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.
Education.
Netflix back in the day. A near-limitless catalog of ad-free movies and TV for $8/month. If you tried selling that today, people would think it was a scam
For me it’s not so much that the price increased. It’s that what you get for the money vanished.
I’d pay $40 a month to have a modern version of the Netflix that existed back in 2013.
Now if you want to have that you’ve got to have netflix, hulu, HBO Max, Showtime, peacock, and 15 other services and spend $35,400 a month for all of them and it’s just not worth the money, time, and hassle.
And even if you did get all of it, the experience would be awful trying to figure out which service has what you want to watch
I knew Netflix existed as a dvd service but back in like 2009 the first streaming ads I saw were on flash game sites so I thought they were scams.
You know those like sign up for blank free trial and you’ll get 5000 fun bucks in shellshock or whatever
I remember first hearing about Hulu sometime around 2007-8 and thinking it was a scam. Free (good) TV for one 30 second ad.
I first watched Sons of Anarchy for free on Hulu!
Democracy
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.
People using real words instead of saying things like “skibidi” and “enshittified.”
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.
It’s looking real Gary in here
That’s not very cash money of you bro
“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.
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.
Tourism, in general, but all the world’s romantic, marvellous and ‘unique’ spots: Venice, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, NYC, San Fran…
Crowds, rules, fees, more fees, lineups, crowd control, advanced ticket sales(with specific time slots) for natural wonders.
There’s a Grotto at a National Park on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, Canada that requires you to book at least a day in advance - to park and hike.
Brutal.
Tourism is cancer… Also same people bitching about climate change seem to love tourism.
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I shit on rich people daily here… this is about “middle” class loser who wants to see paris though, less carbon waste than the rich but still too much.
Plus AirBnB economy that essentially ruined most urban cores esp if they are historic.
So what are you suggesting? We never leave our immediate city? I’m a loser if I want to experience another culture?
No see, if you stay in one place forever you’re a loser too, because you are ignorant and boring.
I’m a loser if I want to experience another culture?
Going to Paris or London or NYC is experiencing another culture. That’s just cospicious consumption.
Go visit friends and family
So what is experiencing another culture then?
Make some friends there and go stay with them.
Paying local merchants for China made trash while eating over priced food specifically made for tourist is not deff not culture but that’s what all these “worldly” Us suburbanites consider sufficient lol
Socialism is when no mobility and have no nice things
I guess lower half of America is living that socialist dream 🤡
Pretty sure they were being sarcastic, but your point makes sense (in conservative world where socialism is Bad) without the clown.
Frontend in software development. If you know, you know.
Google Search. Or search in general. Now it’s all shit and you have to convince it that you actually want to search what you want and not what it thinks you want. Which is sometimes hard and other times impossible. I miss Google Search, it seriously was the best.
Man, Google search back in the day was great. No search categories like images, shopping, videos, etc. Just give it a query and you get what you wanted. God had no idea what was on the second page of results because the first page had what you wanted in the first half. Your ability to find what you wanted depended on your ability to use the search terms and modifiers.
The week I changed from HotBot to Google was a revelation. The jump from barely scraping the surface of the web to being able to find anything was like finally getting the full promise of the internet. Can’t be undersold how great Google was from 2001-03 until around 2013-16.
Wow, I recalled AltaVista, Lucia and Excite but have not thought of HotBot in forever.
It was so good that “googling it” is still in common parlance, even though the phrase has baggage and isn’t used in the same case-closed tones as it once was.
Oh man, and when all the Boolean operators were revealed to work on search, doing some “Google-Fu” was laughably easy, but blew people away. Back before there was so much noise, anything online was possible to find.
I know they took away my negative operator, which is the main one I used. The anger is still fresh years later.
Yeah, that was the last straw TBH.
I occasionally have to do some OSINT-ish research online, and it keeps getting harder and harder to get what I nerd from Big G. So much noise and trash. 2019 was the year they jumped the shark.
I haven’t used Google in a few years (in fact all Google servers are blocked on my network) but I still can’t stop saying “I’ll Google it.”
I’m sorry I came to this late, but this one’s really the best answer.
We talk a lot about how kids are struggling to recognize fake news, find reputable sources, etc… but I also think about how hard it is to find decent sources these days! I honestly can’t comprehend how kids are learning to do research projects and so on without the ability to easily search for stuff on the internet.
