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Enshittification spares no one.
Happens when you don’t have competition. (Except to steam seemingly)
The difference is that Valve is privately owned. They don’t have to please a board of shareholders who want to see the platform milked for the slightest increase in profit margins.
Bingo. Enshittification is mostly confined to companies that have gone public or whose sole aspiration is to do so quickly.
It shifts responsibility from satisfying customers/users to satisfying shareholders (who are never satisfied).
You can build the perfect product and ride a gravy train as a private company in relative perpetuity. As a corporation, you’re just going to strive for perpetually increasing profits on a quarterly basis with no real care or focus past that
This isn’t entirely accurate. If Valve were a public company, the enshittification factor would increase significantly. The reason they’re great now is because the current board is the original founders who are passionate about their business, and actually care.
Private or not, once Gabe and the other old farts die, Valve will enshittificate. That’s almost guaranteed.
Private or not, once Gabe and the other old farts die, Valve will enshittificate. That’s almost guaranteed.
I think they will just live on as ghosts in steam itself. GabeAI here we come!
We need more companies like that, then.
For that you need passionate people who are wealthy and not primarily driven to acquire more wealth. That seems to be very rare in large scale businesses.
It isn’t wealth that breaks or makes it. The system, and in this case the shareholding system makes it or breaks it. Valve owner Gabe is insanely rich (in the billions I assume) yet, because the system he put up, it is consumer friendly.
The system is the one, not the people.
Yes, the problem is when shareholders only want profit at any cost. These are the wealthy people I was talking about.
I mean, the other thing that’s kind of stupid is - lets say a companies stock once issued goes to 0 and is delisted. So what? That’s not the company going bankrupt. The stock market valuation has no direct application to a company once the shares are issued and bought the first time. But ignoring shareholder demands that would destroy the company wouldn’t likely tank the stock of a otherwise good company - because there’s someone out there who just wants value to hold and preferably dividends vs infinite growth (that doesn’t exist). Now, you could buy enough stock to throw out the CEO and whatever, but that’s likely to be expensive and a PITA. So while there’s going to be some high profile examples, A) that gets close to taking a company private anyway, and doing a shitty job and B) generally limited numbers of companies will have people going to these lengths.
I think the bigger issue isn’t wanting companies to be profitable - that’s kind of the point of companies. The issue is shareholders trying to make capital gains on everything. This isn’t possible long term because infinite growth isn’t possible. I would argue what people and decent investors should want is the steady dividends and not worry about if the stock is up or down.
I’d have to think Newell has a lot more skin in the game or passion for his platform. He actually believes in the business and what they do, instead of just viewing it as a way to make money
Steam has some competition, its just that said competition never took off because Steam is so much better.
(Except to steam seemingly)
For now. I’m curious what’ll happen when Gabe eventually retires.
We also can’t ignore the fact that the Steam Marketplace is a hellhole and the origin of a lot of today’s microtransaction hell.
If you buy all your games on one platform then you’re thoroughly fucked if it turns heel.
We all know the answer to this. There will be a hundred threads with thousands of comments with people saying it’s not bad, the company promised x and y and we should be cautiously optimistic, but in the end it always ends the same way.
Exactly the same thing happens with IBM buying Red Hat. No shortage of articles talking about how this will be good for Red Hat and the entire open source community but of course last month they started the enshitification process that will now March on relentlessly. Even now there are defenders of red hat, talking about how it’s not that bad and there are workarounds, but in the end they fail to see this is just the first step.
Once started on this path, the rule is always enshitification, any exceptions are exceedingly rare. If steam ever gets bought/sold it will follow the same path and it’s defenders will stay by its side until it looks like the screen shot above.
The point still stands though, you can easily filter out anything you don’t want to see.
But I doubt the same would apply if it was owned by shareholders.
A future change in leadership could very easily lead to it going public and then all the regular bullshit follows. Don’t just assume it’ll always be great; always be ready to jump ship.
I get worried with the amount of gamers who want Steam to be a monopoly. The existence of competition seems to upset some people and it’s really odd.
“the play store is shit now!”
The play store was always shit.
Sure it does, but only those who have a zero-tolerance policy against using proprietary software. In the long run, Free Software is the only kind that can be relied upon not to betray you.
I agree, free software is the only thing that’s sure to not get worse over time. I took way too long to realize, now I have a shitload of stuff to migrate. I already ditched microsoft, but that google account is a real bitch to replace.
