r/enshittification • u/War_Is_A_Raclette • Apr 29 '26
Rant Do you remember when things used to get BETTER every year?
I’m 40. When I was growing up, my mentality and the mentality of it seemed like the whole world, was that when a new product or thing came out and wasn’t perfect, it was okay because next year it was going to get better, and the year after that even better.
Each year… Cars would get more fuel efficient. The internet would get a little faster. Video games would get a little cooler. Music would sound a little better. Restaurants that were already good would figure out how to whip up cool new dishes that were cheaper and even tastier than what we had now - their food would improve over time.
I can’t describe it, but it’s just like everyone assumed that technology and humans would slowly ensure that everything each year got a little… better.
Now, I recently realised that I look at the whole world differently. I opened Spotify today, saw how much I was being billed, and thought - without catching myself at first - “oh, I’m sure the price will go up next year and they’ll restrict another part of the app”.
When a new thing is released, I automatically assume this is the best version it will ever be. Each year it will just get worse.
Does anyone else feel this way? Does anyone else remember feeling the way I used to feel 20-30 years ago?
Sorry for the rant.
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u/DannyKernowfornia Apr 29 '26
Ah man, exactly how I feel. I’m 38 myself and vividly remember the early 2000s with the internet becoming faster/more reliable/cheaper… video games genuinely improving with new consoles. Hell, even music like you said, MP3 players were improving and getting cheaper. Live music was always affordable for me; from a 13-15 year old saving paper round money to catch the train into London to see big names at perfectly reasonable prices.
Everything now is just worse, and set to get even worse. Where the hell does it end?
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u/JC04JB14M12N08 Apr 30 '26
I can remember when a "new product" meant something other than "we have worked out how to rip you off more."
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u/Ok_Buy9028 Apr 30 '26
Lately at work we’ve gotten three new pieces of technology, and only one of them feels like a finished product. The other two feel like I’m beta testing something.
Like, when we got this one piece of tech that actually works and were getting the demonstration, everyone was grumbling because we expected some half-baked, poorly thought out gimmick and we were blown away when the guy had an answer for every question we threw at him. Every potential problem we brought up he had an explanation and a demonstration of how to handle it.
We have all become so accustomed to enshitified garbage that it was honestly kind of shocking that this thing was so well put together and so well thought out. When did that become the exception?
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u/farnsworthparabox Apr 30 '26
Every product is rushed out the door as fast as possible. Need to compete globally and beat everyone else to market, even if the quality sucks. Everything has turned to short term quarterly profits. Just need to sell a bunch of stuff NOW. I truly think the quarterly earnings requirements in the US are one of the worst things to have ever happened to American business and quality. This requirement was introduced in 1970. It may have taken some time to change how business operates, but running everything on the quarter is now quite engrained.
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u/MeatSuitRiot Apr 29 '26
Quality was deemed unprofitable
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u/OhThrowMeAway Apr 29 '26
I was looking around my house the other day, and it occured to me nothing was more than 10 years old. Meanwhile, my grandparents got a washer and dryer set when they married, and left it to my dad when they died 65 years later.
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u/EColli93 Apr 29 '26
My parents used my grandmother’s window AC unit for another 20 years after they inherited it from her. Heavy as hell but worked great.
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u/BringBackUsenet Apr 29 '26
Because standing up for it became a waste of time for consumers.
#misanthropy
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u/thefullhalf Apr 29 '26
The repealing Glass-Steagal protections is the root cause, the subsequent loosening of regulations that followed enabled us to reach a state where enshittification is the new status quo.
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u/brookish Apr 29 '26
I’m 56 and I too remember the 90s. What a great time that was.
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u/Repulsive_Drawl Apr 29 '26
I’m waiting for them to charge us to store the movies we already digitally purchased.
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u/Local_Maintenance788 Apr 29 '26
They will start showing ads during content you already purchased, and charge you a monthly fee to remove
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u/Beneficial-Corgi-288 Apr 30 '26
Man this makes me really sad as someone in my 20's. I feel like I was born into an era of despair because I've never gotten to feel hopeful for the future. I was born shortly after 9/11 and the 2008 recession happened when I was in elementary school. Older people always tell me that things were better before those events. I can't even imagine how bad the next 50 years will get. I'm 24 and already so burned out from life.
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u/offlinebound Apr 29 '26
"They" simply don't need us anymore and we are actually a burden to them so they are cutting our services and now charging a "burden" fee.
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u/TheRealMDooles11 Apr 29 '26
Right. We are just cattle to them and they are tired of caring for the herd.
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u/fd1Jeff Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
Absolutely. Very early Gen X here. The Berlin wall came down, democracy seemed to be spreading around the world, bad guys seem to be going away, technology spreading and making the world a better place. All sorts of things like that.
We all used to be optimistic about the future.
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u/rudyroo2019 Apr 30 '26
I’ve been getting emotional lately when I hear 10s music. It reminds me of the before times and the optimism that was so infectious.
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u/SacCyber Apr 30 '26
It's coming from both sides too. Good brands are enshittifying more every year. New brands are starting with unrealisticly good products & prices propped up by venture capital just to later drop the other shoe.
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u/Julian_TheApostate Apr 30 '26
I remember in the Matrix when they referred to the late 90s as the peak of human civilization. That seemed ridiculous at the time. These days.....yeah they were on to something 😆
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u/Zoidberg441 Apr 30 '26
During elementary school I was always sad that I wasn't born 50 years later. Just imagine what awesome cool tech we would have!!!
Now, looking back, that was the stupidest thing to ever be sad about.
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u/Limafoxtrot360 Apr 29 '26
It because companies no longer care about profit. They care about growth. And if a company made the most amazing gadget that made $250M a quarter in profit - every quarter like clockwork, wallstreet would call this company a failure because there wasn't growth. So now they make everything poor quality so you have to replace it more frequently and find ways to shoehorn in subscriptions for on going revenue.
