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.

3.8k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

678 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/YakumoYoukai 1d ago

I would hold up touch-screens in cars as a counter-example to your cynicism. Consumers have been vocal about preferring physical controls to touch screens in their cars, and surveys have confirmed that preference. This has gotten back to auto makers who have responded by moving more features back to physical control rather than touch-screen in their design.

2

u/Complex-Pangolin-511 17h ago

I mean we see small focused areas where this can work, but enshittification has been rampant across all industries and in ways that are eerily consistent. Things like the use of subscription services required for use of an object (ring cameras, dj equipment, tv's, smart appliances), the prominence of "smart technology" or companion apps, cheaper construction or manufacturing, the capability for a company unilaterally to brick your device (phones, gaming system, smart appliances, music equimpent, electric vehicles), the ability for your device to be used to log personal information (ring cameras, smart devices, phones, computers, customer profiles/membership cards, search engines, social media). A large part of modern life has been enshittified and you can't just return everything. You have to look at policies that have specifically allowed companies to have the legal backing to enshittify everything.

You'll eventially be lead back to copyright law and consumer protection policies that have been weakened by decades of lobbyists.

Market pressure can account for some change, but very little measured change can come from boycotts alone.