I like how like 10 years ago everyone went crazy about the apps. It seemed like you could have an app for everything, and everyone was enthusiastic about it. Nowadays I only open Play Store when I am in the need of specific utility, or to buy some classic RPG/other game ported to Android.
Most of the stuff in the store is just unusable shit.
And we need a store with actual quality apps (with no micro transactions, and being reviewed by people who care about usability), because certainly Google Play is not a good source for them.
Agreed. Mostly everything in the store can also be easily done in a browser too.
And we need a store with actual quality apps (with no micro transactions, and being reviewed by people who care about usability), because certainly Google Play is not a good source for them.
Fdroid apps CAN have microtransactions I believe, and they’re not curated either, but overall, the quality is much better than Play Store and most apps are free and open source.
Alternatively, for games in particular, Apple Arcade is great, but it’s a subscription (cheap if combined with Music, TV and iCloud storage, otherwise several euros per month). The games aren’t allowed to have MTX or ads if they want to be on Arcade. But of course that requires moving to iOS (where the app store is much better than Play Store, BUT you don’t get alternatives like Fdroid on Android.)
I use a huge amount of open source f-droid apps, like my keyboard, my mail app, the one i’m typing on right now, SD maid 2, (Revanced). in my opinion these apps are just better. not only because i can trust them, also because they simply do what i downloaded them for, in the most efficient way possible.
A single row of ads would be ok, but having this many plus an ad showing up first, where the search results should be… Oof
No it wouldn’t. Phones aren’t cheap.
They shouldn’t rely on ads to make money back on a phone IMHO.
The Android licence is free and the Play Store infrastructure has to support tens of millions of devices.
I’m not saying this is an acceptable level, but Samsung ain’t putting a dollar toward Google running the store, in fact, they’d much prefer to run and maintain their own.
That’s not true. Phone manufacturers need to pay if they want to include Google Play in their devices, it’s not free. It can cost as much as $40 per device.
Thanks for the correction, I was unaware
I don’t even get why having the store on more devices is supposed to “cost” google anything.
It’s a store. They get a cut from every transaction. Why wouldn’t they want it to be on everything?
They can be. I bought a Galaxy s22 with a broken screen for $150, and my carrier just gave me an $1100 credit for it on a new iphone. I don’t need an iPhone, and I will be selling it to get yet another cheap phone and pocketing the money, but it goes to show just how much phones do not cost to the people producing them
Luckily I only have F-Droid on mine.
What, no love for the Ad Store?
This ad has features you may not like
Just be glad you’re on Android and have alternatives to this. Poor Apple users are stuck with whatever Apple decided to do with the app store.
Poor Apple users kinda don’t have to deal with this shit
Can confirm on my own device. Only ad in sight is for two dots itself at the top … I kept scrolling looking for one and didn’t see any.
Lol the ad is also the very same thing you’re searching for
Whats the ad situation on app store, do they aggressively push stuff into your throats there as well?
Not at all from my experience. The App Store generally looks cleaner and more organised.
I hope for your sake that they at least stick to that. The google approach seems to be that they are too big to fail and that they can keep doing what they want, and what they want, apparently is more space for ads!
Unfortunately that seems to be the case with Google products (see YouTube on mobile). Most users might not even care about the excessive ads and Google knows that.
Luckily, there seem to be many alternatives on Android. If Apple was to ad-ify the App Store, you wouldn’t have that many options (outside of jailbreaking and maybe the Altstore).
I’d take the in-store ads if they enforced consistent behavior for in-app ads. It’s infuriating to have an ad that plays for 30sec or whatever, only to then force you to wait ANOTHER 5-15sec on the title card for the close button to appear. Or, worse yet, have an ad that automatically opens the Play Store unless you can hit the 2px close button.
Yeah Apple doesn’t do this to the users whatsoever.
Yes, Poor Apple Users are stuck with no ads at all! What a Shame
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Anyway, what’s the big deal?
You’ve done quite a bit of typing on your touchscreen there. You would enjoy this BT keyboard sold by asabravatechioxnchientopia. Don’t forget AAA batteries.
The Play Store peaked back when it was still called Android Market (which I still reckon is a better name). DAE remember
?Play store sounds like a game marketplace. Also Play has nothing to do with anything in googles brand so its really confusing why its still called that.
