this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
1 points (100.0% liked)
Enshittification
2987 readers
1 users here now
What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ya know they make a valid point. Part of the learning experience growing up and going to school in the 90s and early 00s was figuring out how to bypass the school's restrictions with proxies, or how to load Quake 2 onto every computer in the district so we could sneak and have little impromptu LAN parties, etc. Hell, one of us got caught hacking into the student records portal to change his grades and after he graduated they hired the kid to work in the IT department. He works for a local ISP now.
Nowadays they don't know how to use a computer, they just know how to click icons and get apps from sanctioned app stores.
I don't know where people get this idea from. Kids are still hacking their school computers, just as much as we were back in the 90s. If anything, kids are more knowledgeable on bypassing these systems now than we were then; ask any school's IT admin, kids are doing wild shit with their computers and tablets.
Don't forget, people like you and I weren't "normal kids". We were a very stark minority. That's still the case with today's kids. I think you're just not seeing it because you either don't have children in your life that you are in regular communication with, or aren't present on the social platforms today's kids are on.
And at the same time large sections of them are as tech illiterate as the boomers. There is a huge divide between the ones hacking everything and those that have only ever used an iPad or similar cloud-based devices and don't understand how even basics like folder structures works. And they sit right next to each other at school day after day in the same general classes.
That was the case when I was a teen, too