I’m so hyped they bought Affinity Photo 🤦♀️
“Suicide by AI” drinking game: drink a sip every time that a business gets rekt by trying to force LLM and/or diffusion models down the users’ throats.
from comments on the original story:
My personal opinion, but I believe this aligns with who Canva’s core paid users actually are, and they are not your standard creatives. Canva now powers the creative for pretty much all scams and schemes. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc… If you are selling some garbage product, garbage merch, selling a course, participating in an MLM, “doing crypto” or just outright running a scam, Canva is your go-to tool. It allows you to do things at a speed, scope, and scale that were previously just not possible. These generative AI tools allow one or two people to create a year’s worth of content in a week. It’s the creative tool behind the enshitification of almost everything, and it’s why everything kind of looks the same.
They don’t care about the casual user. They don’t care about students. They want the user who is creating a lot of content, becuase they know that person uses it to generate income the scales relative to the amount of content created.
jesus fuck, 300%? and they’re leaning hard into generative AI horseshit? and I remember a bunch of graphic designers I know very loudly leaving Adobe Cloud for Canva specifically because of adobe’s greed and focus on shoving AI into their product. some of them fucking tagged Canva in the post!
Canva users online have condemned the increases, with some announcing they’ll be canceling their subscriptions and moving to Adobe applications.
some have announced they’re unsubscribing from the frying pan and resubscribing to the fire. not that I can blame them — Canva’s product is utterly indistinguishable from Adobe’s shit now, but it’s still easier to hire designers that know Adobe because it’s unfortunately an industry standard. there’s no reason to stay aboard Canva’s sinking ship.
ah well, at least we’ve got alternatives like the Affinity suite—
These huge price increases also follow Canva purchasing the company behind Affinity’s creative software suite for a reported “several hundred million [British] pounds,” and ahead of a potential public listing in the US in 2026.
well fuck. being a designer fucking sucks.
The enshittification of entire sectors marches on… Some day, humans will learn capitalists are ONLY greedy pigs, and not actually good for anything except hoarding wealth.
I am so sad that Canva bought affinity.
I know, I really hope they don’t screw it up and turn it into yet another subscription service. At least they can’t take away the licenses we’ve already bought.
Adobe is trying to prevent people from using older versions instead of their subscription. I have a feeling it is only a matter of time…