I’m thinking even for cases of like shrinkflation.
I saw an article about potentially cheaper RAM here, so it got me curious if things ever really get better on occasion.
AFAIK internet access was very siloed in the 90s - AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and the like, which weren’t quite ISPs, since they allowed access only to their own services and networks. Then, in 2000s, these companies evolved and ISPs started providing access to the WWW, whick you could call “deshittifying” internet access.
These comments don’t leave room for much hope…
Book stores come to mind. Barnes and Noble killed local book stores and then Amazon killed Barnes and Noble which left an opening for local independent book stores to come back
And now the ones in my area are shutting down because B&N somehow is able to open new branches.
B&N did this huge push to Nook which has now been pretty much abandoned.
The need to constantly show growth makes me wonder if it’s worth doing crazy stuff that tanks the business just to show growth by getting it out of the ditch back to where it was before.
Coffee perhaps. I think previous generations were more apt to just get a tub of Folgers or Maxwell House and not care too much about what they were drinking. Then third wave coffee shops started emphasizing quality, process, and flavor nuances. These days, you can find specialty coffee in most areas or get high-quality beans delivered and brew it yourself.
Beer, too
I used to not understand why people liked coffee until I had a real espresso.
I got a nice local shop which was part of a chain but the manager bought out the location and has been doing pretty well.
academic publishing. It used to be monopolized by a couple publishing company with unreasonably high fee for access on both the side of researcher and reader.
Now, through hard works of the academics and funding from the public, now many publishing company are non-profit governed by working academics. And in many fields, open access has become the default.
I wouldn’t call it de-shitified but it is getting better. I think also Anna’s archive and syhub should not be underestimated in their effect. If students and researchers are not dependant on journals to do their work, they are more likely to publish open access.
Probably the biggest effect IMO is sites like arxiv.
Yes, there are many field that are still struggling, but nowadays most of, if not all, the articles in my domain is published by ACM and Schloss Dagstuhl, both are academic governed non-profit that are full open access (I don’t think author even have the option to close access.
That being said, fields like medicine, biology, engineering is very much behind. I am very glad my field moved away from publishing with IEEE. They are not necessarily “behind” the entire academia, but certainly way behind my field.
Beer?
In the beginning was European beer, and it was good. They created the American brewing industry and it was ok. Then they said “let there be swill” and that’s all we knew. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep.
Then Jimmy Carter said, "Let us make breweries in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the drinkers in the sea and the imbibers in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild party animals, and over all the pedestrians that move along the ground. And there was beer
Jimmy Carter saw all that he had made, and it was very good.
Edit: Jimmy Carter was the US President who signed into law deregulating beer. Since then we were legally able to start brewing our own, and it jumped-started the rise of craft brews here
it always amazes me how many people buy into the neocon garbage that Carter was a bad president. Dude was a nuclear submariner, helped cleanup a nuclear disaster, built houses with his hands, and his biggest crime to them? he cancelled the B-1 bomber when it became painfully obvious the stealth programs were going to eclipse it’s usefulness.
Reagan got elected on treason with iran, and lies about the B-1.
4 years later he was talking about the amount of money the pentagon was spending on ‘costumes’ as he slid into dementia.
Carter didn’t piss and moan, just went on building houses with his hands for 30+ more years.
But all you fucking export is over hopped swill and fucking Brooklyn Amber lager!
Yeah, the over-hopped thing is a trend that should’ve been dragged out back and shot before it ever had a chance to become popular. I want to go to a beer garden and find a variety. Instead, I get a dozen IPAs, Guinness (not complaining about that one), seven different ciders that are flavored like sickly sweet tropical fruits, and a weird peanut butter flavored bock from a local brewery.
Ha ha, every country keeps the good stuff for themselves.
Over-hopped is a major style here, and I find it baffling. Give me the toasty, malty, barley, coffee, bitter, chocolate notes of a good porter or stout any day of the week. But no, the menu is 6 IPAs, 2 ciders, a bock, and a weiss.
Too true. I mean, I like over-hopped swill, but I like most distinctive tastes
Currently drinking a “Maine sour”: blueberry and cinnamon. My local brewery is influenced by the cuisine of the Indian owners and really leans into sour ales and tropical fruits!
But yeah, even though I like an IPA most of the time, what about everything else? I’ve actually had good luck finding dark/black ales this year but it seems like no one makes Marzens anymore. October is disappointing without Marzens. What’s up with that?
Edit: Mango Lassi Sour is back in season!!!
Amen, brother.
I’d say American car companies. Due to market consolidation and car brands being a symbol of national pride, they were able to enshitify in the 1970’s and 80’s, producing low-quality expensive cars. Competition from Japan in the late 80’s and 90’s forced them to improve. American cars still trail behind Japanese cars in quality, but they’ve gotten much better.
Free and fair competition is essential to any economy. The gutting of antitrust laws in the USA is partly to blame for whatever you call this system we have now (I can’t confidently say it’s capitalism anymore).
Hard disagree lol, the American OEM standard is a bar so far down you can see the sparks of hell. The improvement was just their initial attempt to catch up before they gave up.
