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Comment by 3uler | Hacker News Reader

Half decade? Its been getting worse for as long as I’ve been conscious.

The tipping point from steady improvement to steady enshittification is just post the 2008 recession. As soon as the financial incentives were put in for growth (2009+) the trend shifted hard to value extraction from a captive audience.

Eh. I understand the vibe, but so many millions of things have gotten so, so much better in my lifetime.

We could spend all day trying to list them, if we tried.

how old are you? smartphones are strictly better than no smartphones or no mobile phones. internet is better than no internet. etc.

YouTube is better than no YouTube. Wikipedia is better than no Wikipedia. But Google today is way worse than first decade Google.

There's curves to all these things. It just feels like we're accelerating on the downslope of a lot of them right now.

I agree with your point in general but

> Wikipedia is better than no Wikipedia.

In my opinion Wikipedia is worse than no Wikipedia. Wikipedia played a big part in suppressing what the Web might have been and started out becoming before it changed direction.

I have not heard this critique of Wikipedia before. Can you explain further?

Jaron Lanier is eloquent here in expressing a point of view that I find I share about Wikipedia and similar crowd-sourced phenomena:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maois...

I was watching in real time as Gopher, Wais, and the Web were all equally in play, and as the Web won. I had a personal website at the beginning, and I still have it. It seemed to be the next revolution in the dissemination of ideas after Gutenberg. Individuals could make their creations available to the entire world at almost no cost. Individual sites, individual voices, in all their eccentric glory, arose in profusion. Then it all became swamped by anonymous, unaccountable corporate voices. Wikipedia is a salient example of a collective, bland, plagiarising substitute for individual expertise that can not be held responsible for its words and that is accorded a false authority. it is part of the tragedy of the Web that could have been.

Smartphones are strictly worse than no smartphones.

I remember the time before smartphones. They make many tasks faster, easier, many tasks possible at all and replace specialised devices. You are wrong.

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