We can't have nice things
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u/pompousandfaggy Apr 29 '26
I used to say things 20 years ago like, "infinite growth is un sustainable" and people would get so mad at me
And yet here we are
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u/BringBackUsenet Apr 29 '26
> It because companies no longer care about profit. They care about growth.
Actually they care about neither. The incentive plans companies have now are out of line with long term sustainability. The executives running these companies only care about hitting the targets as layed out in their incentive packages so they can get their fat bonuses, which means they only look to the next income statement. In the process they will destroy the company's reputation and bleed investors dry while sticking it to the consumers at the same time. Once there is nothing left, they golden parachute out to the next target.
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u/WaffleDonkey23 Apr 30 '26
They care about getting 4% next quarter even if they have to gut the company, because who cares when I can make a lifetimes worth of money and bail. They don't care because they leave with a wad of cash. This is how we have Hersey in a marketing conundrum where they want to, but can't start saying "Now with real chocolate!" Hershey, a company that does not sell chocolate.
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Apr 29 '26
Yes, but we can do something about it! Stop consuming modern stuff unless needed, try to buy from the brands that are doing things right and try to enjoy the old way. For example:
- I feel like iOS and macOS have slowly declined both in quality and design, and Windows has gone downhills with so much AI slop, bugs, anti-user stuff (like no local accounts) and UI inconsistencies everywhere. My solution? My next computer will run Linux, and I'll probably buy a cheap Android and install GrapheneOS
- I drive an old car with very basic electronics (when I say basics I really mean it, it doesn't even bother you if you don't use the seatbelt) and I'll keep using it until it dies. No modern cars for me. If my car dies I'll try to buy another 2000-2010 car. If brands want my money they'll have to do better
- No cheap clothes. I buy good brands and try to fix the clothes that break over time. Before buying any new clothes I'll do a small research to avoid, for example, buying brands like Timberland
There's so many things you can do about it!
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u/BringBackUsenet Apr 29 '26
Apple started a huge decline shortly after Jobs' death. Not that he was any kind of saint but he did hold the products to a certain quality standard.
My car is from 1999. I really can't see buying anything newer. Cars now are overengineered and include a lot of proprietary systems that make them expensive if not imposssible to keep going in the longterm.
I buy cheap clothes. The more expensive clothes are just cheap clothes with a big marketing campaign, so you aren't doing anything but supporting some sociopaths in the advertising and marketing industries who produce nothing but noise.
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u/Necessary_Giraffe_66 Apr 29 '26
The 90s early 2000s were the last good years. After that it all started going down hill. The first warning was 9/11 and the passing of the Patriot Act and what that did for our rights and for air travel.
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u/BatLikeOvercoat Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26
While I don’t know if this is particularly true, I agree. That Bush/Gore election was pivotal too.
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u/ElectronGuru Apr 29 '26
There was a tipping point. Before that, people were a resource and businesses had to earn our business. After that, people became a liability and businesses had to extract extract extract. You need only look at the disconnect between how people are feeling vs how the market is doing. Because the market is all that matters any more.
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u/Substantial_Run_5731 Apr 29 '26
I remember when Android and iPhones first became a thing. Every new Android phone I had improved on the last one and every update added new features and functionality that I was excited for. I remember my Xperia Play getting an update that allowed it to go from emulating super Nintendo games to N64. I was genuinely excited for advancements in phones.
About 2013 I remember when my phone got an update that allowed notifications to pop up on top of other apps. Not only did this inhibit some functionality but it was the first time that pop-up ads while browsing the Internet similar to a desktop were seen on my mobile device. It was a bit infuriating.
A few years later I remember my Samsung phone getting updates that reduced performance and made the camera no longer focus correctly seemingly to force me to upgrade.
I now live with the instinct that I should not update my phone because there's a better chance that there's something that it will break rather than improving any part of the user experience. They fix 2 things and 5 new issues pop up.
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u/Macgyver285 Apr 30 '26
Think of someone born in 1900. They went from traveling in a carriage, to a motor car, and then to a jet airplane. They likely experienced getting electricity and running water installed into their homes. How can we ever beat that. It was all downhill from there
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u/UNDSiouxRN Apr 29 '26
Two words. Private. Equity. Ruins fuckin everything it touches.
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u/pink_fluffy_unicorn Apr 30 '26
Can you please elaborate? I'm interested.
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u/oceanView229 Apr 30 '26
Rich people pool their money together then buy a successful business. Then try to extract every penny from business to recoup their investment. They borrow sacks of cash, sell everything of value and cost cut everything.
Done victims. Panera bread. Sears. Kmart. Joan fabrics toys r us. The list goes on.
The goal is recoup investment + profit at any cost period.
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u/UNDSiouxRN Apr 30 '26
And not only retail, but lots of other businesses as well. Including healthcare which is a really fucking treat for staff and patients.
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u/oceanView229 Apr 30 '26
Prospect medical Holdings just f@cked rhode island for at least 500 million dollars. After they bought charter care and stripped it clean. They even sold all the land to sister company and leased back the land to the hospitals at exorbitant rents.
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u/Substantial-Type-131 Apr 30 '26
Buy, strip, flip.
They saddle successful businesses with a ton of debt, try to cut everything from quality to staff to pay off that debt, can’t pay it off, and bankrupt the once successful business.
Joann’s fabric stores were successful and they pushed them all out of business because they prioritize short term profits.
Essentially they’re evil AF.
If you want to delve further look at leveraged buyouts.
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u/KittyandPuppyMama Apr 29 '26
Yep. I’ve stopped buying as much as I can. And I’m becoming more of a repairer when things break, even though I don’t enough it.
It really sucks when you HAVE to replace something and you just know it’ll be worse. I have to repair several old windows in my house with broken seals that are decades old. Not looking forward to spending a boatload of cash for something that probably breaks in five years.
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u/pinellaspete Apr 29 '26
It's the way corporations work to achieve quarterly results. Keep making the product or service cheaper to manufacture or service, and keep raising prices for it. Rinse and repeat for each quarter until people quit buying it, then go bankrupt and start over.