They tried having a Play ecosystem with Google Play Video, Music, Games, etc. Music was actually pretty good, so of course Google killed it in favor of YouTube Music, which is terrible and plays YouTube video versions of songs instead of actual album stuff.
Ytm definitely does have album content, wtf are you on about. Yes you can play videos there too, but it’s by no means the default.
It’s actually pretty good, just wish they did a lossless tier like tidal
It’s mixed. The worst is playlists, which are mostly just YouTube playlists without video. Was trying to play a Disney song playlist for a friend’s kid, and it was definitely from the videos, with all the sound effects from the scenes in the movies instead of just the song.
I’ve lost all of my faith in mobile gaming ecosystem ever since I saw that talk of the two guys that created a bot for generating and uploading as many slot machine games to the playstore as possible, just generic pull a lever, see an ad and that’s it, based on a random keyword like “owl slot machine” or “bathtub sloth machine” with pictures pulled from google images, that let the bot run for a few months and then found out that they made literally thousands of dollars of ad money.
I see Google’s review process for apps on the Play Store is as bad as their review process for extensions on the Chrome Web Store. Every couple of months ago, a new batch of malware is found on CWS, and you almost never see that with Firefox’s add-on marketplace, even when accounting for Firefox-based browsers having a much smaller userbase. And I’ve noticed that when it does happen, Mozilla is much quicker in laying down the banhammer than Google. Hell, Mozilla banned a browser hijacker named FVD Speed Dial, whilw Google has it featured on CWS to this day. ~Cherri
When I was looking for a good ad-blocker a few years back, I remember stumbling upon something like… Nano Defender? I’m not sure what was the name, but it was one of the few succesful anti-adblocks that managed to get past most of adblock killers, and was generally recommended on Reddit.
After a few years, the guy sold the extension to some Indian company that promptly infected it with credential stealing malware, which compromised most of my and my GFs accounts. Ever since that, I just don’t use any extensions apart from ublock and Bitwarden, since it’s just a huge security risk.
But I’m slowly building up the willpower to finally switch to Mulvad Browser + VPN, I really like the approach they took to fingerprinting - just use Tor Browser, don’t need any extensions, and it’s bundled with a VPN - so every other user has exactly the same fingerprint and IP as you, thus making you untrackable even by the most soffisticated methods. (Well, apart from the ones that uses ML to fingerprint you based on your typing and mouse habits…). But I have already gotten used to Librewolf, and it would mean getting rid of Bitwarden extension, and that’s -effort- :(
The Samsung Galaxy Store is even fucking worse. I’ve noticed that tiktok is literally shoved in my face on every single platform. It’s always the very first one when I open the store. Be it windows, android or the Galaxy store. Not sure about Apple’s apps store, but it is ridiculous. On the windows store, they put it under the “essentials” category. Lmao Glad I have Linux on my main computer, though. No ads or bullshit, your computer is truly yours.
Linux is great! It’s such a zen environment.
Apple’s App Store has some ads. In my experience the first search result is always an ad, and every now and then the Today list features an ad. Not sure how much the normal data/results are skewed. It’s a store so you have to expect some kinda marketing tricks to sell you more. They tend to feature popular stuff.
It’s nowhere near as abhorrent as the post here.
I haven’t run into TikTok unless it has been featured or if it is the top result in the popular (free) apps chart. I wouldn’t dare searching for it 😆
Btw, i use Fdroid
Becoming independent from the Play Store is probably the best thing I managed to do on my phone.
Though I use the Neo Store as my Fdroid client, since the official one seems to have some funky problems
Neo Store ty for that, gonna try that :D
Since mobile gaming has died for me anyway, i have no reason to browse the store. For what I use it for, it’s fine. It has the apps i need and updates them.
This is the exact same thing I thought a couple of days ago. What the fuck is wrong with the product managers of the Playstore?
I didn’t appreciated the FDroid UX until Google app designers lost their damn minds. Now it makes me feel relief.
Theres a fork of f-droid with a slightly friendlier UI, called foxy droid, if you want to give it a shot!
I did not know that. I’ll give it a look for sure.
I recommend droidfy
We’ve all seen how movies depicted the future. Full of advertisement, even in kids show like Walle
Thanks to Lemmy, my phone went full FOSS. Always go full FOSS.
It’s great that you can’t unlock the bootloader to install graphene on carrier bought devices 👍
In Canada, carriers are required to only sell unlocked phones for the past several years.
Luckily, in 'murica, corporations can freak you over however they like 😎
