Recently re-discovered this gem of a blog post, written in 2018 by Nikita Propokov, about his disenchantment with the state of modern software. Do you think it’s still relevant today (perhaps more/less so than it was when it was written)?
It only got worse, and now that enshittification is in full effect for most big name consumer software, the speed at which things are falling is rising exponentially.
I only expect even worse now that AI has become mainstream and companies are half baking it into every notepad they find.
Funnily, due to this, i often find an open source app that is way better than whatever annoyed me.
Just today i used an Adobe product that got me raging. Within minutes i installed an oss equivalent that was a joy to use in comparison.
It’s an interesting trend.
This is my experience as well. I’ve always tried to be privacy-conscious, and stick to self-hosted alternatives or FOSS, but I was also lazy and didn’t really tried too hard. With the recent enshittification problems for almost every product that has a corporation behind it, it’s a lot more in my face that it’s shit and I should be dealing with it.
It made me finally get a VPN and switch to Mullvad browser. Get rid of Reddit completely. I finally got a Pixel with GrapheneOS and got a NAS running.
It’s also doing wonders for my digital addiction. The companies are grossly mistaken in assuming that my addiction to their service is greater than my immense hatred for forced monetization, fingerpriting and dark patterns. It’s turning out it’s not, and I’ve dropped so many services in the last few months I never was able to really stop using, most of them thanks to popups like “You have to log in to view this content” or “This content is available only in app”, or “You are using an adblocker…”. Well, fuck you. I didn’t want to be here anyway.
