We all know the struggle of beloved services slowly going downhill. What’s one service, tool, or website you’ve been using for years that’s still great and hasn’t turned to crap?
Wikipedia.
Though I could do without the endless donation blockups.
I can forgive Wikipedia and Internet Archive for the spam. Both sites are incredibly valuable and completely ad-free.
They are one of the highest achievements of humanity, imho, that even make me feel proud to be a human.
It’s hard not to try to support them.
The “spam” is for them to operate, not maximise their profits.It’s not that simple and transparent actually. Wikipedia doesn’t really need those donations to operate. They have money reserves for many years of expenses. I don’t have a great source right now but this article looks decent. I didn’t read the whole thing though.
Gotcha, it’s another anti-European (and anti-USA), anti-male, quasi-Marxist organization. This is what your donations to Wikipedia are going to. Wikipedia spends more money on left-wing causes than actually running an encyclopedia, and by a very long-shot.
Well shit, I guess I’ll start donating
I came here to say both of those things about the Internet Archive, but I also hope both of those orgs get tons of donations regularly because I wouldn’t want to live in a world without them
I just pay the 52$ once a year and know I’ve done my part for knowledge.
You know what?
I’m gonna start doing that.
Just found these custom ad block filters. Seems to be working so far
wikipedia.org##.nag-trigger wikipedia.org###centralNotice wikipedia.org##[id$=“banner-nag”] wikipedia.org###frb-inline wikipedia.org##.cn-fundraisingIt’s not just the spam, there is other enshittification like the endless co-option with AI companies and private info disclosure (aka surveillance capitalism) under the self-serving excuse of being anonymized or aggregated.
You can login and it’ll stop with the pop ups for a year.
- VLC
- Winamp
- Audacity
- 7Zip
- Openoffice
- Steam
- Firefox
- Wikipedia
- Duckduckgo (the search engine)
Most of those are programs rather than services.
That’s kind of telling in itself to be honest. Services for most people these days mean subscription (or some kind of recurring cost). The nature of the overwhelming majority of businesses means they will be looking to increase profits. One extremely common way is to degrade the service you provide slightly. Increasing ads, lowering quality, etc.
One of the only exceptions I would say is Steam. But people could argue that Steam isn’t a true service because it’s closer to a store front, at that point you’re arguing semantics though.
There’s also self hosting a service to consider? How would that count in this instance. I self host a few things like nextcloud, Plex, and others. Yes it’s still a program and technically a service as well?
If you’re self hosting Nextcloud, you don’t have to worry about the server operator (i.e. you) enshittifying it against you. There is still some concern towards the software supplier, as we keep seeing with Firefox, but users can react to that.
I’m not really familiar with the situation around Plex since I’ve heard some mixed things, but I don’t use it and have lost track of what is what.
I would consider Firefox to be a bad actor but it’s a bit more nuance than the situation with, say, Chrome. Firefox is involved in the server side as well (i.e. evolving standards that enshittify the web more and more). I would like to have had the web standards frozen some years ago. BIFL should apply to software as well as to physical products.
Open Office? It hasn’t been touched in a decade. LibreOffice is the true continuation of Open Office, which was forked off after Oracle bought Sun and OO had been left with poor governance and slow updates.
Open Office finally ended up under the Apache foundation but hasn’t been maintained since 2014.
LibreOffice has had continual development with both bug fixes and new features, and the Open Document Foundation gives it good governance and independence as an open source project…
Honestly, switch to Libre Office.
Thanks for the heads-up. Got both on my pc but i instinctively open up OO when i need to do writing. Will give Libre another chance now :)
You’re still using Winamp?
Which version? I never really moved on to Winamp 3 (migrated to foobar back then), has it evolved further from that? Does it run on Linux?
I still sometimes miss my Winamp 2 days with a Calvin & Hobbes skin and spending hours with its visualization features as a young teenager.
Signal is good so far. Firefox is teetering on the edge, but it’s also good so far (poor little fox). Lemmy and Mastodon are both great, but maybe that’s EZ mode because they’re built as alternatives to proprietary social media sites.
I pay for ArsTechnica and I feel that I get a lot of value out of doing so. And keep in mind, being a paying subscriber of a service does not safeguard the service from enshittification, so that’s quite great
Firefox is teetering on the edge
Get LibreWolf . They take FF builds and rip out the telemetry/ads/AI/enshit.
