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Disenshittify or Die (pluralistic.net)
39 points by moonleay 5 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments



The current situation will continue because of the incentive structures. For-profit, and especially publicly-traded corporations, encourage owners and managers to optimize cost-cutting in the short-term. Instead, hackers should both form employee-&|customer-owned co-ops and join unions. Difficult to do initially, but it's how to minimize the threats of arbitrary layoffs, unethical customer exploitation, and craptastic, unrepairable products built to expire.


1. I wonder how much of this can be solved by well-designed 3rd party search engines?

2. Would be nice to see some well-organized search engines / web indexes that stay up to date and don't suck. Searching for a lot of stuff on google is like asking, "Please show me generic business site articles."


Damn that was an interesting and eye-opening transcription so read. Thanks for sharing.


> You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;

If PlayStation emulators are legal (like the ones in the iOS app store, for example), why aren't iOS emulators legal?


What makes you think it’s not legal?

You can almost certainly make something like Wine for iOS legally. But it’s a huge undertaking. It took years (decades?) for Wine to become solid. And it’s a constant battle with new OS updates with new APIs.


The difficulty is emulating the hardware, not the software.


Like many of you I use HN as a primary social network and Kagi as my search engine, etc. - but the relative unpopularity of these things shows that most users seem to be OK with their product getting enshittified. In fact, almost every time I tell someone I pay $10/mo for my search engine they look at me like I'm an idiot. "But Google is free."


I think Kagi is one of those things that needs to "just exist" for awhile, and then suddenly you'll be hearing about it from everywhere. Like a hipster band that suddenly gets used in an Apple commercial and becomes a #1 hit.


I used kagi for a while, but it honestly just didn't return great results. Maybe I'll try it out again and see if it's gotten any better...


Google is still a useful search engine for google/youtube/etc.


Honestly, my tolerance for enshittified products has become so low that I have stopped spending on things, foods, and poor services entirely. As in, I cannot fathom buying a shitty product for higher prices any more. It just doesn't feel....right.

Oh well, good for my finances and the environment.


You don't buy food anymore? I guess gardening is your full-time job now.




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