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.
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 have a copy of ET my dad got for my older brother when he was a kid. Dunno if it or the Atari even still work.
You should hang onto it. They dug up some of the ones that were buried a few years back as part of a documentary and sold some of them at auction while the rest were donated to museums for preservation.
I used to have an old shareware floppy of wolf3d as well.
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.
Apple did make an effort with Apple Arcade. The idea is it’s a curated list of decent indie games, none of which have monetization. But, you pay a monthly fee for them.
I remember the seal as a kid, I had no idea why they were doing that though. Thats a cool piece of history.
an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published
Who will save us now?
Indie games
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Carter was the last good president NOT “made for TV”.
Trump is the first “made for internet” president
never thought about it that way but valid. yep.
Carter was also the last president to treat the American people like adults.
that’s insightful; so much of reaganism was ‘let daddy take care of things and don’t worry your pretty little head about ww3’.
I remember reading his malais speech and thinking that the American people were a bunch of babies for trashing him over it.
malais speech
I’d heard this mentioned but it was before my time, upon reading it… holy shit, america, this guy described problems like an adult and you freaked the fuck out and went reagan.
jfc
Yep, the idea that Americans thought Carter was a terrible president bad had me embarrassed since I was in high school.
it just says so much when they tell you who they think the good ones were.
like, so many of them still idolize trump, and he’s a moron.
But all you fucking export is over hopped swill and fucking Brooklyn Amber lager!
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!!!
Ha ha, every country keeps the good stuff for themselves.
Thank you. Christ I hate IPAs. I always feel like people are lying when they say they like them lol. I know everyone is different but fuck IPAs are SO bitter and awful.
I like a session IPA, genuinely. It’s just when all you taste is stupidly bitter hops that I can’t be arsed.
There’s a beer at a locally brewery here called Hop Shock. The name tells you everything you need to know lol.
Amen, brother.
I used to think I didn’t like beer, until I tried it in Germany. Now I just seek that style out.
I’ve also had an anger inducing moment when a forum debater claimed Government regulation always harms industries. I pointed to German beer, which in part remains fantastic because it has regulations to avoid devolving it into American slop. The damn liar pivoted directly into claiming their beer is terrible.
Have you tried Belgian stuff yet? Also highly regarded.
I think so, yeah; not as though the quality stops right at Germany’s borders, several other European countries can follow the same style very well.
Can’t stand Belgian beer. Coriander is disgusting and they use SO MUCH of it. Tastes like a god damn headache.
You’ve been drinking the wrong beligian beers friend. There’s a lot more to Belgian beer than a coriandered hoegaarden.
Try a trippel next time you get a chance. Or if you’re into hops Duvel is divine.
Tripels also contain coriander, but Duvels do not.
Some Tripels do, most don’t though. Most are without coriander.
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.
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.
This is on top of warping the entire US transit system so that many cities require cars to do anything, and most places aren’t walkable. And, intentionally designing those SUVs to look “tough” in a way that completely ruins their pedestrian visibility from the drivers seat. That shittification definitely hasn’t been walked back.
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.
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.
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.
Cable TV was replaced by early streaming, although that is now well on its way to enshitification too
I can think of two cases that might qualify: The American meat industry and the Austrian wine industry.
In the former case, public outrage over Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle caused legislation and regulation. In the latter case, the wine industry got so cheap that they started back-sweetening rotgut with antifreeze and poisoned a bunch of people, and they had a choice: Rebrand to impeccable quality or die as a national industry.
The Austrian Green Veltliner is one of the few wines I always have to have at home.
Domino’s pizza turned itself around.
I am pleasantly surprised by the quality shift. Managed to unseat my local pizza joint
strictly in the context of the title alone, video games.
Video games are at an all time enshitified state. What are you going on about?! You must not be following the whole market.
What are you talking about? There are hundreds of great games being released, the gaming industry is a lot more than a couple of big corps.
The indie game scene is thriving and while there’s a lot of crap out there, it’s not really what I’d consider enshitified.
On the other hand, AAA games and anything mobile is absolutely enshitified.
i was referring to atari in the 80s
anway…
Yeah, video games went through an early enshitification cycle. Atari came out and was all the rage as people made games exploring what could be done, which attracted money, which attracted grifters as well as impatient executives. Between them, a lot of garbage got released to the point where the video games industry pretty much died. Nintendo revived it with the NES and their licensing program that meant someone there had to agree a game was at a certain level before they could even publish it.
Over time, the video games industry grew to the point where it is large enough to survive a wave of shitty games, even if those games are released by the ones normally expected to know what they are doing but don’t because MBAs come in with “optimizations” that ruin things, plus sometimes brag (or are otherwise obvious enough) about what thet are doing to the point where people turn against them.
So even though the video games industry has come up with new ways of enshitification that the 80s grifters would have creamed their pants over, there’s enough competition that understands that enough people don’t really want or like that to thrive without doing it.
No Man’s sky and cyberpunk definitely fall into this
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.
American beer. Used to be just be the macro brews with corn, rice and other adjuncts.
British beer too.
Watney’s and a small number of other breweries had a stranglehold on the UK pub industry because they owned a lot of pubs and could exclusively force their own brands upon their locations. Their Red Barrel bitter pissed people off so much that it led to the creation of CAMRA, an organisation that campaigns for real ale.
CAMRA formed from four ale enthusiasts on holiday in Dublin who were lamenting about the dogshit state of British beer. It was a very successful movement…
Yeah, they do sometimes and in some situations, usually when you have some major disruption, but the problem is that the disruptor often ends up becoming the enshittifier eventually.
Case in point, look at Google. On a technical level Google genuinely cracked search in a way that no other company did, and made it so good that it became the dominant way to find information online.
They then ambitiously decided to use those resources to try and break into / disrupt several other markets like web browsers, email, office software, mapping software, operating systems, video broadcasting, etc.
During those early years we got a bunch of genuine improvements. Chrome was way better then Internet Explorer, and substantially cleaner and faster then Firefox, and still open source and not developed by ad-focused people.
Maps was way better then MapQuest, Google docs at least gave you an easy and accessible alternative to Word, Gmail was way better then Hotmail with way more storage, the original Chromecast and Chromecast audios were amazing value.
But then companies get entrenched, they start tying every product together, building walls around the garden, and start pulling up the ladder behind them. Then when everyone is thoroughly walled in they start extracting every possible opportunity for money and we’re back to enshittification.
Maybe the porn industry? It was rife with abuse and financially yoked its porn stars. Then things like OnlyFans came along and now adult entertainers have full control of their content and careers.
I encourage you to look into the agencies that prey on young women, essentially owning their content and taking most of their earnings.
He didn’t say it didn’t still happen. Just that there is now an option where it doesn’t. Essentially it’s an improvement instead of a continued enshitification.
It’s not that predatory entities don’t exist anymore, it’s that modern systems help make porn stars more independent if they want to be.
