Thoughts on Enshittification

Honestly, between the ever-increasing monthly prices and their complete refusal to be a good citizen on Apple platforms, let alone actively making their apps worse, Netflix makes me want to cancel so badly. (Recently my wife got logged out, and her first thought was that I had canceled.)

Oof, this is bad news. I remember when Apple sold hardware and made excellent software that people wanted to use because it was in service of selling their hardware. Ads are a path to enshittification—there just aren’t many companies who can pull off ads without being user hostile.

There sure seems to be a lot of RSS-related stuff going around recently. I’ve seen some interesting articles and even new software being released. Here’s a look at some of it.

Netflix continues to make its service worse for users, while raising prices.

This is a good, if challenging, episode of _Decoder_.

Of course they are! Yet again, make something good, get the users, then extract.

It’s a false premise that GM must offer either its “deeply integrated experience” OR CarPlay. GM doesn’t want to offer CarPlay next to their own experience, not because they can’t, but because they know that people want the apps that are on their phones, not GM’s.

Ads like these are product cancer. Apple made its success by offering the best experience for people who paid the premium for its offerings. This is a terrible direction.

PSA to Netflix users: Prepare to be the slowly boiled frog.

You just _know_ Doctorow is right: we’ll be getting sold stuff by AI with little visibility in no time. It’s hard to see what the incentive structures are, and I have no doubt that moral clarity alone is not enough to deter the leaders of those companies from tapping that keg.

The commercials during Netflix’s football broadcasts are a slippery slope that leads to ads at all levels of the service. Mark my words: accept ads here, and we’ll all be paying top dollar as well as watching ads in no time.