And while there’s lots of stuff on this threat that was cool while it lasted, I think search engines are one of those things where we never even considered the possibility it would change. Businesses fail, prices go up, experiences get skimped on, but search engines were goddamn magic. They just were. Why would anyone ever want to make them worse? The idea never even crossed out minds.
It goes deeper IMO. Search no longer respects the user as an autonomous individual with self determination. It has stollen your digital citizenship.
Definitely did not take this for granted. Between 2004 and 2010ish it was remarkable how effective Google was. It’s still alright, just not as good as before.
Yeah it’s just starting to look like where no matter what search engine you use almost, they just spit out garbage results. And they try way too hard in being the swiss-army knife of everything.
I have switched from google to a SearXNG instance and i am more than satisfied. For german stuff i use another instance which gives me more local results. I am thinking about hosting my own instance in the future.
Kagi Krew represent
Haven’t had the time to try it yet, but really doubt it’s better than Google at its peak performance.
Is Kagi the AI powered thing? Or am I mistaking it with something else?
No, not AI powered. Just a great search engine. The closest you’ll get to OG google.
Google. It used to just work, and really well
Microsoft Windows. Oh boy has it gotten bad.
To be fair to the XP days, the OS was a bit of a malware cesspool. Now, MS provide pre-installed corpo malware.
98SE was peak.
In what way? I continue to use Windows 11 just fine.
Must be bliss, mate
Could you expound?
The OS is riddled with ads. How can anyone be okay with ads running at the OS level is beyond me.
The tracking is also getting much much worse, they spy on every fucking thing they can.
The OS is riddled with ads
Is there a particular edition that’s prone to this? I don’t see any on my work or personal laptop. Either that or they’re so subtle that I don’t even see them.
I have never seen an ad using Windows.
I have been using Linux 100% for the past several years without any use of Win. The last time I used Win, it was Win 7 on a work computer. All I know about Win since is from what I see on Lemmy and the very few short instances when I might look at a friend’s computer. What I remember not liking about it was a lack of control in comparison to Linux and that it would get slower and slower with updates. Is the latest Win really as bad as Lemmy makes it out to be? Are there ads in the OS? Does it truly spy on you without your knowledge?
I understand there to be telemetry. As I already said, I have never, not once, ever seen an ad using Windows from 95 to 11.
Lemmy is a bunch of Linux users who genuinely don’t know how to custom-install Windows without all the bloat
It’s bizarre, how the fuck are they managing Linux if they can’t even do that?!?
Because they like the idea of doing that and still feeling like they own their computer in every way possible.
It’s pretty sad that the best windows experience now, is just breaking it down to pieces and custom installing.
I can do that. In fact, I do that for the only device in my home that still has Windows. But my point is that you don’t want to really use a system where you need to do something like debloating the OS after every update.
My days of installing LTSC, ShutUp10, Massgrave, modifying ISOs, unchecking 20 checkboxes during install and installing hosts files are over.
Nowadays I just install Linux and it does what I want without begging for it.
That’s impressive. Even the IT-managed corporate Windows 11 Enterprise installs at work have ads in it. Nothing like what you’d find buying a cheap Windows laptop from someplace like Best Buy with the Windows Home edition, but there’s still ads in places like the start menu. I can get rid of some of them, at least temporarily, but not being an admin on the machine I can’t seem to squash them entirely.
Windows ME ftw.
Can you clarify? I’m confused as to whether you think Win ME was the best or worst version of Win.
It was always bad.
Windows 3.1 was bad. It was ugly, it was slow. The Macs of that era looked better, although their multitasking was even worse than Windows, somehow. It was pretty clear that 3.1 was just a desktop GUI over a text OS.
Windows 95 and 98 were bad. They were graphical improvements over 3.1 / NT, but they were so brittle and janky. Remember bullshit like “TEXTFI~1.TXT”?
The latest versions are all terrible too. Like, try to make a change to a system setting and you get the Windows 10/11 themed settings menu. But, if you try to make any kind of advanced setting change and you’re taken over to a GUI that shows that under the hood it’s still effectively running Windows XP components.
I thought Win 2000 was an improvement. Didn’t Win 3.1 literally run on top of DOS? Like, DOS was the actual operating system and Win 3.1 was merely the graphical user interface/desktop environment, so it consumed a bunch more hardware resources? I think I remember having to run many programs out of DOS so that they would run more smoothly than if I used Win 3.1. In that sense, Win 3.1 was really Ski Free, Space Cadet Pinball, Solitaire, Minesweeper, and a nice file manager.
