Dollar Tree.
It used to have been an unreal experience witnessing the existence of these stores when they came out. Everything for a $1. No joke. The quality of some things have had corners cut and the quantity might’ve been laughable, but there was a good solid purpose for these stores.
And then I started seeing the signs after a few good solid years of shopping there. The first sign was how they stopped selling eggs. This was before the Bird Flu. They stopped selling eggs because they simply couldn’t afford to buy stock and then the price hike to $1.25 happened.
And now they’ve hiked the prices again to $1.50 for some products in a handful of stores. Additionally, they’ve incorporated items going from $2 ~ $15 so they have long lost the role and title of being the most affordable places to shop.
Gone were the days.
OkCupid used to be the best for finding matching people: they crowdsourced thousands of relevant multiple choice questions from which you built your search filter: which answers you accept, how important each is to you, and a voluntary explanation. The questions and match results were factored into friendship, dating, and sex.
Then Match Group bought it. First they let it be, but then they:
- removed the factoring - no more looking for friends or sex, only complete packages
- removed search - no more finding the best matches anywhere on the planet, now you just swipe like Tinder
- removed keyword search - no more finding rare interests not included in the questions, like “furry”
- removed the search filter - now everything has to be the same to match: both of you must have or not have tattoos for example, never mind what you like - one of my likes went from 95% to 50% match
- deleted the voluntary explanations without warning, so no one could back theirs up
- deleted ~95% of the match questions without warning
- deleted all accumulated likes, which were my best matching people around the world with the maximum couple/friend/sex partner potential except location for now. I had the links saved, but they broke all of them.
- they delete matches (mutual likes) if they haven’t been messaging in a while, as if that meant they’re not a match - no, we’re just distant for now
- they police inconvenient statements in the users’ introductions as the political situation evolves - the day after the mass murderer CEO got shot, the section in my profile containing “fuck the healthcare system - make a better one” was deleted without sending me a copy to edit
Avoid the whole Match Group.
Now that I think of it, the destruction of OkCupid looks like a politically motivated attack against the minorities and intellectual power users who used to flock there.
Since I started using Lemmy, I’ve wondered if a federated dating platform could ever work. Obviously you would have to solve the problem of low user numbers though…
Unless it is a dating platform for tech savvy gay/bi men specifically, it would also have to solve the problem of even lower numbers of women who are users. Even non-fed dating platforms struggle to reach a 10:1, men:women ratio of active, non-bot users.
As a woman (just have to phrase it that way), good luck to any who try. Personally, I can’t think of anything that would entice me to sign up for a federated dating platform.
Make the men moderate each other’s first messages. You need 3 out of five thumbs up before that first message even goes through. You have to rate five messages before you can try to send one. Make them see how many fucking weirdos there are and hopefully make them behave a little better to begin with by being self conscious about what five other dudes are gonna see. You want five other dudes to see your dick pic on the off chance 3/5 will upvote it? Good fucking luck. Don’t listen to me I just worked for a week in a hospital without running water my brain is a smoothie.
I really miss the quizzes though. You could also make it so that you can limit your visibility to a threshold of question matching. I reconnected with the guy thought was cool in group therapy a year later when we were both doing much better because we were a 98% match. I didn’t pursue it at the time because meeting a partner in group therapy is a terrible idea particularly because you’re that fresh into recovery but it kind of vaguely felt like a missed connection. Turns out it was because we’re the same fucking person. A year later we were both doing much better and I get this message on OKC like “weird question - did we meet at (the fucking psych hospital we did outpatient at)” and he’s probably the only person in the history of ever that that line would ever work for. Thanks OKC!
Also: and I say this as a crazy bitch who just got into gnosticism / esoteric Christianity, you need to include star signs. Idgaf if you think it’s fake or not (I myself am mostly in it for the cool rocks) but its already been said in this comment chain that attracting female users is gonna be rough. You need to be willing to meet people where they’re at (this also includes UI btw my female friends think a lot of fedi looks sketchy and don’t wanna be putting their photos in it). I’ve been able to make so many more female friends now that I know what my ascendant is and I’m not sure I even put the right birth time in so there’s a good chance it’s not even my real one. Its like saying you’re a packers fan or your favorite Linux distro. It’s a short set of words that quickly identify ingroups and outgroups and provides a noncommitally vague description of your personality. Just get off your high horse and roll with it we’re trying to get you laid here.
I don’t hate this.
You have way more faith in humanity than I do. I think after 1-2 and the novelty wears off, a lot of people would just thumbs up without reading.
And even if people stay diligent in rating first comments, it will take 0.2 seconds for bad actors to realize they can just save their bullshit for message #2.
There’s an open source one called Alovoa. I haven’t tried it yet myself, but it’s there.
