I think your average geek used to be like, somewhat academic and erudite and into arcane knowledge and had some level of good faith of wanting to engage in discussion
Now it’s all frauds and absolutely braindead elon stans and crypto dipshits and conservative freaks and people who enjoy and defend watching big tech destroy everything.
When things shifted from being proud of server uptimes to being proud of constant push notifications and constant pointless updates, that’s when the tide turned. Engineers lost, MBAs won, and now customers suffer. It’s all subscriptions and lootbox mentality now.
I’m guessing somewhere around 2010, but it was a gradual relentless process.
Speaking of enshittification, I brought my nephew to an arcade last weekend as a birthday treat. I’m not going to get into the whole “the games are just cell phone games on gigantic screens”, there are a handful of games that are still fun and worth the tokens to play. But the worst thing I didn’t expect to see was this motorcycle racing game. It was your standard sit-and-lean motorcycle game with a throttle etc. But the surprise was that after swiping the card to play, after you choose your motorcycle, you get the option to swipe again for extra boosts. There were micro transactions. In the arcade motorcycle game. I was so mad.
Didn’t games have “pay money to get extra lives” since forever?
Sure, but paying extra for more turbo boosts in the one race that you get to play is something new. Normally if you want extra boosts you need to learn the course or the game. On that same subject, now if you come in 1st place, you don’t even get to continue. (old man voice) back in my day, when you game in 1st place you got to go onto the next race. That was the point of getting good at the game.
This is sadly so, so true. (from an engineer)