making things bad on purpose

[IdleRich]

they love this now dont they eg

make economy class on planes as bad as possible so you want to fly in the nice bit

start out with an nice free thing online then gradually destroy it with ads etc spotify etc

make a computer game very annoying and tell players they can stop it being annoying if they pay a fee

This is something I think about a lot strangely enough. It's weird isn't it, I guess cos it feels the wrong way around... normally, or perhaps I mean traditionally, you pay more for someone to expend more effort and energy on making a service better for you and that makes perfect sense - but now in many cases they are expending effort on making a service worse for you and you have to pay them so they stop doing it. For me the obvious comparison is mafia-style 'protection' wherein you pay organized crime not to burn down your business - though at least the mafia euphemistically call it protection, presumably out of embarrassment and so they can sort of tell themselves that they are doing something positive, I don't think Spotify bother to do that do they?

The first time I ever heard of this concept was watching the play of L'Ecume Des Jours by Boris Vian, in that there is a bit where someone dies and the main character is trying to organize a funeral, he goes to the undertaker and it turns out that they offer a really cheap service which has a shitty hearse and other bits and pieces, but also actual negative things such as a bunch of people who will follow the procession shouting out rude stuff about the deceased. I forget the details but the gist of it is there are various "price points" to use the modern terminology, and at each improved level you get more good stuff and less of the bad. Of course Vian was joking and I read all this smiling, thinking what a good job it was that this would never happen in real life...

And then Spotify came along and I instantly thought of Vian, couldn't believe it was now apparently a legitimate strategy. Does anyone know what it's called when you do this? Do es it even have a name?

 

[IdleRich]

partly going, how do we get people to pay for a free service
partly prompted by the switch from owner to renter relationship
partly just vicious cuntishness

I think of it as something that is part of the same thing as the owner/renter switch - in my mind they both came along around the same time and they are both attempts to redraw the boundaries of what you get when you purchase something - and both spring from the same well of vicious cuntiness.

 

[IdleRich]

I'm imagining the people who run the dating apps deliberately packing them with ugly weirdos, and then there's this higher tier of attractive and relatively normal people that you can access if you pay a premium.

How come my profile gets seem by so many people then eh?

 

[IdleRich]

or maintaining the retail price but shrinking the size, formerly 32 oz bottle now 27 oz.

Ah yes. I think that Rollo had adverts with the slogan "would you give your last Rollo to someone?" which looked sort of ironic when it turned out Rowntree had in fact already taken the last Rollo for themselves by surreptitiously shrinking the packet.
Noone noticed until a mother with three kids who apparently bought the once a week or whatever, she would always split the packet between her children and then eat the one left over as her special treat. One day there was no extra one so she contacted the company and they admitted that they had made the pack smaller.

 

[luka]

i agree it does feel the wrong way round. we're told that people compete for our wage tokens by making their services better and better or something.

a similar process of persuasion engineering is the way they are making it impossible to use cash in supermarkets. 25 card machines, 1 cash machine if youre lucky, and its always out of order. one one manning the fag kiosk either.

trying to manipulate your behaviour. not freedom from tyranny that.

 

[luka]

not really a supply and demand thing. people still want banks but you try and make them want them less by making them worse and worse. people still want to use cash but you make them want it less by making it harder and harder to spend.

 

[WashYourHands]

Supermarkets cold store veg, so you get it home and it goes off in days

Stopped using these for both veg and proteins when small local farm co-ops offer vastly better food, more than happy to accept cash too

 

[Mr. Tea]

Ah yes. I think that Rollo had adverts with the slogan "would you give your last Rollo to someone?" which looked sort of ironic when it turned out Rowntree had in fact already taken the last Rollo for themselves by surreptitiously shrinking the packet.
Noone noticed until a mother with three kids who apparently bought the once a week or whatever, she would always split the packet between her children and then eat the one left over as her special treat. One day there was no extra one so she contacted the company and they admitted that they had made the pack smaller.

I really hate 'shrinkflation', as it's called. I'd much rather they kept the product the same size and made it more expensive, which seems somehow more honest than just charging the same for less.

 

[luka]

different issue that, just for the record.

 

[sufi]

different issue that, just for the record.

Shrinkflation boycotts: have you joined the uprising against downsizing?

From biscuits to crisps, food items are getting smaller while their price stays the same. A fifth of consumers have had enough – and are shunning the offending products

www.theguardian.com

& if the guardian are covering it then it's automatically boring

 

[Clinamenic]

I'm not sure they're using the term downsizing correctly... To me it means dialing back one's consumptive standards/expenses, not just literally shrinking product size while price stays the same.

 

[WashYourHands]

Or how someone spins bankruptcy when they move

 

[sufi]

 

[WashYourHands]

View attachment 15358

It’s a thankless tough job but someone’s got to do it

 

[ghost]

some of these things are intentional but I think others get worse because the midmarket, bureaucratic administrative structure of most corporations is just toxic to taste. no sense of composure, no way for someone who wants things to be good to make it up the ranks.

 

[WashYourHands]

the public sector can be just as ropey

saw a dept head of psychology for a gaff which is best omitted today and would not want her job

managing transitory positions, locum Drs who increasingly bridge too many systems to cope, stress burn out and a pandemic showed every cunt where their systems were really at, increase in obfuscation, sleight of hand, compartmentalising instead of consolidating

vicious

 

[wild greens]

Enshittification

Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

pluralistic.net

 

[sufi]

Enshittification

Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

pluralistic.net

Heh I was just thinking of posting that this morning but I wanted also to finish reading this article about how goo$le shitified the whole internet

The store is for people, but the storefront is for robots

Selling real things to real people means writing a steady stream of nonsense text that only web crawlers will ever read.

www.theverge.com

 

[sufi]

Heh I was just thinking of posting that this morning but I wanted also to finish reading this article about how goo$le shitified the whole internet

The store is for people, but the storefront is for robots

Selling real things to real people means writing a steady stream of nonsense text that only web crawlers will ever read.

www.theverge.com

Shitification is the uk spelling btw.

 

[sufi]

And this

Prepare for the Textpocalypse

Our relationship to writing is about to change forever; it may not end well.

www.theatlantic.com