What brands (of anything) in your opinion, have *not* (yet) been enshittified?
I'm putting this in chat and not in Technology because I'm also wondering about things like clothes, appliances—basically any sort of consumer product, virtual or physical, you can think of that you feel has retained some standard of quality and has not yet been enshittified. I would start by saying that Wikipedia has not yet been enshittified, but perhaps you disagree? Post is inspired by this video.
EDIT: coyotino correctly points out that Wikipedia isn't a product but a service; poor word choice on my part, just trying to cast a wide a net as possible here in the hopes of making a list of "things that are still good that don't suck." Like I said, a wide net 🙂.
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Valve
The benefits of not being publicly-traded.
They've begun to enshittify their reviews. Used to be almost no meme reviews, now they're everywhere because people can get awards for them. And they of course the ability give awards require you spend money on Steam.
I used to trust "overwhelmingly positive" on games I was considering. Now I don't. I still read some steam reviews but also reviews across the web, too.
Steam is getting close to me not treating it as the only place to buy games.
"nobody reads reviews so i'll just say I'm gay"
"a friend of mine said he'll buy me a GTX4090 if I get 1000 likes in this review"
And that kind of shit is listed as "most helpful". Fuck Valve for making it hard to report that fucking shit
Apply Gabe directly to the forehead 😜
Ya, they're not perfect. I prefer GOG over Steam due to the DRM. But Valve still has a special place in my ❤️ and they make awesome products. And also the stuff runs better on Linux generally than GOG.
The Steam client was sheeeeeeit at first.
And has since improved rather than losing features and locking accesses based on an arbitrary tier system?
A rare win indeed. I do tend to prioritize GOG for games now since they're DRM-free (and Bandcamp for music purchase).
Is Bandcamp drm free?
It is, and all the artists I bought music from offered their music in lossless format (ex: FLAC) as well as more common format (ex: mp3)
That's sweet! I'm definitely joining! Of course I want to pay for music, but I can't stand having some black box software walled garden around something I paid for running on something I paid for. And then youtube has this terrible quality.
Quite a lot of steam games are also DRM free, btw.
They do, but on GOG I don't have to check.
Can't easily download offline installers, though.
Personally, I have trouble continuing to buy from Bandcamp since they were sold to another company which promptly had a round of layoffs.
It was green though!
steam has had it built-in from the start.