this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026

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Some say tech peaked in 2013 in terms of pre-enshitification. What year do you think it peaked and why? (fedinsfw.app)

submitted 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) by Hirohito@fedinsfw.app to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

EDIT: Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.

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[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 9 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

2013 is too late, the machinations of the Cambridge Analytica scandal had already begun at that point.

I think about 2010 was when big tech peaked at being at least viewed as a predominantly utopian force (if not necessarily actually being one). Social media was still mostly social, rather than a side effect of an advertising business. Recommendation algorithms were relatively rudimentary, where they existed at all. Smartphones apps were not dopamine factories designed to be psychologically addictive.

After that was roughly the beginning of "disruptive" tech and a big expansion of surveillance tech.

[–] yardy_sardley@lemmy.ca 2 points 55 minutes ago

I think I agree. Still in the period when facebook's userbase was mostly teenagers, and before smartphones became ubiquitous.

In my opinion it was facebook buying instagram in early 2012 that signalled the beginning of the end. Of course they were only following in the footsteps of google and yahoo before them, but it was the first domino in the enshittification of social media specifically.

[–] zout@fedia.io 1 points 1 hour ago

For me it started in 2006 when OLGA went offline. OLGA was a community of people who transcribed how they played songs on guitar, and the music industry decided that they held the rights to that and sent a takedown request.

[–] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 11 points 2 hours ago

Before Google turned evil and GitHub got bought by ms, after valve started funding proton

[–] officermike@lemmy.world 4 points 2 hours ago

2013 seems like a decent pick. NVME drives just came into existence. Windows 7 was around and still had Windows Media Center. Fiber ISPs were around. Facebook was still centered around people you actually knew and wasn't hyper-focused on serving you engagement-bait political bullshit. Not a trace of LLMs in sight. Google search still worked. Chrome hadn't crippled adblock extensions. Porn was accessible without privacy-violating age verification. Content was less fragmented across streaming services.

Probably the roughest backslide for me would be going without Android Auto.

[–] CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world 4 points 2 hours ago

Everything after fire was probably a mistake.

[–] mrmaplebar@fedia.io 2 points 1 hour ago

Right now! And no, I don't mean corporate software and services or generative AI bullshit...

The hardware market sucks right now for sure, and it's the AI bubble's fault. The rate of advancement of hardware is also slowing down. But at the same time $2000 still gets you a significantly better PC today than what you had 10 years ago. Hardware isn't as affordable as it was just a couple years ago, but it's still good.

On the software side, you really just have to embrace FOSS. The Linux ecosystem is going wild, and it feels like the entire thing is snowballing, growing at an accelerating rate. I now run Linux as my main OS on all of my PCs, including gaming PCs. I have a Linux home server with self-hosted services that are accessible to me whever I go thanks to tailscale. I feel pretty much immune to service and software enshittification, because I have almost no subscriptions and mostly to use free and open source software.

I really feel like I'm getting more out of my technology than I ever have before, and it's a lot less corporate.

[–] one_old_coder@piefed.social 6 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Software tech peaked in the late 80s / early 90s. We still don't have an equivalent to Ada or Eiffel with safety and shit. Rust could be an equivalent, but the quality of software engineering has been dropping every year and I am not proud to be a developer. We used to care about quality, now its vibe coded shit written in JavaScript, the worst language ever created.

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

We do have an equivalent to Ada. It's Ada. The open source GNAT compiler is actively maintained. Eiffel, too has a maintained open source implementation, but with a weird one-year release delay (probably not a big deal with a 40 year old language).

If you're not choosing them for your own projects, then you are part of what you perceive to be the problem. You probably have a good reason, like lack of libraries or general inconvenience compared to popular modern languages. That's fine; maximizing safety over velocity is the right call for avionics and safety-critical public infrastructure control systems, not the average software project.

[–] neidu3@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago

I was always skeptical about cookies, it was around 2004 when I first noticed advertising cookies. So I'd say 2003.

[–] EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 5 points 3 hours ago

I'm not going to try and pinpoint a specific year, but my off-the-cuff answer is 2015.

It's just a rough estimate, so 2013 is in the ballpark.

[–] Davel23@fedia.io 1 points 1 hour ago

I'd say 2013 is approximately accurate. That's about when seeking recurring income started really becoming a thing, and software started going SaaS, and renting cloud servers started taking off.

[–] CombatWombat@feddit.online 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

The peak of software was handing bundles of 3.5” floppies with shareware on it to your buddies, so probably closer to 1993 than 2013.

[–] Cherry@piefed.social 2 points 2 hours ago

Quality yeh mid teens.

Peaked on what people will pay for unfortunately I do not think we have met that yet. Too many people still buying or supporting bad products.

[–] c64z86@piefed.world 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I would say the late 2000s, because after the 2008 crash things started to get worse yet cost more.

[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 2 points 3 hours ago

My Radio Shack Tandy 4000, ca 1991

It had a hard drive. It had color and sound. I could make it do anything I wanted, down to the individual registers using assembly language or high level with Object-Oriented Turbo Pascal.