I also liked the improvements of Win Vista, but my laptop couldn’t seem to keep up with the requirements needed for things to run smoothly. Win 7 seemed like a smoother Win Vista, so that was nice. However, I felt let down that there were no major noticeable improvements other than performance, which could also have been attributed to improvements in hardware. Around then, I started experimenting with Linux out of sheer curiosity and slowly switched to Linux 100%. In the past several years, I know about Win only from what I hear on Lemmy, so ofc I think it’s terrible, but I wouldn’t know from personal experience and judgment. I’m happy af with Linux anyway.
Windows 95, 98 and ME were all DOS based.
I recently ran Windows 2000 in a VM to pull some files from some install discs (grabbing Microsoft Train Simulator content from disc images off of archive.org to play in OpenRails in case anyone reading this is the same kind of crazy I am) and it was kinda striking how usable it was even in a modern context. Sure certain shortcuts and niceties hadn’t been thought of yet but it’s surprisingly modern for a 25 year old desktop operating system
The internet. We’ve had a solid few years, but it has become a giant heap of shit for the most part.
Back then, not everything was an AI generated, SEO, ad riddled, interaction fishing, time wasting, data collecting nightmare with auto-playing videos and a dark pattern employing cookie banner.
Not enshittified. We still pay a monthly fee for access to the internet and it still operates in the same way as it did back in the 90s.
There was auto-playing music, auto-playing gifs, auto-playing banners all over the place, and it was always for time-wasting.
Most of my time on the internet I e generally been able to avoid disruptive tracking and ads. No more. Even for subscriptions: Boston Globe online games require that ad blocking be disabled.
Most importantly, I just got a new iPad. I paid a crap load of money for something like ten times as fast as the old one, desperately needed …… to look at web pages. Video and games were fine with the kid one, but web pages were not. Now I can browse again
it still operates in the same way as it did back in the 90s
IT guy here, this is just not true.
Back in the 90s, HTTPS was released in 1994, I remember in the early 2000s that Internet Explorer would warn you that a page was using HTTPS, these days it just the opposite.
The internet has been encrypted, where is mostly ran in plaintext before.
Then we have the content on the internet.
We used to read webpages, mostly static HTML, these days the vast majority of websites is running a content engine, say Wordpress or other backend system that you push content onto. This is a gigantic shift, especially for private websites, sure many people used geocities, but many, many built their own webpage as HTML using a WYSIWYG editor, and just uploaded the file to a server.
Plenty also wrote their own HTML code and built the webpage like that.
These are just two examples of how the internet has massively changed since the 90d
I think both of you are right.
I agree with the three of you.
Also the traffic is monopolized in platform silos
AI is definitely a problem. I can’t remember the last time I tried to Google something technical and didn’t have to wade through 2 pages of links to more or less the same slop that didn’t actually answer anything. The internet peaked in like 2013.
How fast it is doesn’t matter. We can “do” more on the internet today, but the experience is absolutely more annoying and shitty than it was in the 90s.
Democracy
You’re implying that democracy was good and worked at some point.
Our system at least was functional before primaries were invented in the 40s.
the hell is ‘our’ system
A lot of fast food places have undergone this due to private equity acquisitions.
Whataburger and Dunkin Donuts used to be much better around me.
Dunkin’ Donuts used to make the donuts right there in the store multiple times a day. True story.
Oh yeah I used to love eating at Subway, way back in the 90s. Then one day the steak-and-cheese got substantially worse. Then the meatballs got much worse as well. Once they started prioritizing app orders over in-person orders, I realized I didn’t fit into their cost-benefit calculations and haven’t been back since.
Chipotle has fallen HARD.
Disney World and their fast passes.
SubWay. That $5 foot long was a good deal, even if it was not that great.
DC Shoes - They used to be SICK shoes and now they are basically WalMart shoes.
The whole Disney World situation hits for me in particular. I was privileged growing up with my family being able to go there (altho I think my parents just had massive credit card debt lol). I know even when I was a kid it was ungodly expensive. But comparing when I was a kid to now in 2025 it is absolutely wild on the things they are nickel and diming people on.
The whole fast pass converting to a paid model after it previously being a perk with a ticket was one of the most slap in the face things I had seen.
Oh man, i was wondering if i just had shitty luck with chipotle recently, but its been BAD the last couple times…
Panera fell hard too
Panera never was good to begin with.
