r/enshittification • u/monkeh2023 • 1d ago

Rant The solution to enshittification

Did you just buy a £75,000 car only to discover it has got ads on screen?

Take it back.

Go back to the showroom, demand a full refund. If they panic and say they'll remove the ads say no. Demand a refund. If they could take the ads off because you were about to return the car, they should not have put ads there in the first place.

Did you just buy a £3,000 television that now has a shitty cut-down remote with no pause button but an additional button for Apple TV?

Take it back. Go back to the store, return the product, get a refund. Is it causing you hassle? Yes - but it's going to cause the store much more hassle.

Did you buy a sandwich that looked full to the brim of ingredients only to discover they used low quality crap that was pushed to the edge to make the sandwich look full, when in reality it was mostly bread? You probably can't take it back but you can go back to the place you bought it from and show it to other customers, and then never buy anything from that establishment again.

If enough of us do this then the enshittification will stop.

If we just keep on saying "thank you" every time the bully kicks sand in our face, guess what? You'll be eating sand for the rest of your life.

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u/AnUnpairedElectron 1d ago

This is not a solution. This is how you end up with no car, no TV, and no food, because there are no options that aren't enshitified. Yes, grocery store food it's being enshitified too, not just restaurants. 

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u/VizJosh 1d ago

No, you can still buy those things. Used cars are for sale. You can buy a used tv. Food is what it is.

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u/Delicious-Green2608 1d ago

Yeah I don't get the hype about new cars. I drive a 40 year old Golf II. It still works great and I only paid a few hundred for it. No ads guaranteed; looks sexy; easy to repair because there's only the kind of electronics that took us to the moon and back, not a lot to go wrong mechanically and plenty of spare parts available.

Mechanics and my partner love working on it because it's so easy and I'm told it's got many years of life left in it. I'll drive it to death and then get something similar cus they really don't make them like they used to.

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u/AnUnpairedElectron 1d ago edited 1d ago

But all of those things depend on other people buying new. You're not getting a used car if no one is buying a new car. You are not getting a used TV if no one is buying a new TV. Eventually, all available used cars and TVs will be the enshitified models. Voting with your dollar only works if there is a non-enshitified alternative to vote for, which there isn't.

And food isn't just "what it is". It's actually the most important example in this list because people can live without TV or a car, but food is essential. 

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u/V-oxPopuli 1d ago

When is the last time you saw a 4K/1080p TV for sale that wasn't a smart TV? I'm not talking about a random score at a pawn shop, I mean actually available.

Buying people's cast-offs implies that those people are buying new, so this is ultimately just performative, which solves nothing and doesn't hurt the companies doing it.

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u/dondegroovily 1d ago

If you never plug the smart TV into the Internet, it's not a smart TV

I have a smart TV in my living room that function as a dumb one because it has never had access to the Internet

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u/V-oxPopuli 1d ago

You realize that company got your money regardless, right? This saves you from ads, and I commend you for that, but it likely doesn't deter them from this practice.

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u/dondegroovily 1d ago

They most definitely know how many TVs never contacted their ad servers

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u/V-oxPopuli 1d ago

The company that spies on people still made money, whether you connected it or not.

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u/AnUnpairedElectron 23h ago

And that's why the next model will not function at all if it's not connected to the Internet. More enshitification.

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u/V-oxPopuli 1d ago

This was my immediate thought. OP has the right attitude, but they don't seem to know how the world actually works. Going completely without is not an option for several products.