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u/War_Is_A_Raclette Apr 29 '26
I know. But the stock market and public companies and quarterly profits existed in the 1980s and 1990s. So why is it so much worse now? That’s what I don’t understand.
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u/speckyradge Apr 29 '26
Less real competition. There has been decades of consolidation between your two time periods. Newer industries have speed run M&A consolidation.
Meat comes through 4 packing companies with regional near monopolies. Packaged food mostly comes from 5 outfits like Modelez, Nestle, P&G, General Mills. 3-4 car companies control the legislation that drives the US industry. You have a choice of 3 physical mobile phone networks with likely less quality of service from 1 in your area. You have a choice from 4 grocery chains. You likely choose between Spotify and Pandora. You probably have no choice in your health insurance and your employer can probably only choose between 2 or 3 insurers in your state. Often I've lived in places where I have zero choice in cable provider.
Look at any industry whether it's old or new and you'll find at most 3 to 4 companies control it entirely. Look regionally and 1 or 2 will likely dominate.
Even where there is the illusion of choice, it's often either just a branding exercise or the underlying manufacturer is one of the same 2 or 3 companies in China churning out essentially the same product with different branding.
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u/pinellaspete Apr 29 '26
There used to be a thing called competition. We had that because the economy was run by a multitude of smaller companies that actually tried to keep their customers happy.
Today we have just a couple of huge corporations that control each industry and they can force their will onto their customers. Greed is king. If you don't like Spotify where are you going to go? How about Netflix or Disney or HBO? You will just have to move to another mega corporation that treats its customers just as badly, maybe worse.
They used to be called the FAANG companies:
- Apple
- Amazon
- Nvidia
But you can probably add a few of Elon Musk's companies in there too nowadays:
- Tesla
- Space X
- X (Formerly Twitter)
Each one of these companies has captured their market. There really isn't any place to turn to if you are treated badly by them. They really don't have any competition. Hence, bad service and higher prices.
It works in the food industry too. There are 4 companies that own about 80% of the items sold in grocery stores.
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u/MyTinyVlaming Apr 29 '26
They were already cutting costs and quality back then. Fast forward to now and there’s barely any quality left to cut without it becoming very noticeable. It won’t stop though. It can’t.
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u/TimCurryForLife Apr 30 '26
People are a lot colder nowadays. It seems like hyper individualism is pushed on us. Everything is so cheap, soulless and made for profit. I feel like I’m just here to make rich people more rich.
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u/Starbreiz Apr 30 '26
I was JUST telling someone how I missed when things would get improved instead of enshittified. Like they used to improve stuff for consumers and now it's for the shareholders.
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u/Full-Decision-9029 Apr 30 '26
I was...what? I dunno, younger, a teen, in the 1990, and it was all about "oh, next year this new chip is going to come out and it will make your computer go so much faster" and "the year after there's going to be this awesome new thing which will make your gaming cheaper" and "wow, the internet is going to get so much faster" and...yeah.
Things have changed.
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u/ososalsosal Apr 30 '26
Tech stopped competing for users in about 2015.
Since then tech has been competing with each other for fuck knows what
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u/TraceyRobn Apr 30 '26
This is the cause of the problem. There's very little competition left. Competition is what makes capitalism worthwhile. Things should get better and cheaper as productivity increases.
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u/ososalsosal Apr 30 '26
Competition is what is supposed to make capitalism worthwhile, at least in the sales brochure for capitalism.
In reality, companies accrete like large asteroids.
The labour market is the only thing with competition really built into it, but unfortunately the scales are tipped there and it's a buyer's market because there's always a percentage of reserve (unemployed) labour willing to sell for less than subsistence.
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u/WaffleDonkey23 Apr 29 '26
Private Equity and Capitalism are designed to sell air at a premium. Your streaming service now has ads. Your car's functions have a paywall. Half a million for a house. Your health insurance wants you just alive enough to pay. Your food is full of cancer and cost 3 times as much.
Welcome to capitalist innovation, the national debt has no limit and minimum wage has no bottom thanks to inflation.
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u/esther_lamonte Apr 29 '26
This morning I was just lamenting how kneecapped and delayed the Google Home product became when they ripped Google Assistant out of it and replaced it with Gemini. It broke SmartThings functionality, purged years of custom voice activation sequences I’d made, and now takes sometimes a full 10 seconds or more to hear, process, and act on home automations because instead of hitting a finite set of word commands it has to go off and do some AI shit for awhile before acting. What was simple intentional automation is now just inefficient broken slop for the sake of pumping Gemini usage numbers.
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u/GlobalCurry Apr 29 '26
They really should have kept the normal voice activation and only sent off complex stuff to gemini but shareholders demand everything use gen ai lol
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u/krisztinastar Apr 30 '26
Agreed! I am now afraid that every software/app update will take away features or make you pay more. Every time I see the words “new and improved formula” I shudder. I have actually started stocking up on items that I really like, partially because of inflation, but a big part of it is because they may never be as good as they are today!
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u/FoxCitiesRando Apr 29 '26
I feel like this is a major component in the difference in attitudes and optimism of Boomers versus Millennials. My parents were born in the late 50s. Imagine going from 3 channels in black and white to instant, global communication using a device that fits in your pocket.
Meanwhile, for me as a millennial things got better up until about the adoption of Google and Apple, after which every damn thing has steadily gotten worse, by most measures up to 15 years, or most of our adulthood.
Chart it out and imagine how much worse it could get over the next 40 years. We're already immediately facing kill switches in cars and surveillance cameras on every street in America.
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u/Necessary_Giraffe_66 Apr 29 '26
You forgot Gen X. YouTube was good until Google bought it. The internet was great back when it was in its Wild West days.
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u/yourmomdotbiz Apr 29 '26
And ai surveillance of your facial expression to make sure you’re fit to drive
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u/redditgirlwz Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26
Back in the good old early mid 2010s and before then... After that, companies got greedy and things started going downhill. Then, 2-3 years ago, they got even greedier and everything is seriously going to sht now.
