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Comment by renegade-otter | Hacker News Reader

The days of interesting tech have been gone for a couple of decades now. Every technology is now being quickly enshitified. It's ALL about selling you crap.

The nerd Internet was the best, but it's never coming back.

The bandwidth gave us streaming - okay, I'll give you that, but we had that before. It's more of an infrastructure thing than "interesting" tech.

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There's literally an ad on the front page right now for a YC startup hiring engineers to protect patient privacy. Follow the link? The company exists to better sell ads based on patient data (but in a "compliant" manner).

Link?

Gone now -- I don't remember the name (unless this was the fastest pivot ever recorded, it was not Glass Health, which currently has a now hiring ad up[1])

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149581

Hah, happened to see this mentioned in another comment today. It was FreshPaint, whose website includes this gem:

"You need to install ad trackers on your website to get the most out of ad platforms like Facebook and Google Ads. Ad trackers can create issues for healthcare marketers by sending visitor identifiers and health information to platforms that aren't HIPAA-compliant."

I'm sure they are good folks, but what an absurd premise. Something about the best minds of our generation selling ads....

Source: https://www.freshpaint.io/hipaa-compliant-advertising

I think "interesting" becomes a psychological term. Things were interesting because they made our brains react in strange ways. All relative to what we knew or dreamed about. I find the ultrafast paced technology ear incompatible with human life. You don't get to wish, dream and go deep into something on your own, with a proper crowd size. Now it's 7b of people all locked in this dopamine ride of neverending updates, all that on top of drama, social rules..

It can come back (in a new form obviously), we just have to build it and secure it, and not relinquish it.

I been hearing this term 'enshitified' a lot lately. I am curious to its source and why it seems so much more prevalent recently. Do you have any insight into that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

It's when monetizing your users is more important than maintaining and growing your product.

With AI, it's going to get even worse. I mention that in this new post I just wrote: https://renegadeotter.com/2024/04/22/artificial-intelligence...

The nerd / weirdo internet still exists, it's just not in your safe space.

I hate the recent "enshittification" trend. It seems to come from some place of entitlement in which people think they deserve to get everything for free. Surprise: you only get what you pay for.

Sounds like you might have been too young to enjoy the 90s Internet

My new high end washer and drier come with an iphone app that notifies you when it’s done. It comes with non-optional spam notifications for their other products and subscriptions. It seems that the market of “pay more to get a product without ads” is increasingly disappearing.

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