They nuked the EPA regulations which is why everything in the US is an SUV now and they bypassed competition with Japenese OEMs by lobbying congress to make anti import laws (exactly like what they are doing right now for Chinese EVs) which is how we got all these hodpe podge 90s era hybrid deal brands like diamond star or mazda & ford.
By the time those brands finally entered the US market with local production in full, they had already learned the gg ez system from their American counterparts and began to follow the same crappy practices of reducing cost and quality on every possible corner.
I wouldn’t buy a Ford vehicle of this decade even if it ends up being cheaper because the thing is made of ABS plastic and Chinese aluminum glued together with the freshly harvested tears of their yearly department layoffs.
I’d argue that the big
32 never recovered. Car design peaked in the 1920s and never recovered when the larger corps lobbied/wrote safety and fuel standards to force the mass consolidation of companies down to 3. Innovation slowed down so much and it is why China is going to eat our lunch through the transition to BEVs.Cronyism is the system we have
I agree with you. Ford still sucks though. if only for the awful interiors.
I once heard a take that American cars prioritized a great experience under the hood (spacious, easier to work on, fun to show off) …but cramped, uncomfortable cabins, while Japanese cars did the opposite.
My old Honda Element (RIP) seemed to support this theory: Interior passenger comfort? SO much leg room and dude, the back was basically luxury theater seating! That thing was ROOMY.
Working on it though? Half the time it legit felt like the only way to get to The Thing You Had To Fix was to run it through a Honda assembly line backwards.
…Or have a VERY strong octopus friend who could work a socket wrench…
That engine compartment was not made for human mechanics once the thing was put together. The starter location was EVIL.
Helped a friend replace the alternator on a 1990 Honda Prelude once. The official procedure was to disconnect one of the engine mounts and jack the engine up a few inches to create a path to get the alternator out. Crazy.
Pour one out for the Honda Element IYKYK!
Japanese cars are currently in a state of industrial shittiness. If the US is still trailing them, there is no hope for the US car industry.
They’ve been a bit more spotty on a couple engines and transmissions, but dollar for dollar they’re still averaging above US on reliability most of the time. Pretty much every car company has had a few complete disasters over the past decade.
I wonder how many companies love the cyber truck for making their failures look good?
Tesla in general. BYD is going to absolutely crush the global market, though. Anywhere they’re allowed to sell, they’re going to dominate. Better battery tech for way cheaper. Tesla won’t shake the global market much, but China will do it.
Very briefly, after the CEO of United Health was killed, insurance companies were accepting claims they otherwise would have rejected.
And some of those were literally life-saving claims.
Luigi saved more lives than he (allegedly) ended.
Welp, gotta kill another then.
Don’t do that. Don’t give me hope.
I went to pick up a prescription the next morning. It was mysteriously free.
Fuckin awesome
Is that verifiable? Claims are all PHI and kind of a black box. To be fair, there has been a shift in prior auth rules which could be influenced by the killing.
I’ve seen a few anecdotal claims that people with severe conditions got okayed after the killing.
Unfortunately, the ultimate fallout is less accountability, as they’re now unwilling to release any information about the “doctors” supposedly reviewing cases.
Video games
Had a huge crash around the Atari era due to an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published. Games were also extremely expensive then
Nintendo famously reversed this crisis with the introduction of the NES and their “Nintendo seal of quality”. Consumers were able to access a curated collection of quality games, and it really turned things around and basically launched the modern gaming industry
If anybody wants to know just how bad the crash was, Atari buried about 700,000 game cartridges and consoles in a landfill in New Mexico after the release of the infamously bad ET game for the Atari. A game that supposedly had more cartridges manufactured than there were existing consoles for them to be played on at the time.
It was so bad that the home console effectively disappeared from the US market as investors and customers believed that the fad had run its course and companies went back to focusing exclusively on arcade cabinets until Nintendo came in about 3 years later and proved that there was still a market for home consoles. It was so bad that Nintendo changed the name of the NES for the Japanese market to the Famicom - advertising it as a “family computer” system, not a game console.
I remember the seal as a kid, I had no idea why they were doing that though. Thats a cool piece of history.
Steam, too. It was originally unpopular DRM for Half-Life 2. It had a broken offline mode that could only be selected when already online. It had no meaningful customer service and people permanently lost their accounts with no avenue for appeal (and probably no human even involved).
It was originally unpopular DRM and a launcher for Counterstrike. I think Valve was trying to take a page out of Battle.net’s book. The Half Life 2 thing came afterwards, and if it weren’t for that Steam probably would have just been yet another failed footnote in gaming history.
NES also introduced verification so you couldn’t just manufacture random games and take them to market without approval.
Walled gardens - sucky but sometimes genuinely useful to clean up messes and keep them from happening (aka Grandma on her iPhone)
Can someone make this happen with mobile games please?
We’re at the point where you can play all sorts of emulated games on mobile. There are near infinite bangers to play right now.
