The underlying issue is that enshittification is just growth induced entropy. The constant accumulation of half-baked features or user-hostile choices. Every business that is pressured by investors to grow suffers from this. It's the commercial equivalent of old age. It's why the advertising slowly increases everywhere, why Spotify can't just stay a decent app, why each new release of Windows only rearranges the ads and throws in a new version of the control panel.
The cycle is inescapable: * Startup has modicum of success * Success attracts investors/cash * Cash is spent hiring "talent" * The talent has to build SOMETHING * And by definition, half of what the talent produces is BELOW AVERAGE
And so it goes, the mutations increase, the telomeres shorten, and eventually the product ends up in the nursing home wishing it had spent more time just focusing on what was important.
I've already been considering the idea of just buying my media when I want it and see how that compares to my streaming bill. I'm willing to pay for things. I think that's important. I'd just like to make sure I'm getting what I want when I buy in, and the proliferation of services has come with the likelihood that not only will the ones I have not have specific content I'm looking for, some shows aren't available at all, which means I have to buy anyway.
But ads in things I'm already paying for are a new level of problem that are an expression of contempt for both the customer and the product. Streamers: it's not enough that I'm paying you for access to the content you've made or secured a right to so that I can give it my full attention? You also want to actually dilute the value of that by requiring me to divert my attention somewhere else?
That's an outright invitation to media piracy. If you're going to spend your attention on something extraneous to the actual media, the digital literacy skills involved in piracy are more generally useful than an advertisement. Not to mention the satisfaction in sending a message to people who'll erode the value of their own product to bump profit margins.
I might accept a price raise. Lots of streaming was probably underpriced in the first place. Add $25-50 a year to my bill and I'll keep paying for it if the value is there. But subtract from the value and I'll find a substitute.
Yet then, then… we can have tiers. There can be more interesting sponsors and advertisements in the pricier subscription tiers. For the bargain tier, you get the literal 90-120 minute “advertisements” I’m aware exist on YouTube (yes, as ad breaks!) that are basically financial scams. Except on Prime they might be unskippable depending on the device you’re using.
Then Bezos will have so much money he’ll need a second monocle.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/oct/31/emilia-...
This is nothing new. The Wayne's World 2 movie had a fourth-wall bending/breaking scene that made fun of this back in 1993:
I switched over completely. This is on iOS Chrome.
Do you get ads if you watch anything from CNBC? I think that's the only channel I get ads from on my phone.
More often than not I move from one service to the next because the last service got so shitty/annoying/terrible privacy decisions that I jumped ship.
The internet and tech was meant to be a wild west of ideas and options but if it ever was that was a sadly brief period.
Modern-day capitalism optimizes for maximum enshittification, because there isn't enough competition to encourage any other result. Occasionally you'll have a company that does what's "supposed" to happen: provide a generally better product to gain market share against competitors, but that's rare. Pretty quickly they start responding to the same incentives as the incumbents, and enshittify their products too.
Modern technology has also been a double-edge sword. It's provided consumer benefits, but has never really lived up to its potential, because "innovation" frequently means new consumer-hostile uses of the technology (e.g. pervasive communications technology means your car can now provide a middling navigation app; as well as can spy on you, sell your data, and show you ads).
Enshittification hits the sweet spot between big word and escathological humor, and that's probably why it became viral.