"Twiddling represents the big cognitive hazard from enshittification during the AI bubble: the parts of your UI that matter most to you are the parts that you use as vital cognitive prostheses. A product team whose KPI is "get users to tap on an AI button" is going to use the fine-grained data they have on your technological activities to preferentially target these UI elements that you rely on with AI boobytraps. You are too happy, so they are leaving money on the table, and they're coming for it.

This is a form of "attention rent": the companies are taxing your muscle-memory, forcing you to produce deceptive usage statistics at the price of either diverting your cognition from completing a task to hunt around for the button that banishes the AI and lets you get back to what you were doing; or to simply abandon that cognitive prosthesis:
(...)
It's true "engagement-hacking": not performing acts of dopamine manipulation; but rather, spying on your habitual usage of a digital tool in order to swap buttons around in order to get you to make a number go up. It's exploiting the fact that you engage with something useful and good to make it less useful and worse, because if you're too happy, some enshittifier is leaving money on the table."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/28/twiddlehazard/#outboard-brains-considered-harmful

The General Theory of #Enshittification https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-general-theory-of-enshittification
"… to summarize: a history in which firms start out offering great stuff at low prices but eventually offer worse stuff at high prices is the natural life cycle for any industry with strong network effects. It’s the story of Facebook and Amazon. It’s also, I’m pretty sure, the story of the rise and fall of Peak TV.
… For users, it’s all too natural to see the degradation of their experience as a morality play. Once upon a time, the fantasy goes, there were nice guys who ran their businesses in the public interest. Then, however, they became corrupt, or were forced to behave badly by venture capital, or something.

But they were never nice guys. "
#economics

"Your boss has no idea what your job entails, and is (not so) secretly convinced that you're a featherbedding parasite who only shows up for work because you fear the breadline, and not because your job is a) challenging, or b) rewarding
That makes them prime marks for chatbot-peddling AI pitchmen."
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter
#AI #enshittification

Fuck TV, im reading a book.

#reading #books #technology #ai #marketing #surveillance #enshittification

http://shojiwax.com/2025/07/29/reading/

Een interessant interview over #enshittification #verkuttificatie door VPRO tegenlicht:
https://youtu.be/CgJ6isBJiWI?feature=shared

I’m quite happy that I bought a non-enshittified music player for my kids (which is something that is quite hard to find nowadays). It’s made of wood, can be repaired, stores its music on a SD card, needs no internet connection, and works without any user accounts or subscriptions. Yes, it’s more expensive than the other devices, but is a lot more sustainable and will probably still work in 20 years. https://www.hoerbert.com/ #hörbert #enshittification

Every year I have to update the religious holidays calendar for work and HOLY CRAP has A.I. made that difficult this year. There are so many A.I.-generated pages with wrong dates.

I'm really glad we're burning down the rain forests to power digital bullshit engines.

ok I'd just like to shout out to the #Thunderbird team - no matter what/what else #mozilla seems to #enshittification , so far TB is intact. #outlook used to be the GOAT but now its #shit and plugins are $$heckaspensive and also shit. Meanwhile TB chugging along with a beautiful ecosystem of apps that just _work_

Shout out to #Qnote and #quickfilters plugins!

#MozillaThunderbird

AND - and I know they say you _shouldn't_ but - you can put your mail store in a #dropbox folder.

Gesproken over de verkuttisering van het internet: is er een werkend alternatief voor #Marktplaats? Ik gebruik die site zelden, maar elke keer is het weer een stukje verder verkuttiseerd.
#enshittification #verkuttificatie #verkuttisering

Scheinbar zeigt YouTube jetzt nicht mehr nur bei Suchergebnissen immer wieder die gleichen paar Ergebnisse wiederholend an, sodass man nur noch das findet, was YouTube einem zeigen möchte.
Jetzt wiederholen sich bei mir auch schon die Videos von Kanälen, die ich abonniert habe.

Das ist ein Problem, weil ich mich meist nur alle 1-3 Monate mal anmelde, um Videos zu bookmarken, die ich mir ansehen/anhören möchte.

One of the reasons you should avoid using shortened URLs…

𝙂𝙤𝙤𝙜𝙡𝙚'𝙨 𝙐𝙍𝙇 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙧 𝙜𝙤𝙤.𝙜𝙡 𝙬𝙞𝙡𝙡 𝙤𝙣𝙡𝙮 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙬 404 𝙚𝙧𝙧𝙤𝙧𝙨 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙚𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙛 𝘼𝙪𝙜𝙪𝙨𝙩

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Google-s-URL-shortener-goo-gl-will-only-show-404-errors-from-the-end-of-August-10501127.html

When you thought the internet was enshittified enough, Youtube is now dubbing videos with AI.

I already hate dubbing with a passion when it's made by professionals, so if I don't find a way to block this everywhere, this is going to be problematic. (I've found a way to block my future uploads from being dubbed, but not sure if this is retroactive).