#enshittification #longreads
“Imagine going for a ride on your favorite loop through your local woods and stumbling upon a notice of an impending clear-cut. That’s the shock many of us in the European #cycling community felt when the news broke that our trusted route platform, #Komoot, was sold to the notorious #privateequity group Bending Spoons on March 20th of this year”
“The employees were the first to get the axe … 80% were fired immediately” https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/

How #Google’s A.I. Search May Kill #News Dead

It’s now common to get #AI generated answers from Google when searching the web.

The whole concept of searching Google to find actual websites is almost over.

#usa #data #canada #cdnpoli #journalism #enshittification see @pluralistic for context

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/1196-how-googles-a-i-search-may-kill-news-dead

On the sell-off and digital enclosure of #komoot -> #enshittification

( #bluesky users, take note, it's never too late to switch to the #fediverse )

https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/

"Enclosure by private interests interrupts the fundamental reciprocity of the commons, eroding its abundance over time. [] We, the community that supplied the data, cannot remix and repurpose our collective treasure, for example, to build specific tools and datasets for different activities and regions."

Another reason to avoid buying connected devices dependent on online services. #enshittification https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/firmware-update-hinders-echelon-smart-home-gym-equipments-ability-to-work-offline/
Alternative: ride a bike outdoors

im fairly sure this is death by late stage capitalism.

i've developed a serious allergy to it and a chronic inability to put up with its bullshit or to even maintain the charade that any of this is okay.

When we started bikepacking in 2010, handmade bags, no Garmin no Rules and before Gravel meant anything, I never thought bikepacking and the fucked up nature of techbro internet business models would ever coincide in a major way. With Komoot, it did.

This is a super thoughtful piece, I would recommend anyone to read not only for bikepackers, but anyone interested in commons in digital spaces. Also proves again why bikepacking.com is just such a gem of a space on the web.

#bikepacking #enshittification #komoot #KompassStattKomoot

https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/

What will be your Komoot replacement?

For me, I only use Komoot to create my route on my computer. It's easy to plan a perfect route using route surface, elevation, and Street View. After I push the GPX to my Garmin.

So it should be easy to replace for me...

#komoot #enshittification #cycling

https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/

I absolutely loathe web development, yet I've been having to work on implementing a webshop from scratch, as I'm trying to start up a laser business. To make the experience slightly less painful, I implemented the backend in #freepascal ; as most out of the ready-made solutions are evil in various ways. (eg: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/08/1518213/shopify-ceo-says-staffers-need-to-prove-jobs-cant-be-done-by-ai-before-asking-for-more-headcount ) --

It's just about done, the only bit I need to finish yet is some sort of solution for shipping/tracking info.

I've been looking into ShipStation and actually started implementing their API('s); learned they just acquired the ShipEngine company, leading to some API confusion - which lead me to look more into the company.

It turns out that the same company that recently acquired them (Auctane) owns a myriad of shipping-type companies, including stamps.com, endicia, shippingeasy, shipworks, and many others,...

It seems to me that they put themselves in a position where there's basically few alternatives.

If you think about how much e-commerce integrates with at least one of these, you quickly realize that most of what pretty much anyone buys online goes through one of the companies owned by them, which means they know what everyone buys, their name, their home address, etc,...

This absolutely sounds like a #privacy scandal waiting to happen.

Needless to say, I'm not going to be using ShipStation.

I guess I'll just try to use ups/fedex/whatever directly then. Back to the drawing board. :(

It never fails to blow my mind that whenever you turn over even the most benign rock, you'll find some billionaire sucking our society dry. Nothing seems immune to #enshittification these days.

(Probably a surprise to no-one that actually deals with this stuff on a regular basis - but like i said, i've not been doing webdev in a long time, and actively avoid the www even as a user, I've been a bit out of the loop)

Aha, der #Sonos interim CEO, der massiv stellen abgebaut hat und das app Desaster mit verantwortet hat, wird also dauerhafter CEO und setzt den Fokus auf die "Exzellenz der Marke". Ah ja, das lässt ja hoffen....

https://stadt-bremerhaven.de/sonos-macht-naegel-mit-koepfen-tom-conrad-wird-neuer-ceo/

#SysadminDay this year falls on the 80-year anniversary of the fall of #Fascism in #Italy

Here's to all self-hosters and small-community admins, who in an #Internet drive to #enshittification by #capitalism, are today at the forefront of the resistance to this century's fascism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Fascist_regime_in_Italy

Google has done it again

The interface that we've gotten used to The illogical UI of Google photos, is now mangled beyond recognition Beyond Logic and broken in such a way that I will have to use offline editors on Computing Systems, while I look for Open Source editors on my Androids.

If there are people who know of good editors graphic editors on Androids please enlighten me so that my search time can be shortened

It now takes literally 16 to 24 steps to do certain actions that normally took just two to four steps. It is quite clear that Google uses enshittification all their services

Thanks to the accelerating enshittification of search, we are rapidly losing access to human expertise and authoritative, trustworthy content.

https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/index.php/learning/2025/07/enshittification-of-search

... et l'expression "se faire komooter" pris un nouveau sens :

https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/ (en anglais).

Je n'attendais pas à voir Cory Doctorow ( @pluralistic ) apparaitre sur un des sites de #bikepacking que je suis habituellement

Corporations have annual profit growth targets. If they don't hit the %, stocks plummet, etc. They're still profitable, just not growing. With growth, market share slows, so you reduce service, add subscriptions, & reduce spend.

#Enshittification is a logical consequence of #corporate #capitalism.

"Ask Meta AI or Search" ... well, no... just search, damn it!

Seeing this text in the WhatsApp search bar - along with the glaring Meta AI logo looming in the corner of my contacts list for weeks already - was the last drop. I am finally deleting WhatsApp (way ahead of my end-of-2025 goal).

Luckily most of my contacts already use Signal , I hope the rest will follow or switch to another non-enshittified messenger.