Enshittification

Do you think Lemmy and other parts of the fediverse will eventually enshittify? I think this would be an interesting discussion to have. There currently is not financial incentive like the ones that have led centralized platforms to enshittify. But there might be in the future. Does decentralization protect against that tendency in some way?

Lemmy and Mastodon do give me the hope, that when one platform turns to shit, there will be people creating a platform that - for the time being - is not.

Among the most significant changes with this year’s Elements releases has little to do with new features but instead concerns the ways users purchase and own the software. While prior versions of Photoshop and Premiere Elements have been lifetime licenses — the user buys the software and then owns it indefinitely — this year’s release has moved to a three-year license term.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/21985939

Just know I saw this, because I would never ever visit freaking groupon. “Sponsored shortcuts” can be disabled in the settings . Bleh :(

Oh yes! The 3D experience!

Go ahead sign in! Tell us how our shit product is broken. That's valuable information that we SOLIDWORKS can keep to ourselves and make you create a new username and password combo to remember. Ofcourse your data regarding anything is actually ours. We own it! Thanks!

During the company’s Connect event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta AI can now process image inputs, allowing it to answer questions about photos and edit them. Want to know what kind of flower you took a picture of or how to make a multi-colored cake? Just ask Meta AI. See a picture of a goat on your Instagram feed and want to repost it as a picture of a goat on a surfboard? Just ask Meta AI. Not sure what to say about the goat on a surfboard? Don’t worry, Meta AI will also suggest captions for your stories on Facebook and Instagram.

And if chatting with Meta AI yourself sounds like too much work, the company will be testing a new feature on Facebook and Instagram that injects unsolicited AI-generated images “based on your interests or current trends” directly into your feeds, allowing you to “tap a suggested prompt to take that content in a new direction or swipe to imagine new content in real-time,” according to pre-event briefing materials.

Not to be outdone by OpenAI’s release of a voice assistant for ChatGPT earlier this week, Zuckerberg announced that users can begin talking to Meta AI and it will talk back in the voices of celebrities like Awkwafina, Dame Judi Dench, John Cena, Keegan Michael Key, and Kristen Bell.

The company is also beginning “small tests” in the U.S. and Latin America of a deepfake feature that will translate video content on Instagram and Facebook from Spanish to English, or vice versa. The Meta AI translation tool will automatically “simulate the speaker’s voice in another language and sync their lips to match,” according to the company’s briefing material.

Meta did not immediately respond to questions about whether creators on Facebook and Instagram will be asked for their consent before their images and voices are manipulated.

Google is doing scummy things, Literally 2024

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/42162061

Was recently browsing Reddit and noticed a new type of ad which pops up in between comments now. It used to be a few ads in between posts and you would get an ad as the top comment when you click on a post, but now they’re injecting ads in between comments when you are even scrolling comments lol. When do you think this will start having an effect on regular people? Do you think the enshittification will slow down or come to a halt if these companies start losing revenue due to lost customer base?

cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/2260127

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240716045110/https://www.takahe.org.nz/heat-death-of-the-internet/

What the URL above says. It's getting crazy on Xitter.

Hi there. My guide is currently hosted at survival.aesistril.com. I wrote some stuff but it's really hard to write every guide by myself.

My goal is to create a easy to follow guides for the average joe and compile every other guide into one web page. I want to be able to link this whenever a relative or a friend asks me how to get rid of x

Name and URL suggestions (under .aesistril.com subdomain) are welcome. I am currently using open source hardware icon because it looks cool

I am using the CGA color palette and I would appreciate if you don't use any other colors. Not a strict restriction though

Source code is here on GitHub. Pull requests, markdown guides, docx, txt, every type of contribution or constructive criticism is appreciated

Is YouTube actively trying to make their platform as unusable as possible?

In case you can’t zoom the YouTube definition of ‘latest’, is any time in the last few years.

My video suggestions are also 50% text posts now for some reason.

Rick Beato making clear what is happening on the music scene just as Cory Doctorow or Adam Conover talk about the Internet. Please remember to use frontends like Grayjay, NewPipe, Freetube or invidio.us to watch videos like these.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17201554

Mozilla acquired Anonym, an ad start-up

I don't know if it's just me, but browsing virtually any mainstream website without an ad blocker or with alternative frontends is becoming harder and harder to justify. It's getting to the point where adblocking isn't an optional luxury - it's a requirement to effectively get basic information about things.

Yesterday, I was trying to search some information about Ghouls from Fallout. This lead me to this Fandom wiki page which had ads on almost every corner of the website, autoplaying video in the corner, asking for my age as soon as I clicked on the site, injecting polls and random unrelated videos into the communty wiki content and being incredibly slow to browse. A query that in the past that took 5 seconds now takes 50, for what? Money?

I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.