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Comment by shermantanktop | Hacker News Reader

Just be thankful they did this upfront, instead of at the tail end of a painful evolution from an open-source effort to closed-source commercial product, complete with a fig-leaf GitHub with all the interesting bits removed, and a graveyard of abandoned forks. They saved you all that disappointment.

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Absolutely, sometimes I feel the mid 2020's will be known as the era of enshittification.

It merited "word of the year" last year, could happen.

The Italian word for it, “Merdocene”, sounds even pithier.

Merdocene sounds like geological epoch. Pleistocene, Holocene, etc.

WFM!

Exactly, or Anthropocene, describing the changes wrought by humans including climate change.

Can we just call it "the scene"?

The D in "Système D" (economic concept, not to be confused with the controversial init system) stands for démerder which means "to deshittify".

We're gonna see a lot more Système D applied in the future...

Let’s hope the result is that the 2030s are known as the decade when consumers, users of apps, figured out it was worth paying for software from honest developers or companies, rather than getting it for free temporarily and then getting their data used in unexpected ways, enshittification, etc.

Hi, I'm a time traveller from the 2030s and chuckled a little at the prediction that people would still by writing apps by then.

What about when the consumers pay for software and still get their data harvested and the product enshittified?

Microsoft Windows has entered the chat. Apparently the next insiders version has even more ads in the start menu.

This stuff is so horrific.

That is completely irrelevant.

A large fraction, if not most, of potential users of software in the world can simply not afford paying any non-trivial amounts of money (by US/European figuring) for software of any kind; they simply don't have such money to spare. Look at median incomes in different countries:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

Country-specific pricing is not a new thing, though. After all, if someone in a developing country paid for a smartphone they might be able to also pay for some apps.

Also, you don’t make any money advertising to poor people in poor countries. I imagine if they don’t have money in their wallets, their data isn't worth much either. (Well, except to OpenAI).

So all the existing advertising in developing countries is not profitable? I wonder why anyone is doing it, then. ;)

Sorry, I didn't make my point clearly.

My point is that "free software supported by data harvesting and advertising" isn't more profitable in poor countries than software you buy off the shelf. Advertising revenue scales down just as much as disposable income for apps.

Have you tried watching a cricket match in India? The ad frequency is incredible. It’s usually essentially a long series of ads with a bit of cricket mixed in.

If advertising were lucrative, it probably wouldn’t be that way.

Those are orthogonal; Debian is free, Windows is paid, guess which one spies on you and shows you ads?

Such an overused word and in this context it's not even relevant.

It is kind of relevant, we have zigbee. Which is a bit quirky, along comes Thread that promises to make it more open, better compatibility between vendors and more modern. If it turns out that big companies use Thread in a way to oppose those goals then I feel that is an attempt to enshittify the entire home-automation ecosystem.

Which must be the holy grail of enshittification, I mean it is one thing to make your own product/service worse. But to make everyones products worse? Jackpot!

At least back up why you think it's irrelevant if you're going to call someone out like this

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