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 🙂.
Valve
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.
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).
There is a brand of flour called King Arthur that seems pretty decent as far as brands as a general concept go. I don’t get them all the time as their stuff does tend to cost more, but I’ve found my bread machine has consistently done better with their stuff than any other flour I’ve tried (I’m not sure exactly why, what is there to get wrong with grinding flour, that would enable a significant difference in quality to exist?), they don’t seem to have gotten any worse over the time I’ve known about them, and operate as some sort of employee cooperative from what I’ve read.
King Arthur is awesome. I also buy olive oil and einkorn flour from Jovial. Einkorn is in the ancient grain category I guess and I find more digestible than typical flour. It is a bit different tasting and to work with, so its not a straight 1 to 1 replacement however. https://jovialfoods.com/einkorn/flour/
Im not as active in the movie industry anymore but I always liked Blackmagic. They’re making Davinci Resolve, a really good video editor. Really generous free tier, pro version is a one-time purchase.
They’re also making affordable cinema cameras. Both of these products really shook up the industry a few years back.
I’ve been using Davinci Resolve for many years now and couldn’t recommend it more. In my opinion, some of the best software I’ve ever used or heard of.
I’m no expert in video editing and have only done it scarcely, but I do still want to plug Kdenlive for those interested in a FOSS alternative to Resolve. I don’t know how it stacks up by comparison, and I suspect it probably can’t do quite as much, but it’s still a well-made piece of software that’s been easy for me to use and more than capable of pulling off anything I’ve needed.
You might not like the prices, but computer components, cpu, gpu, motherboard… keep getting better each generation, some bugs cause issues, but that’s due to trying to maximize performance, not cheeping out. 3-d printer tech. In fact, thinking about it, a lot of competitive products keep their quality. Also small brand premium products in general.
Counter-argument: A lot of computer part brands are not viewed in the best light. From Intel and their constant upgrades of sockets and recent issues with CPUs, to mobo vendors doing anti-consumer stuff, most storage(ssd/hdd) vendors hiding details or downgrading models silently to save money at consumer cost. Nvidia is still getting hate for the price increases of their GPUs, and doing other anti-comptetitive things using their dominance.
It’s not everyone but making a good choice isn’t always easy these days. Since the post mentioned brands, I’d rather hear which brsnd is doing good rather than just a “the market in general is good”.
Partial rebuttal. If you increase the power draw, you need more pins dedicated to power and ground. Without reducing functions, this needs a different footprint. They have had issues with some CPUs in the past. bugs in complex systems are basically unavoidable, its just in hardware you can’t just issue a software patch to fix it 100% with no negative effects.
Nvidia has been anti-competitive as long as I can remember. They put out dev tools that basically break games on AMD. That’s just their operating model. I don’t know that that’s enshittifying as it often makes their own product better, its just being an anti-competitive ass.
I can’t comment too much to your other points. I think some of the memory was down to the memory chip makers, not the product makers, but I can’t back that up.