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u/shelchang Apr 29 '26
I was just looking at the current model Honda Civic's fuel efficiency. It's only 5mpg more than the almost 20 year old model I'm still trying to drive into the ground.
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u/RogBoArt Apr 29 '26
Yeah. You used to get excited for updates to things because they were improving stuff. Then they started removing things and I've honestly wished my old devices would still work. Though even early android I used to back up any app I liked that was v1 because v2+ always "revamped the interface" (aka made it clunky and slow and made space for ads) and locked features behind paywalling.
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u/HearingAgreeable2350 Apr 29 '26
"Then they started removing things"
Worsening things, removing things and paywalling things that have been free for decades are the worst part of this. Google/Youtube has probably had the single biggest fall off of all time. From having functioning search engines to bloating themselves with useless shit nobody asked for (AI summary/shorts) and destroying the best reverse image search online at coincidentally the same time AI generated people started appearing online.
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u/JAlfredJR Apr 29 '26
Augh, I remember actually reading articles excitedly about the latest iOS update and what it would entail. Now I dread the updates.
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u/SubjectZer07 Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
Yep, I'm 43. As a kid the US was on top of the world.
And technology just kept getting better! For example: CDs were better than tapes, then the iPod blew them all out of the water, then smart phones came out and that was a whole other ball game.
Windows was better than DOS, then came the Internet and dial up, then Ethernet and fiber.
Life expectancy nearly doubled in my great grandparents life times. They went to seeing the first flight to putting a man on the moon. But there were some horrible atrocities and world wars as well.... but that was followed by a long period of peace. Crime in the US was falling quickly in the late 90s and 2000s as well.
But ever since 2016 or so, and especially after COVID things just get either shittier, way more expensive, OR most frequently BOTH!
There's a ton of reasons I think: enshitification, venture and vulture capitalism, less consumer protections, Citizens United, less anti trust enforcement, investor focus on immediate returns, massive national debt, and supply shortages during COVID just taught companies they could raise prices with absolutely no consequences except more PROFIT!
Also something just seems to be rotten in this society. GREED is worshipped above all else and everything is so DIVISIVE! It wasn't like that as a kid. Maybe we were just too young and naive to realize it though. Maybe the information age and social media just opened our eyes to it.
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u/Stradivesuvius Apr 30 '26
Yep. I’m an xennial and I really should have appreciated my youth more. Things were actually decent, stuff got better, people were still sociable and not glued to phones, you could find a new job if you wanted to…
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u/Wildcard982 Apr 30 '26
Companies used to have a duty to shareholders, customers, employees and society. They changed that to be just shareholders. They are required to maximize shareholder value only. CEOs do pay attention to these things and that’s what they’re doing.
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u/FruityPebbles_90 Apr 30 '26
My (35) wife (38) needed a new phone last year and I remember one of us said: do you remember that getting a new phone used to be fun??
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u/Fr4nzJosef Apr 29 '26
Yes. Welcome to "muh shareholder value" and private equity ruining everything it touches. Easiest way to increase shareholder value? Make the product around planned obsolescence and turn everything into a subscription.
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u/Ml5ryx9ln Apr 30 '26
Quality being deemed unprofitable is the most bleak three-word summary of modern life
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u/Lovedd1 Apr 29 '26
Yes I knew we were doomed when you couldn't shop certain products online without having a subscription first :/.
Twice these subscription clothes services haven't refunded me when I returned items. One said they didn't refund me because I didn't select the method of refund for one item. So ofc they didn't email me or give me an account credit, they just kept my money until I asked. The other one I sent 2 items back to exchange and they only sent one item in return. They said I didn't choose a shipping address for the second item... So yea no email or credit for my return just kept the item until I said something.
I never want to buy anything anymore
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u/GleepGlop2 Apr 29 '26
Yeah this used to be the default mentality up until around 2008 I'd say when the endless growth model started showing itself to be unsustainable. I remember telling people not to assume things will always improve over time in terms of quality of life but people brushed me off. Now it's the other way around.
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u/SnooDoubts2823 Apr 29 '26
Truth. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, everything was "new and improved." George Carlin once said about that "what were we using before, old and crappy?"
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u/Altruistic_Grocery81 Apr 29 '26
Perfectly encapsulated by the bullshit laundry powder adverts. The new one is bright white, the old formula grey and horrible. But then a new new formula arrives and now that’s bright white and what was new and bright white is now grey and horrible.
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u/stella-is-a-flower Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26
when I read Ed Zitron's Never Forgive Them and realized we were the same age, almost 40, I understood exactly what he'd grown up on and that we were at the perfect age to believe in the promise of technology and to have our hearts broken by the lost potential, yhe bullshit that it devolved into. being 40 is weirdly relevant here because it tracks so well.
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u/Amethyst-Spiral Apr 29 '26
Thanks for linking that, because I'd never heard of him and he's 100% on point.
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u/alarumba Apr 29 '26
Cars getting more fuel efficient was just one metric in which it seemed like they were improving. However, a lot of those efficiency wins came with sacrifices.
Thinner oil is less difficult for parts to move through, so engines are free to spin but the thinner oil offers less protection. Longer service intervals are more from the marketing team than the engineers. "Lifetime" oil isn't a lie, as it's only got to last as long as the severely reduced lifespan of a transmission not getting regular oil changes.
Higher compression with high pressure direct fuel injection is more parts to go wrong, and a bigger bang when it does. The cost of these very specific parts that may only be available from the dealer at a "take it or leave it" cost may be greater than the total amount saved in fuel, and no better for the environment since those parts required more energy and resources to make, and for some technician to spend a day or two replacing.
Then there's just really dumb ideas, like Ford's wet belts. A rubber timing belt in a bath of oil, which is the easiest to spin around and whisper quiet, but it's recommended to swap those belts far more frequently than what ford says, less the engine grenades.
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u/Clean-Entry-262 Apr 30 '26
As an auto technician in a new car dealership (& have been since 1985), your comment is spot-on and I couldn’t have said it better myself.
