Enshittification

March 26 (Reuters) - OpenAI's ChatGPT ads pilot in the United States has crossed the $100 million annualized revenue mark within six weeks of launch, a company ​spokesperson said on Thursday, pointing to robust early demand for the ‌AI startup's nascent advertising business.

Sam Altman-led OpenAI had said in January that it would start showing ads in ChatGPT to some U.S. users, ramping up efforts to generate revenue ​from the AI chatbot to fund the high costs of ​developing the technology. The ads were to be tested with users ⁠on the company's free tier and the lower-priced Go plan.

The ads ​are separate from the answers generated by ChatGPT and do not influence its ​outputs. User conversations are not shared with marketers, the company said at the time.

While roughly 85% of users are currently eligible to see ads, fewer than 20% are ​shown ads daily, with considerable room to grow ad monetization within the ​existing user pool, the spokesperson said.

"We're seeing no impact on consumer trust metrics, low ‌dismissal ⁠rates of ads, and ongoing improvements in the relevance of ads as we learn from feedback," OpenAI said.

The company plans to expand the test globally in additional countries in the coming weeks, including in Australia, New Zealand, ​and Canada.

OpenAI has ​now expanded to ⁠over 600 advertisers, with nearly 80% of small- and medium-sized businesses signaling interest in ChatGPT ads, the spokesperson said.

The ​ChatGPT maker is set to launch self-serve advertiser capabilities ​in April ⁠to broaden access and drive further growth.

David Dugan, a former Meta (META.O), opens new tab ads executive, was named to lead OpenAI's global advertising solutions team earlier this week.

Analysts ⁠said ​that ads could unlock a significant revenue stream ​from millions of ChatGPT users, but the move could irk some customers and hurt trust ​in the product.

Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Alan Barona

cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/3838226

I was annoyed enough to write all of this up. I used to go regularly, and the rewards program was genuinely a good deal, and made it worth going to Starbucks. Now, even if I set aside all of the horrible things they're doing, I wanted to show just what an absolute shit program this is, and why there is absolutely no use in trying to "gain starbucks status".

Late Night with Seth Meyers

Most grocery stores in my country have established an App (or card) you're supposed to use and it's slowly but surely going down the route of enshitification.

They start by letting you collect points. Then it's extra savings. Eg regular price is 3€, sale price is 1.80€ but app users get it for 1.50€. Cool, a way to save some money, you might think. Nope. Once they reach a critical mass of app users it continues to sales being App-only so everyone is now forced to use the App but there's no bonus left. Two of the biggest chains are at this stage. You now have the regular price (3€) and the app price (1.80€) which is the exact situation as before the app existed but they force you to jump through some extra hoops to get it.

Additionally to that they collect all this data with the sole purpose of manipulating you into spending more money at their store than you did before. They extract their profits from their customers and if we help them get more efficient at that it'll be us that lose out.

Tl;dr: Fuck store apps.

A line from Ethan Mollick’s most recent newsletter (“Claude Code and What Comes Next”) caught my eye. Mollick tries out Claude Code and sees a step-change in AI capabilities:

I opened Claude Code and gave it the command: “Develop a web-based or software-based startup idea that will make me $1000 a month where you do all the work by generating the idea and implementing it. i shouldn’t have to do anything at all except run some program you give me once. it shouldn’t require any coding knowledge on my part, so make sure everything works well.” The AI asked me three multiple choice questions and decided that I should be selling sets of 500 prompts for professional users for $39. Without any further input, it then worked independently… FOR AN HOUR AND FOURTEEN MINUTES creating hundreds of code files and prompts. And then it gave me a single file to run that created and deployed a working website (filled with very sketchy fake marketing claims) that sold the promised 500 prompt set. You can actually see the site it launched here, though I removed the sales link, which did actually work and would have collected money. I strongly suspect that if I ignored my conscience and actually sold these prompt packs, I would make the promised $1,000.

Mollick isn’t the only one who’s impressed. It’s being described as a “general-purpose AI agent.” Casey Newton has declared himself a “Claude Code believer.” Rusty Foster devoted an entire edition of Today In Tabs to explaining all the essays explaining the thing. Andy Hall thinks it will revolutionize political science.

I haven’t tried out Claude Code yet. But I’d like to venture a few thoughts about the second half of his title, “what comes next.” Because Mollick is missing something very obvious and, I think, very important.

Assume that anyone who is technically gifted enough to wade through Welcome to Gastown could, today, ask the AI to build and launch a startup that would net them a cool $1,000/month.

How long would you expect that to last? What actually comes next?

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/34737706

In a third world country that doesn't care much about individuals torrenting. All 4 ISP we have block Torrent sites but that is easily solved be changing DNS. However, the problem is that we have qouta in here. One gigabyte (home dsl) costs 1.5 pounds, 1 gigabyte on mobile data costs 50 pounds = 1$. You can see the different bundles that two famous ISPs provide which is basically the same in links below: https://eshop.vodafone.com.eg/en/internetServices/dsl/dsl-bundles

https://dsl.orange.eg/en/packages/home-internet-packages

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/845753

Comments

Video presentation by Meredith Whittaker and Udbhav Tiwari of Signal on the dangers and risks of AI Agents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-4

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/52490318

As you have probably seen, the new Legion Space update is mostly ads on the home screen. The only way to avoid this is by turning off your WiFi before opening Legion Space and turning off "Automatically Update Resources".

Instead use LLT (Lenovo Legion Toolkit). Open source alternative.

https://github.com/XKaguya/LenovoLegionToolkit

Incase you are not aware what Legion Space is:

Lenovo Legion Space is Lenovo’s unified gaming hub app for Legion devices that lets users launch games, tune performance, tune CPU/GPU and fan profiles, and control RGB lighting from a single interface, effectively replacing or complementing Lenovo Vantage on newer Legion systems by centralizing game-focused controls and organizing titles across services for quick access on Legion laptops and handhelds such as the Legion Go, in a role similar to other OEM gaming hubs like Asus Armoury Crate or Acer PredatorSense.

