I think enshitification will be the word of the year this year
What is the etymology of this term “enshitification”?
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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#92It took me a little while to get it but now I do. They want their community to continue on even if some of their members are moving off of Unity.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great advice… Unless you’re a game studio who wants to ship on PlayStation and Switch some day. If you want to build on an engine that lets you target proprietary platforms your options are, in practice, limited.
Are open source tools banned on playstation and switch?
The issue is that console SDKs are under NDA, meaning that open source tools can't target consoles because they would reveal details about the SDK. Some projects have workarounds for this, for example SDL maintains a private Switch port that you can get access to by emailing one of the maintainers with proof you're a Nintendo licensee.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides Reddit, do you have other examples ?
Etsy. Ever since the 2017 activist investor event, it feels like they've been trading good will with sellers for profits.
I used to be able to buy amazing handmade items for reasonable prices and reasonable shipping from actual people running small storefronts on Etsy.
Now it’s just another e-commerce site that’s been completely and utterly overrun with marked up Aliexpress junk and low quality copies of anything novel that gains the slightest bit of popularity. The few remaining authentic sellers now charge so much it’s laughable unless you’re wealthy enough that cost isn’t a concern.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#95I think enshitification will be the word of the year this year
Cory Doctorow coined it to mean something different from how it is now used:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.
Cory's definition doesn't really apply to B2B transactions (e.g. the word makes no sense for RedHat especially given abundance of other distros).
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that really help? Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with). I wonder if it's less about the source code here but about the people involved, and how to prevent a consolidation of capital and power in the hands of greedy financiers. Maybe developing the projects as nonprofits (like Blender or Mozilla),…
> Does that really help? Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with). Of course it can help. For example, when Oracle bought MySQL, it was forked and we got Maria. When Emby pissed off people, it was forked and we got Jellyfin. There are plenty of other examples. Whether or not you like these products, the po…
OpenZFS is another great example.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you drink from a river and get cholera, would you drink from that river again in the future? It might be fine! Maybe on that particular day, somebody with cholera had just taken a shit upstream, and the bacteria are totally gone now. But it's still a useful prior, and that's the case here with whom you choose to conduct business. I think it's a question of burden of proof. You'd ordinarily not worry too much about…
> If you drink from a river and get cholera, would you drink from that river again in the future? No. Further, I'd stop drinking untreated water from all rivers. (Just answering your hypothetical. I spend a lot of time in the wilderness and wouldn't drink untreated water from a river or lake to begin with.) This effect, though, has happened with software for me years ago. Enough bad actors exist that I've reached the…
I was going to observe that another totally-understandable reaction to getting fucked in a business transaction (or getting cholera from untreated water) is to begin researching everyone you do business with (or testing/treating all the water you drink).
I may be stretching the limits of the analogy here, but either way that "verify, then trust" approach is more work than "adaptive blissful ignorance", and a lot of people aren't going to do it, or will at least slack off as the pain of the original incident becomes a more distant memory.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#98I think enshitification will be the word of the year this year
I think we need to decide on its meaning first. Most people these days use it as a death mark. Except the original op-ed often quoted used Meta, Uber, TikTok and Google - companies who make billions of clean profit per quarter, and more profits than they ever have, as examples Enshitification = more profits is unfortunately correct in my mind, but most people use it with a much different meaning. I don't think Unity…
It's not the actual profitability of the move that's important, it's the motive. Enshittification comes from the ever-expanding _desire_ for profit. At some point the golden goose is killed to make next quarter's goals. Just so happens it was killed immediately in this case.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why it is good to build on the top of open source solutions
Does that really help? Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with). I wonder if it's less about the source code here but about the people involved, and how to prevent a consolidation of capital and power in the hands of greedy financiers. Maybe developing the projects as nonprofits (like Blender or Mozilla),…
> Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with).
True, but there's no rule that says you have to update when they do. You can just stick with what you have until/unless you find or create another option.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would I even want to build a game if I'm going to have to give between 4-8% of everything I make to steam and unity? I completely understand why nearly every AAA studio builds their own client and game engine, it's cheaper in the long run.
Surely steam takes way more than 8%?
Last I heard it was 30%.