I know it’s on FDroid, though I haven’t checked any other app store for it yet
Man that sounds really good
Oh snap, I met my wife on OKC before these changes. I believe Match had already bought them out but it was before the changes like you mentioned.
I remember it being the superior online matchmaking service at the time.
RIP
Re: Dollar Tree. Even in the pre $1.25 days or $1.50 or whatever they are now, it was well known that they made ends meet by deliberately padding certain items and in the process, preying on the poor people who shopped there who would be unable or unwilling to go to two different stores to complete their shopping trip.
This was primarily on packaged food products which are easy to comparison shop for if you have the means. Canned goods from them were the worst. They’d charge $1 for lots of things you could get at the grocery store at the time for 59 cents or 79 cents or whatever. And if that wasn’t the play, if you checked the quantities on stuff you’d find that the $1 version they sold was inevitably a smaller can, bottle, or jar versus the $1.79 version from the grocery store. So even if one container appeared less expensive, it was actually a worse deal per ounce.
I think they also propped up their business an awful lot with disposable party supplies: Balloons, plates, cups, paper hats, napkins, and all that kind of stuff. I imagine that definitely was not a winner for them during Covid.
Dollar Tree has essentially always been like that. It was never really there for “deals” because of what you mentioned. Usually the items were just smaller packages of things which is why they cost less to begin with.
But it has always been fantastic for certain kinds of items:
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Birthday/greeting cards. They are always simpler and of lesser quality than at other stores. But is anyone really going to keep your card for a prolonged period of time? If they do, it’s probably because of what you wrote in the card to personalized it, not because the card was fancy. I’ve seen greeting cards go for up to $10 in some drug stores which is pretty wild to me. Yes, they are more elaborate, but does it really matter when the cheaper one suffices?
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Gift bags. Same dealio as above.
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Wrapping paper in very particular circumstances. They have significantly less wrapping paper in the package than at other stores. But I find sometimes it’s a good thing if you only want to wrap a present or two with that style of wrapping paper. If you want to wrap many things or if you want to use more of the same paper in the future, then I’d buy elsewhere to get a larger quantity.
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Letting kids pick out some cheap crap from the toy aisle.
For basically anything else, it’s not worth it imo. But the above have always been where it shines.
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Private messaging. We used to all use an open protocol to message each other (email) and now everyone is fractured into proprietary closed centralized messengers.
Cadbury chocolates, Fuck Kraft Carmelo doesn’t taste good at all, and their eggs have gone from the size of a chicken egg to the size of a Robin’s egg while somehow tasting worse
In that time period the costs of cocoa have skyrocketed due to blight, climate change, and legal efforts to reduce slavery in the harvesting of cocoa. Most mass market chocolate brands were harmed by this.
Hitting a button and the TV turns on.
Idk what your setup is, but one of my favorite things about my TVs (and most newer TVs) is that they have HDMI-CEC enabled, so if I hit the power button on my Chromecast or PlayStation, the TV turns itself on/off too and I didn’t even have to program the remote, or worry about pointing the remote toward the TVs IR receiver like back in the day.
can you not do that? or are you talking about it playing something immediately and not picking something?
I can but the elderly struggle. They’ve got these satellite reciever boxes from dish that give them too many options.
Democracy
In the us they used to be called 5&dime stores. A big chain known as woolworths was one but had to raise prices of the decades.
Inflation happens .
Netflix back in the day. A near-limitless catalog of ad-free movies and TV for $8/month. If you tried selling that today, people would think it was a scam
I remember first hearing about Hulu sometime around 2007-8 and thinking it was a scam. Free (good) TV for one 30 second ad.
I knew Netflix existed as a dvd service but back in like 2009 the first streaming ads I saw were on flash game sites so I thought they were scams.
You know those like sign up for blank free trial and you’ll get 5000 fun bucks in shellshock or whatever
For me it’s not so much that the price increased. It’s that what you get for the money vanished.
I’d pay $40 a month to have a modern version of the Netflix that existed back in 2013.
Now if you want to have that you’ve got to have netflix, hulu, HBO Max, Showtime, peacock, and 15 other services and spend $35,400 a month for all of them and it’s just not worth the money, time, and hassle.
A clean toilet.
Enshittified public toilet
It cheats you in through a back door, looking like an ad-covered kiosk. The main entrance is on the other side.
In stalls, there are two screens playing ads, sound coming from the one you’re facing.
Toilet paper brands advertise on dispensers, all brands owned by the same conglomerate.
Softest toilet paper has printed portraits of the toilet company’s political enemies.
Facial recognition measures usage, you pay at exit.
Exiting after 5 minutes is expensive, but a monthly plan is cheaper.
Chipotle has fallen HARD.
Disney World and their fast passes.
SubWay. That $5 foot long was a good deal, even if it was not that great.
DC Shoes - They used to be SICK shoes and now they are basically WalMart shoes.