It’s… beautiful
Voicemeeter
Overwolf
Reaper
VLC
PCPartpicker
Ninite
There’s probably some others I’m missing.
YES to Reaper. No surprise that the original developer of Winamp makes an amazing DAW.
Doesnt overwolf rely on ads?
Isn’t Overwolf’s business model literally monetizing and profiting from modding communities? Curseforge and Overwolf are the epitome of enshittification.
Yeah… over wolf was enshittified from the start lol
I’m ok with things relying on ads to make a product free. Someone has to pay for a product or service, if I don’t want to pay for it, then show me an ad and let someone else pay for it. The thing that overwolf and more specifically curseforge do that keeps them out of the enshitification category for me is they simplify modding of games.
I’ve been around since the early days of video game modding and know how hard it used to be. They have streamlined it to the point that if someone has created a mod it is a simple button click to download, and install, and then keep the mod up to date. You can even create and share collections of mods and mod packs. And if a modder has added a donate button, it’s a single click to donate to the modder. It’s everything I want out of the modding community with none of the headache, and it’s been like that for years.
I recently bought a replacement PC for my dad because of windows 11 (though his old computer was also over 10 years old so it was a somewhat fair upgrade, anyhow). Someone suggested I use Ninite to quickly bootstrap a lot of the programs he’d use and I was honestly surprised. It was genuinely no-nonsense and got the job done. A rare nice thing in Windows…
There is also WinGet.
Feel like overwolf was out of the gate pre-enshittyfied
Avoided it like the plague
Sure, I’ll add to that.
- Audacity
- Inkscape
- Notepad++
- DaVinci Resolve
- QBittorrent
- YouTube to mpe 3 convert (the command line one - can’t remember the actual name rn)
Is QR bittorent different from qbittorrent or was that a typo?
Typo. My bad!
Steam
This! Steam is the only proprietary program I use on my Linux machines that I’m actually happy with and don’t want to get rid of
The Pirate Bay
That’s plain wrong that site is littered with viruses and ads these days. 1337x is much better.
Also snowfl and eztvx haven’t let me down yet
My regular open source tools:
- Inkscape
- GIMP
- OpenShot
- Synfig
- Firefox/derivatives (currently using Waterfox)
- Terminal emulators
- OpenSCAD
I do like Inkscape a lot, but GIMP simply isn’t a viable alternative for photoshop for most users. The interface is horrid and the capabilities are limited. Adobe knew what they were doing with their strategic buyouts of developers.
There are definitely some things PS can do that GIMP can’t, but I’d argue it’s fine for anyone who isn’t coming from Photoshop expecting all those features. I’ve only ever used GIMP, so it seems great to me.
Do RSS feeds count as a “service”? I fear one day they will go away and that will be the end of my efficient way of keeping up with things I am interested in.
Not an overly surprising one, but the arch wiki has been an incredible source of info with no ads, tracking, or any of the modern web bullshit for as long as I’ve used it.
They’ve been hit with some pretty major DDOS attacks recently and they’ve done a really good job of keeping the important parts of the service as accessible as possible - they haven’t resorted to buying into cloudflare’s monopoly or blocking vpn users despite either or both being the easy way out.
For anyone else who’s relied on them as much as I have, now would be a great time to donate!
I’ve never used Arch yet still use their wiki quite a lot.
For real. The number of times I’ve been working problems on a Raspberry Pi and my searching ends up there is wild.
- audiobookshelf
- gluetun
- homeassistant
- immich
- invidious
- jackett
- jellyfin
- kavita
- lazylibrarian
- lidarr
- mylar3
- mumble
- navidrome
- podman
- prowlarr
- qbittorrent
- radar
- sonarr
- syncthing
7zip and VLC.
foss stuff - slackware, seamonkey, emacs, keepassxc, fvwm, etc
nonfree stuff - xnview, wacup, winrar
websites - wallhaven, hackernews, etools
I want Winrar to sell merch with licenses included. I want an official “I bought Winrar and all I got was this dumb shirt” shirt.
I’m still rocking a license from early 2000s
Linux has become better and better and now its incredibly good, better then windows and mac OS if you just spend a few weeks learning the small differences.
usenet
