Enshittification

I liked to assume that every development in science and tech that goes mainstream are intentionally good products that solved people's problems. Although it isn't uncommon to pay to get a problem solved, the norm of the internet has always been to distribute the information for free. So, something who previously got information free of cost would not like paying for the same exact thing. Earning money from a service isn't a bad thing, but when the focus of something is shifted from solving problems to increasing profit, the quality diminishes.

Instead of taking the free product and making it a paid one ofcourse the product needs resources and hard work to build, it is instead added with adverts to pay for the users. In a way it may be a good way to keep the product free and also the users happy, it isn't something that keeps being good as the product needs more funding and more resources, as it is updated and upgraded. Slowly the ads start to seem like they are the part of the product and gets more and more closer to the service making it very hard to distinguish, and eventually making the service/product be the problem itself looking at you meta and google and x and y and z and....

The same goes with subscriptions, if the service giver has to keep making efforts to provide the service it makes sense to pay as a subscription, but if it is a product that works without the provider having to continuously make efforts or use their resources, it doesn't make any sense to make it a subscription. Looking at you adobe, it would have been fine if it was " pay to upgrade" to the latest version if I needed the new feature.

Pushing down ads and subscriptions both down the throat of people is the next level of Enshittification, yes! You Netflix. Microsoft, Meta, even Reddit is not safe from enshittification. The experience gets worse, but the price keeps on increasing. Yes! it is very difficult to make money to sustain companies but when the users are hooked to the service/product the quality degrades as the priority now is to make money instead of user satisfaction. The user stay because other users are there, and the other users stay because the other users are there. looking at you, everything that has been enshittified

I am not against ads or subscriptions because I love free things and as a student I need them. But it would be great if there was a clear separation between the ads and the actual thing, like, i don't want to dodge ads while searching for the content, I want the content and it's fine to put some ads in it. And it would be great if the thing I paid for remained usable as it is without any updates If the updates were necessary, I would be happy to pay for it. and without having to constantly connect to the providers.

I use Linux, Inkscape and Krita and vim and Firefox, so that I don't have to deal with these things, but seeing this problem creep into Firefox, I wasn't very happy. I think focusing on user experience is better for both the provider and user, but what do I know? I am not a company.