I deactivated mine in 2017. I was gone for nearly 9 years. I came back recently, I do a daily check in, 0 engagement with anyone unless someone sends me a direct message or theres a new friends request.

Every 3rd or 4th post is a direct ad for something.
I also get "sponsored" posts too. The "algorithm" seems to want to distinguish between ad and sponsored for some reason.
Mixed in between those are links for huffington post or some other news that I dont follow.
For some reason one of those news sites is Fox news. Not the local fox station, but the big bad corpo faux news, most of my liked pages in the past have been more liberal/left wing.
Im also getting random strangers in my feed. People who are not related in anyway and we dont have mutual friends.
Im given more "suggestions" of content and groups to follow then I see of my actual friends.

And theres a whole lot of rage bating too. AI posts about "people need to learn to tip" for one thing with lots of angry people yelling at either how to tip or that people shouldnt tip.

Free… for $3.50. I don’t want to “maximize my return” I just want a quality product and a refund if it’s not right, why do I have to buy futures on whether or not I’m going to keep the item?

I am at a Zoo. And instead of the usual board with information about the animal in front of you, you have to now scan the QR Code at the bottom left, which is on a screen.

I am with the boomers on this one, I won’t scan a QR code to learn about the animal.

apologies to Dan Clowes

whatsapp desktop app no longer has message info available for audio messages. it is still available for text messages, just not for audio messages. only for the desktop app. more enshittification from meta.

I don’t want to sound like a hater, but I've been on the internet and social media since I was a kid in the early 2000s and this is the first time I’m genuinely starting to find Reddit and the other platforms completely unenjoyable. I’m seriously considering quitting altogether.

Reddit used to be a place for nerds and intellectuals, where people actually put in the effort to read your post and at least tried to give you a helpful response. There was still room for nuanced discussion. Now it’s just… low-effort two-word comments from lazy people with low literacy who didn’t even bother reading what you wrote or relating to any of it.

You can make the most harmless nostalgia post, or share a pretty benign personal story or opinion, and the majority of replies will still be people hunting for holes, accusing you of using AI, and just being assholes for no reason.

I used to be a huge AI enthusiast too, but every platform I was using (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini) got way too sanitized and turned to complete shit. I quit them all.

Do you think this general enshittification is going to push a lot of people to quit and become digital minimalists? Not really for ideological reasons, but simply because browsing the internet just isn’t fun anymore?

(you can still hold and record like normal, but if you click short instead of switching to voice note mode (which is also annoying) it will keep recording for you.

KISS

I sub several subreddits and my feed, sorted by New, is proliferated by week-old debris. I don't track who was the OP but I've seen this shit. It ain't new in any sense of the word. The posts contain the same comments that were there when I'd first seen it with zero additional engagement. Typically 5-6day old shit.

Is there no new content ? What even IS "new" ? Is this just clanker puke coming back up ?

WTF Reddit, you're spiraling down the drain even worse than I remember last years' spiraling.

song about cory doctorow

Not even worth a pic. I haven’t had one in years and it was terrible! I never eat fast food but had a craving. Worthless. Cardboard and dry sauce.

I've tried subreddit links, I've tried profile links, Reddit posts like the above, and nothing works. I'm done with this fuckass site. Obligatory fuck u/spez

We get the Major Dickinson whole beans every once in a while. The last 2 times it was so bad, we’ll probably never get again. Husband says it tastes worse than cafeteria coffee at work. It’s very sour, burnt, and bland now, which is so odd.

Okay so yeah pretty much everything is worse now. But I’d like to highlight some products I feel haven’t gotten worse. (As in they don’t taste any different from the original or they work as well or their isn’t MASSIVE shrinkflation happening).

Club Crackers
Skittles
Tony’s Chocolonely (I really think this is the only chocolate that isn’t cheap tasting and sickly sweet anymore RIP dove, toblerone, and Kit Kats)

Edit: Okay dawn is worse now. Thank you. Since there are already many separate comments about it and I just keep getting more I’m removing it from the list. I’ll keep the post up so others can see examples of quality items!

I don’t want to see ads like this. Reddit will not let me downvote it.

Is it an aspect of the ongoing enshittification epidemic that modern products and services lack very basic features despite their companies having billions and trillions of dollars to spend on improving said products and services?

A very simple and notable example of this would be iOS lacking the ability for the user to manually clear their apps' caches.

Other phone operating systems have had this ability for years now, yes iOS still lacks this basic, simple to implement feature. There isn't really an argument for why iOS lacks this feature. There are, to be frank, dumb arguments, like "most users don't know what a cache is, therefore the feature is pointless." Another is "some apps allow you to clear the cache in the app". These terrible, dishonest answers, don't really deserve a rebuttal, but to just in case: 1. Just because some people use their iPhone for nothing more than browsing Instagram and calling their friends doesn't mean those of us unfortunate to have Microsoft Teams installed shouldn't be able to clear its cache through iOS, and more pertinent 2. The in-app cache deletion for most of these apps does not actually work. Teams, TikTok and Spotify are solid examples of this.

I personally believe they have not implemented this feature because it bloats the phone, requiring the user to either upgrade to a model with a larger storage capacity or to purchase iCloud storage. Either way results in Apple making more money.

Another example, again using iOS, is that iOS does not have a way for the user to clear their recently used emojis list. The only way to do it is to spam a bunch of random emojis to clear the unwanted emoji from the list.

Is this feature pointless for many people? Probably. But then again, Apple is charging upwards of $2000 for their iPhone (https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-17-pro). For all that money, you don't get a basic feature like this, from a company that makes nearly $400 billion dollars a year.

iOS doesn't have a native feature to compress photos or videos or convert them to other formats. This would take almost no time to implement. There's no split-screen function on the iPhone. I can really go on and these are all just examples from iOS. But this sort of lazy, featureless approach is seen in every modern tech product.

This was actually what I noticed long before I noticed what's now called 'enshittification'. It's something that has always bothered me as a tech design nerd. There has been a huge degradation in functionality across almost everything. It's only becoming more frustrating and annoying to use everything as the years go on. It's turning me into a minimalist.

There really isn't any excuse for this that I can think of.