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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • theparadox@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.worldKotaku being Kotaku
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    12 days ago

    Just reiterating what others have said but… if you have an IP you like and want more of it in the future (regardless of medium!) then its success in any other medium will likely impact whether or not you get more.

    Unfortunately, we live in a world where:

    • Money matters more to most IP holders than the IP itself

    • New IP is seen as risky

    • Those in charge don’t have to take responsibility for their failures

    If there is a commercial failure of an IP, there is a good chance that its failure will be seen as the IP generally failing or falling out of poluarity instead of the failure to best utilize the IP that likely occurred. As a result, priorities will often shift away from the IP to something else in all mediums (ex. ASOIAF/GOT). Unless the IP is absolutely gangbusters in all other mediums, it will suffer. Similarly, success will likely lead to more utilization of the IP in any medium.

    It’s unlikely that the IP owner will sell or license the IP in the near future because at one point it was popular and new IP is hard to make. It would be better to hoard IP and maybe try again in a decade when they need a trick up their sleeve. Plus, another failure might damage the IP even more.

    Admittedly, I’m not attached to any brands or IP in particular and so I’m not invested really. I just makes me a little sad when some IP I thought well of has this happen… or when the person who benefits from the IP turns out to be a person I’d rather not give money to. Occasionally I’ll ponder what might have been if things had gone differently and feel a little bad.


  • the same process

    It doesn’t necessarily involve the middle man, who is ultimately the bigger fish that enshittifiers are looking to land. I think that’s relevant. Enshittification’s process involves capturing both a “retail” user base and a business user base and then squeezing both.

    Edit. Enshittification is layered and more specific to industries and markets that are not inherently profitable. It starts with seed money being burned for that initial user base and fucks over everyone up and down the chain because the business is not really profitable otherwise. Skimp/shrinkflation is more about squeezing more profit than you are already making.


  • I’ve see it used a lot recently to describe the general degradation of quality in service of increasing profits. I think technically, it is not enshittification. Below is my general definition of the process enshittification describes. Repost from another comment.

    1. Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
    2. Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
    3. Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.

    A word that includes the word “shit” in it has a very nice ring to it when describing things getting generally shittier in favor of profit. I suppose language can evolve rapidly and things mean what people believe them to mean.

    Edit: As per Wikipedia’s Shrinkflation Entry:

    Skimpflation involves a reformulation or other reduction in quality.

    I see skimpflation as a form of shrinkflation. The idea is still that the price stays the same but to try and hide the cost increase from the customer they give you less. I guess fewer strawberries per “smoothie” is even more subtle than fewer ounces of the original “smoothie” formula per bottle.


  • To be a pedantic asshole, technically enshittification is meant to refer to online services that follow an inevitable process of…

    1. Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
    2. Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
    3. Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.

    Admittedly, I see enshittification used colloquially meaning basically “business found a way to fuck over its customers more than usual to increase their profit”. Perhaps that is what you mean by “General enshittification”.



  • Despite Public Radio being creates by an act of congress, good old Ronnie Reagan slashed it funding in 1980. Currently, it gets ~25% of its funding from the government, but only a fraction of that is direct funding. Most funding comes through member stations getting funding from state or Federal sources, or from state funded universities. That means it needs corporate or nonprofit sponsors that can impact the incentives of a media organization.

    PBS gets a bigger chunk, ~40% if it’s funding from State, Federal, and educational sources. Still more dependent on external funding, such as corporate advertising, than internal.



  • Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices

    Assuming you are in the USA, it’s fundamentally because our politics is fueled by private money. The “haves” spend lots of money to make rules that protect and enrich themselves at the expense of the “have nots”. The rich get richer, and the rest of us get a larger share of the burden.

    The rich then spend more of their money convincing everyone else that some minority group of their fellow “have nots” are to blame and let us fight amongst ourselves. They starve us but leave us with just enough left to lose so that the price of doing something about it is too high (quitting, losing health insurance, getting arrested at a protest, etc) for most of us to bear.

    how can we change this?

    Get money out of politics. Get the public to stop blaming their fellow have nots and demand change from the haves.

    How does one person even start to address these issues?

    Have empathy for and help your neighbors if you can, especially when they take the risks required to push for actual change. Talk to people. Organize. Support/start unions or a mutual aid organization. Go to local government meetings and make your voice heard. Run for local office.

    Its easy for a small group of wealthy organizations to tilt specific elections or politics in their favor. It’s much harder them to do that in 1,000+ small communities across the nation.



  • Fundraisers and charities, when you have a lot money, are rarely acts of charity. They tend to be PR campaigns and power plays.

    Honestly, even when the acts have good intentions, they are often quite damaging. The involvement of the wealthy in charity is very similar to their involvement in politics. Their wealth buys influence and gives them a disproportionate say that allows them to ignore and overrule the will of the people and sometimes even reality.

    For example, look into the impact of Bill Gates’s “acts of charity” in the education space. He poured money into charter programs that negatively impacted public education. Later studies showed that his programs were not particularly effective.

    Let’s say, hypothetically, that a very rich person is convinced by some charlatan that they found the a means to produce free energy. The wealthy person throws tons of money at the idea. How many talented people will be taken from other legit programs because the paycheck at Bullshit Energy Nonprofit is better? These rich people are successful and think they know bestr. Their money ensures they get treated like experts because money makes things happen whether or not those things are helpful.



  • In the US, conservative lawmakers have been waging a quiet war against our postal system for a while now.

    Highlights: They forced it to be self-sustaining (cut federal funding), then when that didn’t kill it they forced it to, in a very short time frame, pre-fund retirement benefits ahead of time for all current and former employees.

    The postal system is more or less dependent on the funds it gets from spam mailers.

    Edit: To clarify, I’m not insinuating that the bulk/majority of its income is from junk mail, I’m just stating that its not nothing, so they don’t really have an incentive to kill that source if revenue.


  • Market socialism can be distinguished from the concept of the mixed economy because most models of market socialism propose complete and self-regulating systems, unlike the mixed economy. While social democracy aims to achieve greater economic stability and equality through policy measures such as taxes, subsidies, and social welfare programs, market socialism aims to achieve similar goals through changing patterns of enterprise ownership and management.

    I mind if you are simultaneously linking to a Wikipedia article defining it as being completely self regulated, lacking any form of social welfare.

    Capitalism’s problem is that, ultimately, it’s “compete” or die because you need to work to afford to live. I’m not necessarily advocating for the nationalization of all industries or a command economy. There can be competition, but the playing field needs to be leveled first. Workers owning the enterprise as a collective is a step in the right direction but that still leaves the door open for “B2B” exploitation when an enterprise’s failure can mean its workers now cannot afford to live.





  • My point is that people like Trump aren’t looking to help the weak. Trump is looking to exploit them. The only “problems” be wants to fix are barriers to more easily exploit them.

    By blaming the minorities, he creates a scapegoat for his base and others to blame for their problems. This distracts them from the fact that him and people like him are the cause of their problems.

    Sure, some of them are racist but I honestly think most of them are just hurt, angry, scared, ignorant, and desperate. If they had more exposure to minorities most of them would change their beliefs.