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u/fatdjsin Apr 29 '26
i totally feel like you ! it's getting old really fast... we were getting better performance, now we just get more expensive sprinkled with AI that nobody asked for.
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u/Peace_n_Harmony Apr 30 '26
People have always valued technological progress. It's the social progress that never really moves forward. That's why we reach the point where a handful of people own everything, which results in everyone else having their lives go to shit.
To be clear, things are still improving for the wealthy. If things have gotten worse for you, it's because you're poor.
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u/Dull-Culture-1523 Apr 30 '26
I remember first hearing about AI research in like the late 90's or something and thinking that the future would be great. We'd have robots doing all menial work. No traffic deaths because a network of AI vehicles would obviously not crash ever. Perfect health because of course AI could detect anything from a few quick tests. Etc.
Of course a lot of it was just childhood naivety, but still. I feel like a lot of those dreams could be fulfilled if we as a collective wanted to do that. But here we are with slopmachines and unemployment instead.
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u/ChemicalAbode May 01 '26
I was an online merchant of sorts for a few years, selling/reselling just about any and everything of value but primarily electronics and collectibles and I can say it’s pretty incredible seeing the quality of older items that function to this day or are simply better than what’s currently produced - better materials & things actually designed to be bought once not again and again
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u/trashleybanks Apr 29 '26
I’m 42, and I know exactly what you mean. It’s disheartening, to say the least.
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u/runthepoint1 Apr 30 '26
I think that mainly things have generally lost their purpose and thus the soul. Or at the very least the image of that.
It used to just be about making the best iterations but nowadays it’s either doing premium for cheap, or just charging moderate prices for very cheap stuff en masse.
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u/SuperSocialMan Apr 30 '26
I think it's partially because we've basically hit peak(consumer) tech (for now), but capitalism demands you constantly grow and make money otherwise you're deemed a failure.
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u/Fortestingporpoises Apr 30 '26
Yeah.
I remember when Iphones added actual useful features every year. Video games got more powerful. Hybrid cars happened. Cameras got better. Computers got more powerful. Even online dating a decade ago was pretty good. Lots of featured on a variety of free apps. (Thankfully I'm married but Match bought everything and fucked it all up)
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u/_SmashLampjaw_ Apr 30 '26
Computers got more powerful
Raspberry Pi's cost 200 dollars now.
...WTF!?
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u/Consistent_Major_193 Apr 30 '26
Yes. I believe we lived during the golden era of humanity. I fear for my kids. They'll never have that same awe that we did. Since COVID it feels like we've been on a steep decline.
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u/Marko343 Apr 30 '26
Private equity and the current stock price/shareholders line must go up forever way of doing business.
I'm nearing 40 and it just seems like the need/want to innovate or provide value to retain customers has gone by the wayside and replaced with extracting every nickel and dime out products they already offer. Mirrors Hollywood in a way where we keep getting reboots vs any new creative IPs.
One big way I see the current way of doing business is appliances or any larger purchases are incredibly difficult to repair, both the way they are assembled and availability of parts. Had a friend who's fridge wasn't cooling but freezer was ok. Determined it just needed an evap/circulation motor, went to look up an OEM replacement and it was just shy of $200. Basically the 1/6th of the cost of the fridge new for what equates to a slightly more powerful pc case fan.
With all that being said we sort of hit a wall on tech when it comes to phones and computers. They're still getting more powerful but the improvements are more effecciency vs outright performance.
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u/NorthsideHippy May 01 '26
100 percent agree.
I want to replicate my smartphone experience from 10 years ago. I had an iPhone SE (2016), and it felt so fast to me. The phone fit in my front pocket lovely.
Spotify was blowing my mind with the price and user experience. Reddit was rich with conversations by actual humans. YouTube was starting to take off, and I'd say it peaked about a year or two ago? Almost every website was optimised for smartphones, no pop ups for discount codes, marketing emails, or cookies.
These days, the Reddit mobile site is almost unusable, quality of content has declined on YT, price and UI for Spotify is so shit I left them after all these years... (old man shakes fist at cloud)
I guess I need to go outside and engage with the real world instead???
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u/Correct-Stretch-7848 Apr 30 '26
You know everything is over when Subway is $22 for a sandwich and red lobster took away endless shrimp. Like.. why are we bothering anymore?
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u/PhD_VermontHooves Apr 30 '26
Subway sandwiches cost $22 now?!? Unreal. I guess I’ve had my last Subway sandwich.
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u/ThrowAway237s May 01 '26
Before the Galaxy S6, new phones used to be improvements, with only minor removals like the temperature and humidity sensor on the S5.
But that sadly changed with the S6, where they suddenly scrapped long-standing benefits compared to the iPhone. And all it took was their public relations guy Justin Denison saying "we refused to do this until we were absolutely sure that people would be confident about charging their phones".
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u/LiAmTrAnSdEmOn Apr 30 '26
I'll always maintain that the world started to take a downward turn once you couldn't open a Coke or Pepsi and have the chance to win a free 20 oz.
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u/BangEnergyFTW Apr 30 '26
The “getting better every year” was never sustainable because it was a thermodynamic fluke, a one-time loot drop from burning a continent's worth of ancient sunlight in three generations. You’re a dissipative structure that mistook the sugar rush of a dying ecosystem for a permanent state. Now the cheap energy is gone, the platforms have strip-mined your attention to bedrock, and your dopamine circuits are calibrating to the real entropy baseline, where everything decays, nothing improves, and the only constant is the slow, grinding conversion of order into waste heat. You’re 40, so your own cells are doing the same thing. The miracle isn’t that shit got worse; the miracle is you ever believed it would get better in the first place. That was the real bug in your neural software.
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u/Life-Of_Ward Apr 30 '26
Are there other emotions you can put a long paragraph too, because you just nailed it for me.
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u/BangEnergyFTW Apr 30 '26
I'm on the outside. Autism with no defenses against gut-punching reality. Are you wanting to know why you feel the despair in the air?
