both counts, just raising the point that sometimes words kind of become meaningless sometimes.
Bro got zero rizz FR and that’s on God.
That’s not very cash money of you bro
If everyone gatekept language like you then no one would ever speak.
You’re not impressing anyone, you’re just annoying. It’s Ohio as fuck.
It’s Ohio as fuck.
Jesus Christ that’s hilarious, I’m stealing the shit out of it
Better Ohio than Indiana…
That’s not just bad, it’s Fort Wayne bad.
Democracy
Education.
Re: Dollar Tree. Even in the pre $1.25 days or $1.50 or whatever they are now, it was well known that they made ends meet by deliberately padding certain items and in the process, preying on the poor people who shopped there who would be unable or unwilling to go to two different stores to complete their shopping trip.
This was primarily on packaged food products which are easy to comparison shop for if you have the means. Canned goods from them were the worst. They’d charge $1 for lots of things you could get at the grocery store at the time for 59 cents or 79 cents or whatever. And if that wasn’t the play, if you checked the quantities on stuff you’d find that the $1 version they sold was inevitably a smaller can, bottle, or jar versus the $1.79 version from the grocery store. So even if one container appeared less expensive, it was actually a worse deal per ounce.
I think they also propped up their business an awful lot with disposable party supplies: Balloons, plates, cups, paper hats, napkins, and all that kind of stuff. I imagine that definitely was not a winner for them during Covid.
Dollar Tree has essentially always been like that. It was never really there for “deals” because of what you mentioned. Usually the items were just smaller packages of things which is why they cost less to begin with.
But it has always been fantastic for certain kinds of items:
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Birthday/greeting cards. They are always simpler and of lesser quality than at other stores. But is anyone really going to keep your card for a prolonged period of time? If they do, it’s probably because of what you wrote in the card to personalized it, not because the card was fancy. I’ve seen greeting cards go for up to $10 in some drug stores which is pretty wild to me. Yes, they are more elaborate, but does it really matter when the cheaper one suffices?
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Gift bags. Same dealio as above.
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Wrapping paper in very particular circumstances. They have significantly less wrapping paper in the package than at other stores. But I find sometimes it’s a good thing if you only want to wrap a present or two with that style of wrapping paper. If you want to wrap many things or if you want to use more of the same paper in the future, then I’d buy elsewhere to get a larger quantity.
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Letting kids pick out some cheap crap from the toy aisle.
For basically anything else, it’s not worth it imo. But the above have always been where it shines.
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Frontend in software development. If you know, you know.
