this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Dreamweaver, gaaaah. Hey, at least it was better than Frontpage, which took a much faster nosedive into enshittification after Microsoft bought it and ruined the absolute shit out of it. Slightly better. Like, it had its own shitty inline styling that would get tangled up in itself and you'd have to clean it up manually, but at least it wasn't Microsoft styling.
Yeah, Fireworks compression was great! There was a period of time where I only used it to export jpeg, Photoshop's did suck in comparison.
Ugh, you just unlocked a core memory: Every element is assigned a class, but they are unique to the element, thus defeating the whole damn point of the class functionality?!
Oh jeez, it's coming back to me now. Yikes, what a terrible use of classnames. I'm sure they thought they had a good reason for it, but to me it's kind of a failure of a feature implementation if most of your userbase ends up not just ignoring it but outright deleting it because it's useless to them and just creates clutter.
Dreamweaver did have one saving grace. It had this code editor cleanup mode that removed empty and redundant tags, and at one point they added a neat option to remove Word document tags! From what I remember, it was pretty accurate and helped clean up a lot of shit. Unfortunately, it was unable to clean up code that it created itself.
Ahhh! I had a client a hundred years ago that did a "save as webpage" from a Word doc and wanted me to clean it up... I'm like, "it'll be easier to throw it out and start over", so that's what i did. Then i charged her for the time it would have taken, had i bothered to try and clean up the code. She was happy to pay it!?
Argh! Yeah, sometimes it's better to start over than try to fix it. All those weirdass classes and bizarrely nested divs, screw that hahah
I didn’t know Frontpage was ever not a Microsoft product. It was on all our computers at school when I was in high school. When I first started making webpages with it it seemed cool, but as I learned more I was shocked at how bad it was. Still, it was just playing around in there that introduced me to how HTML worked, so I’ll give it a little credit for introducing me to the web.
You never forget your first WYSIWYG HTML editor. Mine was Adobe Pagemill, which doesn't exist anymore but was also purchased from another software company. Ok, I shit on Frontpage a lot, maybe I've been too harsh. Those early WYSIWYGs helped us take those first few baby steps, and that's so important in the learning process. Like, I'm just now realizing this, but I think I owe my web development career to Pagemill, lol. That little program (as we used to call them, you remember) made it easy for me, I was like "uh...I think I can do this!"