The whole Disney World situation hits for me in particular. I was privileged growing up with my family being able to go there (altho I think my parents just had massive credit card debt lol). I know even when I was a kid it was ungodly expensive. But comparing when I was a kid to now in 2025 it is absolutely wild on the things they are nickel and diming people on.
The whole fast pass converting to a paid model after it previously being a perk with a ticket was one of the most slap in the face things I had seen.
Panera fell hard too
Oh man, i was wondering if i just had shitty luck with chipotle recently, but its been BAD the last couple times…
Frontend in software development. If you know, you know.
A lot of fast food places have undergone this due to private equity acquisitions.
Whataburger and Dunkin Donuts used to be much better around me.
Dunkin’ Donuts used to make the donuts right there in the store multiple times a day. True story.
Oh yeah I used to love eating at Subway, way back in the 90s. Then one day the steak-and-cheese got substantially worse. Then the meatballs got much worse as well. Once they started prioritizing app orders over in-person orders, I realized I didn’t fit into their cost-benefit calculations and haven’t been back since.
The internet. We’ve had a solid few years, but it has become a giant heap of shit for the most part.
Back then, not everything was an AI generated, SEO, ad riddled, interaction fishing, time wasting, data collecting nightmare with auto-playing videos and a dark pattern employing cookie banner.
Not enshittified. We still pay a monthly fee for access to the internet and it still operates in the same way as it did back in the 90s.
There was auto-playing music, auto-playing gifs, auto-playing banners all over the place, and it was always for time-wasting. It’s literally not changed. Maybe its inhabitants have changed, but it’s largely exactly the same as it was.
The days of randomly happening on goatse from clicking some link in a chat room are basically gone, and places are far more moderated than they ever have been. Open source software exists for anything and everything you could possibly do, and with an adblocker, you see none of that shit - which you should have been running 30 years ago, as well as today.
Additionally, everyone keeps piling onto this “AI Generated” bandwagon even though a bunch of it isn’t. Any time they see a mistake, they think it’s AI and not some basement-grown dweeb with a inferiority complex.
The term “Enshitification” encapsulates when a high quality service exists, and is reduced in quality for the purposes of profit. If anything, the internet grants higher quality access to things today than it ever has; for cheaper prices, and faster speeds…
I’m paying $60 a month for symmetrical gigabit fiber access to the internet. Gigabit upload speeds! For 60 a month! How in tf world is that worse than what we had before?
Most of my time on the internet I e generally been able to avoid disruptive tracking and ads. No more. Even for subscriptions: Boston Globe online games require that ad blocking be disabled.
Most importantly, I just got a new iPad. I paid a crap load of money for something like ten times as fast as the old one, desperately needed …… to look at web pages. Video and games were fine with the kid one, but web pages were not. Now I can browse again
it still operates in the same way as it did back in the 90s
IT guy here, this is just not true.
Back in the 90s, HTTPS was released in 1994, I remember in the early 2000s that Internet Explorer would warn you that a page was using HTTPS, these days it just the opposite.
The internet has been encrypted, where is mostly ran in plaintext before.
Then we have the content on the internet.
We used to read webpages, mostly static HTML, these days the vast majority of websites is running a content engine, say Wordpress or other backend system that you push content onto. This is a gigantic shift, especially for private websites, sure many people used geocities, but many, many built their own webpage as HTML using a WYSIWYG editor, and just uploaded the file to a server.
Plenty also wrote their own HTML code and built the webpage like that.
These are just two examples of how the internet has massively changed since the 90d
I think both of you are right.
I agree with the three of you.
Also the traffic is monopolized in platform silos
AI is definitely a problem. I can’t remember the last time I tried to Google something technical and didn’t have to wade through 2 pages of links to more or less the same slop that didn’t actually answer anything. The internet peaked in like 2013.
How fast it is doesn’t matter. We can “do” more on the internet today, but the experience is absolutely more annoying and shitty than it was in the 90s.
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People using real words instead of saying things like “skibidi” and “enshittified.”
That’s not very cash money of you bro
Bro got zero rizz FR and that’s on God.
If everyone gatekept language like you then no one would ever speak.
You’re not impressing anyone, you’re just annoying. It’s Ohio as fuck.
Better Ohio than Indiana…
That’s not just bad, it’s Fort Wayne bad.
It’s Ohio as fuck.
Jesus Christ that’s hilarious, I’m stealing the shit out of it
“enshitification” is an objectively fantastic word. Coined by the great Corey Doctorow, I feel it truly describes our era. Word of the decade.
Most of the examples given aren’t enshitification though.
Well, I’m not going to go to the mat for every comment in this thread… but some of them are good examples of enshitification.
Oh no, you’re definitely right on both counts, just raising the point that sometimes words kind of become meaningless sometimes.