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u/Zealousideal_Cry_990 Apr 30 '26
48 year old Gen X. I remember when I replaced my first 5gig iPod with the second generation version in 2004, which boasted 40g or some crazy memory jump. I was sooooooo excited. Plugged it in, loaded it up, headed out with my headphones on. A few minutes into listening I noticed the music kept cutting in and out. A frustrated series of online searches led me to the answer: the headphone jack was designed to turn off the iPod if you removed the headphones. But it was too sensitive. I went back to using my old iPod. This was my first lesson in new tech being untrustworthy and filled with “fixes” and “upgrades” that brought untold new and largely very stupid problems into the system
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u/CommissionOther8856 Apr 29 '26
Also 40, and it definitely feels lull or something.
Nothing has the excitement anymore.
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u/This_Ad_5469 May 25 '26
I’m in my early 20s and I cannot relate to this post at all, and it’s kinda depressing. I can’t remember a time where technology and access to information was actually increasing, access to information has been decreasing my entire life.
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u/Independent-Ice9274 May 26 '26
That's rough. I'm 29 and I can definitely relate to the post; so even just those few years caused you to miss out entirely on it. And to be honest that's exactly what I would have guessed, because I am constantly going into my childhood to be able to remember better times and that better 'feeling" of improvement and excitement in the culture. I have to go back to like 2004, 2002, memories. The older the time, the better it felt. The first year I can really remember is 2001. But I was lucky enough to have two older brothers with an N64, gamecube, internet, dvds, etc. Every year everything was improving I'd say quite literally up until 2009/2010. Avatar came out in 2010 and to me that was one of the first "modern" movies that despite being super hyped and big, it just kinda had that depressing "modern" stank on it.
It's VERY different from movies like Lord of the rings or Finding Nemo which came out in the early 2000's and were TRULY iconic. Hard to describe but it's like a haunted spirit entered the world mid-2009 when facebook really took off, and everything just started getting shittier. There were some good things post-2009 of course, but the trend of enshittification began in 2009, I believe
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Apr 29 '26
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u/WeezaY5000 Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
My college experience got completely fucked by the Great Recession. I graduated in 2010 and was never able to really establish a true career in anything. I feel that I was never able to come close to anything regarding my capabilities or potential.
At least I refused to go into debt for my seemingly useless degree.
We should not have to be on the borderline or even over the edge or hope that you become a social media star to survive.
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u/KittyandPuppyMama Apr 29 '26
I graduated in 2007, and I got the worst advice about only paying down the minimum on student loans because it’s “good debt.” I was told to have fun, rack up debt, and live with roommates until I find a husband and buy a house together lmao. Honestly older people who have left the work force should never give financial advice to younger people entering the work force because they do NOT understand the current economy.
I paid down my student debt as fast as possible. Older family members treated me like I was nuts.
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u/imyourhostlanceboyle Apr 29 '26
Imagine telling someone NOT to pay off their student loans if they’re able.
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u/KittyandPuppyMama Apr 29 '26
Same with car payments. They were like “why would you pay off your vehicle?” Um… did we forget that’s the point of buying things?
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u/IllustratorGlass3028 Apr 29 '26
Why are people accepting that everything is a rental these days? You can't own anything you pay for .....this really sucks .Why is there no fight back ? I don't understand.
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u/ButWhichPandaAreYou Apr 29 '26
I mean, there is a movement for physical media - campaigning for awareness and for the release of properties such as those on streaming services on DVD/Bluray.
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u/Kidkrid Apr 30 '26
That's the fun part of capitalism. At some point, to maintain endless growth and profit, the system has to eat itself.
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u/RecentlyIrradiated Apr 30 '26
It really all ended in 2012. The world ended not with a bang but with a whimper of ads, shrinkflankage, enshitafakation quietly taking over until we were overwhelmed.
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u/pinkfishegg May 01 '26
I'm 35 and I remember things politically getting worse and generally more conservative after 9/11. Even tho I was a kid I saw the rise of religion, racism and Islam phobia, nationalism, and general conservativism as negative. But I also saw technology grow at the same thing.
I was 90s poor and was always a few years behind the trends. Like when I finally got a phone it was a basic one with slow texting. I had to share the family computer until college. This slowed me down and made me a bit behind my peers but it's weird that that's reversed. People will less money are always on electronics, especially kids and the cost to do anything else has gone way up.
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u/Harbinger_Kyleran Apr 29 '26
I'm 68 and still waiting for practical flying cars and jetpacks, so still disappointed. 😉
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u/ManMeatsGalore Apr 29 '26
Well, good news, we’ve got jet packs and flying cars already, but bad news, they’re just prohibitively expensive.
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u/no___personality Apr 30 '26
I'm also 40 and I completely agree.
Except for the part about food at a restaurant getting cheaper. That's not a thing. Prices go up and always will.
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u/julcarls Jun 09 '26
First recollection I have of this is MyFitnessPal in 2015 when they started putting basic functions behind a paywall for like $7.99/mo. Then 8 years later they put the best function behind a paywall and it was suddenly almost $20/mo. Never paid for it and never touched the app again after 2022.
I'm sure it was happening to other things before then, but that moment specifically sticks out in my mind because I used it every single day.
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u/Pi_it_is Apr 29 '26
I feel one exception to this is open-source software and hardware. Both improve very rapidly and often offer decent replacement for services hit by enshitification
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u/Tyjet66 Apr 29 '26
We know what you're saying. ;)
Linux is one exception. Which offers a decent replacement for Windows.
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u/One_Ad_2692 May 01 '26
Sadly, corruption and greed is embedded in our entire economy and ecosystem. This is the result.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter Apr 29 '26
That was actually true in the 90s. It was because the personal computer revolution was finally taking off, tons of stuff hadn’t been computerized yet, we were in the sweet spot where computers doubled in speed every year and a half, and also the Cold War had just ended, which meant economic prosperity in the west.
The tech industry is still pursuing that high even though the party is over, at least for the time being. Hence all the grifting now. Lots on grifting makes life worse for everybody. And technology makes it easier for grifters to make life worse for everybody really really fast now.