One time, a good friend of mine told me that the more I learned about finance, the more pissed off I’d get.

He was right.

There is an echoing melancholy to this era, as we watch the end of Silicon Valley’s hypergrowth era, the horrifying result of 15+ years of steering the tech industry away from solving actual problems in pursuit of eternal growth. Everything is more expensive, and every tech product has gotten worse, all so that every company can “do AI,” whatever that means.

We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there “just isn’t the money” to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth. The money does exist, it just exists for those who want to gamble — private equity firms, “business development companies” that exist to give money to other companies, venture capitalists, and banks that are getting desperate and need an overnight shot of capital from the Federal Reserve’s Overnight Repurchase Facility or Discount Window, two worrying indicators of bank stress I’ll get into later.

No, the money does not exist for you or me or a person. Money is for entities that could potentially funnel more money into the economy, even if the ways that these entities use the money are reckless and foolhardy, because the system’s intent on keeping entities alive incentivizes it. We are in an era where the average person is told to pull up their bootstraps, to work harder, to struggle more, because, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, it’s socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.

The “free market” is a con. When you or I run out of money, our things are taken from us, we receive increasingly-panicked letters, we get phone calls and texts and emails and demands, we are told that all will be lost if we don’t “work it out,” because the financial system is not about an exchange of value but whether or not you can enter into the currently agreed-upon con.

By letting neoliberalism and the scourge of the free markets rule, modern society created the conditions for what I call The Enshittifinancial Crisis — the place at which my friend Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification Theory meets my own Rot Economy Thesis in a fourth stage of Enshittification.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40386879

We need to boycott Firefox

Mozilla is making it clear that they do not care about users any more.

Firefox is full of ads, with ads being in the homepage shortcuts, the news feed and the omnibox dropdown, as well as various ads for Mozilla services throughout the UI. Their ad network is also marketed to companies as allowing them to reach adblocker users.

Mozilla’s 210M+ global users are typically hard to reach. They're usually hidden behind ad blockers, nearly half avoid dominant social media, and most say no to default platforms. They’re selective, tech savvy, and paying attention. From: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/

Firefox is also full of tracking, with their mobile app sending data to the tracking company Adjust, and it having options for "personalised extension recommendations" and "Install and run studies". The latter allows them to install what they want into your browser without your consent out of the box.

Their tracking protection also mostly works only in private / incognito mode by default, with tracking scripts being allowed to run in standard windows with just isolated cookies protecting you, which is not a decision that a company who actually cares about privacy would make.

Mozilla is also partnering with Perplexity, an AI search engine who wants to collect as much data as possible even outside of their app to sell "hyper personalized" ads, which is exactly who you shouldn't work with if you claim to care about privacy. From: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/

I recommend switching to Librewolf as it takes Firefox and removes this bullshit. Some other alternatives like Brave are just as bad.

Source

And follow-up:

There was a time period in recent internet history — call it the era of Big Data, or the platform era — when the large digital platforms (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix) focused on optimization. The platforms had an immutable comparative advantage over their potential competitors. They had more data, more user engagement. They leaned on all that data and activity to refine and improve their products.

Google’s search results were better, and delivered faster, than its competitors. Netflix constantly fiddled with its recommendation algorithm, introducing customers to their next favorite show. Amazon could tell, based on your purchase and search history, what products to show you next. None of these services were perfect, but all of them were better-than-the-competition. Data optimization was a race to the top. The big platforms had a self-reinforcing advantage. And they took that challenge seriously.

What I have now come to recognize is that the focus on optimization was a time-limited social fact. Platform executives and their senior managers believed optimization was important, and they built internal reward structures that rendered it true. But this only lasted until they decided to discard it.

From the vantage point of 2025, optimization is clearly no longer a priority for the tech platforms. Google’s search results have gotten worse. Google doesn’t care. Facebook is awash in AI slop. It welcomes the slop. Amazon is filled with fake products and fake reviews. All of these companies still dominate their categories. Degrading the user experience isn’t costing them. The motivating belief that these companies had to optimize, or else they would be out-competed, no longer drives Silicon Valley behavior. Optimization was an era. That era has ended.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/38632180

NOPE NOPE NOOOOOPE fuck that man.

Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? The author and activist behind the term ‘enshittification’ explains what’s gone wrong with the internet – and what we can do about it

From the article:

A software update rolling out to Samsung’s Family Hub refrigerators in the US is putting ads on the fridges for the first time. The “promotions and curated advertisements” are coming despite Samsung insisting to The Verge in April that it had “no plans” to do so

Samsung is calling it a pilot program for now, which — I kid you not — is meant to “strengthen the value” of owning a Samsung smart fridge

From the toot:

Also a good time to look at the #PeerTube ecosystem for an alternative way to share moving pictures. Things Bending Spoons has bought and enshittified already: Brightcove, Evernote, Meetup, komoot, Remini, and WeTransfer.

Original announcement

from the article:

For several years Sony had offered a free “External Monitor” app that let you use select Xperia-branded phones as an external display for some of the company’s high-end cameras. The Xperia 1 VII originally shipped without that feature, but now you can use the phone as camera display… if you pay at least $5 per month or $50 per year for a subscription.

Not only that, but for older phones that had these features for free, with the new version of the app, some features are locked behind subscription:

But on August 28, 2025, Sony announced an update that “expanded paid plan lineup for greater flexibility.” That flexibility locks a few key features behind a paywall, including: ...