'Enshittification' is coming for everything | Hacker News Reader

'Enshittification' is coming for everything

ft.com

50 pointsscrlk9 comments

Not for everything: only for the huge-corporation-owned, ad- and tracking-funded services and software. GNU/Linux, Mastodon, Matrix and other free-software-based things are thriving.

https://archive.ph/KCElF

> The internet isn’t more important than the climate emergency, gender justice, racial justice, genocide or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we’ll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it’s joined.

This is really well said.

> When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can’t agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can’t even agree on how to cater a meeting where they’d discuss the matter... But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.

This as well.

My single ray of hope is that maybe just maybe a good AI will provide better support than these presumably real people who don’t bother to read what I have written.

I had a problem with a Facebook marketplace purchase getting wrongly refunded. Could not get Facebook support to even try to comprehend the issue, and no way to reply.

Twitter account for a side project got hacked and started posting crypto scams. Try to contact support they were utterly useless. Over and over again just “Your account is permanently suspended for spam” no option to reply.

Now I’m having trouble with some tax software and I am getting the exact same experience. No one’s actually reading the content of my emails, they just scan it for keywords and hit some auto response of like top ten fixes for people without real problems. It’s throwing an API error on connecting to one of my accounts. This is a real problem.

With olden days phone support you could at least start yelling “MANAGER” at the robot and get to talk with a human.

Human time costs money. We can't tolerate spending on any avoidable expenses like that, comrade.

In the last year or so, I've had a disturbing number of experiences with various large companies messing up or violating contract and responding with, essentially, "f you, sue me."

I actually have a legal dispute going, and have heard of others, where the company responds with various forms of stalling and stonewalling in the hopes that you run out of patience or money - and if you don't - well you're a small exception to the rule and just the cost of doing business.

We need to start treating these examples for the criminal wrongdoing that they are instead of simply terrible customer service. And then, if the state doesn't react accordingly, we need to grapple with the fact that we live in countries with unreliable (or compromised?) legal systems.

I’ve heard that tableau and sales force are quite good at this

It's more like "f you, arbitrate this in kangaroo court."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com