And I THINK there was a company out there trying to revive old mobile games that were actually good (think original Angry Birds) so they’d work on modern phones. I dunno if that took off sadly, though…
I got curious and did a bit of searching since I couldn’t really think of anything. Apparently Fender (guitars) was originally amazing, was sold to another company and really degraded in overall quality, and then was purchased back by some of its engineers and returned to a better quality. Pretty nice to see that people who were actually passionate about something regaining control and saving something they loved.
https://www.soundunlimited.co.uk/blogs/articles/fender_timeline
This is similar to how many of the big names in the video game industry were built. Disgruntled designers leaving companies like Atari to start their own company. It’s how Blizzard got their start, and I believe Ubisoft, EA, and at least a couple of the other big names were founded the same way.
Then, of course, the bean counters started taking over and it all went downhill from there once they went from keeping the designers on task with realistic goals to maximizing profits.
Newman’s own seemed on track to go through the same thing, but the original family bought it back before things got too far.
They then proceeded to not innovate at all for a couple decades and now they’re serving cease and desists to any builders making guitars remotely similar to the Stratocaster with demands to recall and destroy sold guitars.
Fender is dogshit ass like Gibson. Both companies have behaved like entitled nepo-babies for decades. These companies deserve to die as punishment for their hubris.
Ironically, they are now sending cease-and-desist letters to guitar manufacturers that build guitars with the s-style that their stratocasters have, and they are public enemy number one in the guitar community right now.
https://www.guitarworld.com/gear/electric-guitars/fender-cease-and-desist-lsl-instruments
Sadly though with the recent cease and desist stuff they’ve been involved with it seems like they’ve turned scummy.
Disappointing :( It seemed like their overall production quality is what made them popular and revered, so going after someone who won’t be able to source the same materials and match the same production scale does seem super low.
Could be that they don’t want people selling knock off shit as real and tanking their reputation. Or it could be assholery.
Their Stratocaster shape is public domain in the US. They won a court case in Germany for copyright of it and immediately went after any builder selling to Germany.
It was a total asshole scumbag move. No silver lining, just finance bros destroying a brand.
I could so understand that! I’m not super familiar with their products beyond looking into things for this post, but I feel like their branding would be on their official products 🤔 If another company is making something similar and using their branding, that would be pretty disastrous.
That was a nice read, thanks for sharing
In some ways shrinkflation is “cyclical” in that inflation rises costs, companies try to cheat consumers by shrinking products, but wages go up and “premium” products launch that are a decent quantity again. Those do well, but then inflation hits again, they shittify and shrinkflation happens again.
The long standing “big” brands never recover, but new stuff does come along. Good example is the “premium” chocolate bars that come along, their selling point being they had more cocoa in them. The established mass market brands used to have cocoa in them, but reduced the proportion to save costs. Now some of those “premium” brands have reduced the cocoa content and new even more expensive chocolate brands are available.
Fun fact: most American chocolates cannot be called chocolate in the EU because they don’t contain enough cocoa.
Equally though many European chocolates can’t be called chocolate in the US because they have too much vegetable or seed oil in as a ratio to cocoa butter.
Enshittification happens in both places, they just toe the line of the rules in each.
That’s mainly the British ones, to be fair. Brits developed a taste for vegetable oil during the war, and we’re nothing if not nostalgic.
Huh. I had no idea.
More British than European typically.
Bowling Alleys, at least some of the ones I’ve seen lately. There was a period in the late 00s where bowling alleys thought they were the shit and started charging upwards of $20/player/lane, plus $30+ dollar pizzas. Not to mention the arcade jumping from quarters to dollar-credits.
The last couple I’ve found have all but dropped that, basically back down to the $15/lane/2 hour model with however many players and complimentary shoe rental. One even had $5 personal pizzas (that yes were just Totinos or similar heated up, but hey it’s better than $30 for a red baron).
I guess the ones that survived covid realized no one was willing to spend a nice dinner’s worth of cash on a night at what should be the second cheapest type of third space available to people.
I would love $15/lane/2 hours. Bowling here is $285 for a lane for 2 hours
Shit, good thing I suck at bowling
There was an article on here about some sort of antitrust suit against Bowlero just a few days ago, with a bunch of people in the comments complaining that bowlibg is more enshittified now than ever before.
Apple products. They were considered junk until Jobs came back and revived their style. They are currently in the round 2 of the enshitification process.
Jobs and the ipod started the entire enshittification paradigm.
Don’t @ me.
Yeah, you’re right, we’re in round 3.
I’m not usually an apple fanboy, but it’s hard to hate on the M1 MBP. I have one used (around $800) and it’s still insane after all these years. Just a great laptop even today. Really hard to find anything better at that price.
It was that interval after they’d merged with NeXT but before iOS became a thing.
Cash. Currency exchange. Used to be a tourist trap, intransparent and bad rates, commission on top; take only mint banknotes. Now often we see: No commission, rates with low spread (same as the best bank rates available to consumers). Takes bank notes and coins at no surcharge, no discussion.
This is for countries where cash is still king and practically required. It’s competition at work; there are multiple local shops and they advertise their rates publicly. With internet in everyone’s pocket, there’s little room for cheating. Just enough spread for this to be a profitable business without robbing the customer.
Compare to ATM operators, which are usually a oligopoly charging growing fees to foreigners. Because they can.