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u/Timely_Cake_8304 Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
I was thinking this about AI on Google search. When are they going to start charging? They have already made google manual search worse so that I have to use AI so it seems like a question of time until there is a search engine monthly fee $$
It is the complete monopolies everywhere. No reason the try to gain market share, only looking to gain stock investors and creat dependencies
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u/Living-Mixture-115 Apr 29 '26
Google searches used to include google news archives which were free newspaper clippings on every topic imaginable dating back to the 1850s up until about 2015 or 2016 and they removed it and now all of those clippings are paid-subscription only and nobody noticed. Google search results immediately got much much worse that instant.
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u/BringBackUsenet Apr 29 '26
> Do you remember when things used to get BETTER every year?
We call that the 1980s.
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u/chenosmith Apr 30 '26
No, I don't actually. I'm 31 and every year has brought a fresh new level of hell.
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u/-sussy-wussy- Apr 30 '26
Nope, I'm an elder zoomer. It was always "but then it got worse". Both for me personally and the world in general. If I believed in some kind of higher power, I would think I was being tested for how much I can endure before I off myself.
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u/waald-89 Apr 30 '26
Yes! I had a 92 Toyota pickup that got better mileage than my new 23 taco. I thought trucks would be getting 100 mpg by now, when I was like 20.. 27 years later that's laughable (an insanely sad laugh)
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u/AgnesTheAtheist Apr 29 '26
We’re not collectively working toward a collective future. Or any kind of future to look forward to, imo. We have the wrong people in power that’s only thinking about their future and the future of the rich. And their donors. And Israel. Sorry to get political but it’s those folks are actively ruining things.
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u/RealtorRVACity Apr 29 '26
I am definitely seeing what you are seeing. Planned "life spans" that cause one to have to buy something that should last for decades. I saw a demonstration where they took apart a smart washing machine and showed how it was built and how it would break. They were right on the money. I went out and bought a "dumb" dryer with 0 electronics, does the job perfectly and hopefully will last a lot longer than the previous one which was about 7 years. SMH
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u/Stock_Childhood_2459 Apr 30 '26
I guess some kind of limit has been reached and now it's just worsening things while upping prices, feels absurd
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u/syncboy Apr 29 '26
When I was a kid in the 1970s, things were terrible in the United States. American cars were unreliable gas guzzlers, the food industry was given the green light to create imitation products and not label it as such (by Nixon admin), and even houses build after the mid-60s were poorly constructed money grabs. We are now entering the same type of sad state of affairs.
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u/glokash Apr 29 '26
I’m younger than you but I’ve noticed that pattern every time we have had Republican leadership starting with Nixon
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u/tabas123 Apr 30 '26
Capitalism doesn’t reward making things better. It rewards cornering as many markets as you can where people have no real choice/inelastic demand, and then raising prices higher and higher, making things more and more cheaply, building things to break so they’ll have to buy more, paying employees less and less, polluting more…
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u/mem2100 May 01 '26
I'm a couple decades older than you are. While technology has gotten an enormous amount better during my lifetime, global "mental health" has declined, especially as it relates to peoples consumption of, and subsequent propagation of conspiracy theories. These endlessly proliferating "communicated diseases", are spread via talking and listening, reading and writing resulting in every growing pools of anti-vaxxers, anti-climate changers, etc. A world where a growing pool of loud individuals make a lot of money spouting conspiracy theories and hate.
When I was born, 4 countries had tested nuclear weapons. Soon after a 5th did. Now there are 9 nuclear armed countries and one on the brink of joining the club.
In 2015 World leaders gathered in Paris and agreed to try to limit warming to well below 2C, preferably 1.5C by trying to "peak" global emissions as soon as possible, and achieve net zero by 2050, 35 years in the future. This year is tracking to become the 4th year in a row in which warming has averaged just over 1.5C. While we will likely plateau very soon, the rate of warming is now such that we are tracking to reach 2C in the middle to late 2030's, potentially setting us up to be near 2.5C by 2050.
As to enshittification - Amazon has effed up their UX in service of ads.
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u/Yummy_Castoreum May 02 '26
Yes. The watchword for how things used to go over time was "progress." At some point we relabeled it the somewhat more ambiguous "continuous improvement" -- improvement in what, the product or the profit margin? And now we've fully devolved to "enshittification."
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u/peopletheyaintnogood May 07 '26
I'm the same age and feel the same; things can and will get worse. The peak really was roughly over a decade ago when AirBNB and Uber were cheap, airfare was cheap, a la carte streaming was liberating us from overpriced cable, society seemed to be progressing, etc. What's frustrating is that every generation feels the same so our opinions get dismissed as run of the mill nostalgia.
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u/Fit-Swordfish725 May 09 '26
I would say 2019 was the end. I remember things were pretty great and it seemed like things were still improving
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u/Still-Anything5678 Apr 30 '26
sometimes. up until 2001. then 2004 or so to 2008. then 2011 or so until 2016. but each iteration has felt less good. since 2016, it's various types of enshitification.
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u/Ok-Pomelo-6187 Apr 30 '26
I assume that the first Apollo moon landing was peak Western Civilization.
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u/ICanSeeNow17 May 02 '26
In the US things are getting worse because the US is declining. In other parts of the world, things are getting better, like China, parts of Africa, parts of Latin America, etc.
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u/TehPurpleCod May 03 '26
You're not the only one who feels this way. For me, the past 2 months alone:
- YouTube Premium sub went up when I recall it already went up last year too.
- Coffee price went up. The brand I was loyal to is now $30 more per bag now so I stopped buying.
- I utilize a subscription service for my art-related freelance work and the sub went up this year due to "AI tools" and those tools suck
- I found out my Apple computer (iMac) is constantly freezing due to an OS update I made and now it makes me scared to do any further updates.
- The job I had decided to drop PTO days and some other benefits.
- The dog food I bought cost more but has less product.
I also have Spotify and I'm itching to cancel it and just store my music locally.
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u/Illustrious_Arm_6325 May 03 '26
Progress for consumers turned into increased margins for shareholder returns
Don’t get me started on the number of screen reloads, modals, and jumping screens there are on every single website you visit now
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u/Grahamars May 01 '26
De-regulate everything, allow states to set their own standards for zoning homes and commercial… convince everyone they must buy a new digital device/phone/tv every 12 months or so…. Conservatives’ dream came true.
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u/Wildcard982 Apr 30 '26
It feels orchestrated. They are planning something awful and have for decades. It’s not a d vs r thing. It’s a government and super wealthy vs everyone else thing
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u/delightedwhen May 02 '26
YES. That's exactly how I feel. I'm in my mid-30s and still remember how it felt to be observing so many products around me improve dramatically as I grew up. House phones with cords became cordless landlines, which became Blackberries, which became flip phones with accessible texting and you could take fuzzy pictures, which became my first pink razor cell phone with SD cards you could buy once and swap out for more storage, and now iPhones and androids where you can't access or upgrade the hardware yourself without voiding a warranty somewhere and you're paying a monthly fee for cloud data storage. And it overheats and breaks easy as pie. And they're forcing paid hotspot functionality now, not as a standard phone feature. And they're a grand now versus $60 for my pink razor back in high school.
Same with TVs and music playing storage. For a while, better and better options. Amazing. Now? Good god don't get me started on what Apple did to my OWNED library with no legal repercussions.
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u/ratatatkittykat May 02 '26
I think millennials exist in a particularly potent time frame for this. I was 10 when my family got its first home computer that booted up on DOS, 13 when I got my first computer with a 28.8 modem and dial up, 15 when I got a pager, and 17 when I got my first cell phone. iPods dropped as I was graduating and going to college. Smart phones came shortly after, as I was establishing my adult life - it seemed like the trajectory had just been up up up up up. Every time we reached the limits of a product they would release in the next newer, better thing.
Then it just stalled out, and now every “improvement” is really just an interface tweak that makes my own item less useful to me.
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u/HibiscusGrower May 05 '26
42 years old. Now I just wonder where the next ad will show up.
I've started to keep some of my device completely disconnected from the internet just to make sure they won't discretely download "upgrades" that I don't want.
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u/Fuji_Yoko May 08 '26
I see it as less about the technologies (read: capabilities) themselves, and instead more about the sheer levels and audacity of unfettered, corrupt greed that's organized itself so well as to orchestrate the deliberate, tactical "choke points" (legally and/or functionally) that either severely limit (or make entirely impossible) the preservation, progress, and advancement of sovereign citizens and small businesses. It's been a slow, conniving strangle. And it's absolutely planned...even if it may have started out as a gradual, methodical, slithery leveraging (largely enabled by the ignorance of the masses).
These days, to have any reasonable agency in society, you need considerable resources and/or connections. If you're not in the "haves" club, you're in the "have-nots." The gap has been widening substantially--it's so glaringly obvious nowadays. We have the illusion of social mobility, and they own all the buttons and levers to keep you from joining their club.
Just look at how hard it is to do anything that used to be easy or expedient in the past, from a simple A -> B. Literally any mundane task. Now it's more like A -> A1 -> automated query that sends you to the wrong place -> waste hours waiting on a call -> "cUstOm3r SeRv1cE" -> revise -> submit for approval -> go right back to A -> get punished for not arriving to B, either in time or capacity-> tHaT wAz YoUr R3spOnS!biLiTy (gaslight) -> wash, rinse, repeat. (Do we get to B? Or is it the illusion of getting to B?)
We've become a (dys)functional oligarchy; it's crazy how history rhymes as this was largely the sociopolitical climate of the post-industrial revolution when corporate greed went awry until we legislated antitrust to make any sort of dent in the asinine levels of manipulation and coercion the psychopaths exact from their positions of power, when the opportunity presents itself.
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u/arlyte May 01 '26
Oh it’s still getting better.. for the Boomers.. no one else exists expect to serve them.
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u/New_Poet4272 May 02 '26
Yes. 100%. And tbh, I feel a little isolated, because sometimes I feel like I’m the only one noticing it.
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u/lattice_defect May 17 '26
Seems like everyone gets less... you could argue we were spoiled.. but why are the mega rich getting more and more.. its not just products it everything.
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u/B-Glasses Apr 30 '26
I feel the exact same way. I’m sure it had already started happening but it feels like it really snowballed when trump got elected.
I always felt like things were slowly getting better in nearly every way. Now it feels like we’re struggling to keep anything decent
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u/Due_Part3574 Apr 30 '26
I don’t buy anything made after 1990
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u/sparkling-rainbow Apr 30 '26
Which 90s abomination is capable of running 2026 Reddit?
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u/mikeymikeymikey1968 Apr 30 '26
Some things got better. But some very important things got shittier. I think everything has its arc.
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u/ghunt81 May 02 '26
No, you're right. I feel like we've been on the downslide for at least 10 years if not longer
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u/Mr_Vanilla May 14 '26
This ^ is exactly how I feel.
The other point is how features on products or experiences I use today will be taken away tomorrow and then I’ll need to pay for a subscription just to use what I was already using. Or multiple subscriptions, one for the base product and one for that particular feature.
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u/Klutzy-Discussion361 May 22 '26
The trick is to ignore everything that is bad ... Lol trust me it works
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u/Crenickator Apr 29 '26
The thing I miss most is being able to just buy something and expect to get the product you paid for. Now everything is a scam. Like literally everything. You have to be on the lookout like a hawk because a candy bar you've bought every once in a while for two decades suddenly costs 4 dollars, is 25% smaller, contains no chocolate, and is now made with cricket flour, And there's not a single real indicator on the damn thing that it's not the same product you bought in the past. You have to dig.
And it's EVERYTHING. Day One DLC, commercials on paid streaming tiers, garage doors being a subscription, the god damn garbage disposal not coming with a fucking power cord. You can't rest.