1169
Google fucked a whole generation with Chromebooks, and now they're fucking the next generation with AI
(slrpnk.net)
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
1169 points (90.7% liked)
Enshittification
2923 readers
174 users here now
What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Have you ever worked in an environment powered by Windows-based computers, and Microsoft software? Have you ever spoken with any user in such an environment about their experience with errors like the ones you described, and how easy or difficult it was to solve them?
I am not doing the whole passive aggressive argument where you refuse to say what your issue is and hold a clear conversation so you can try and seem like the winner and claim that I am an idiot because you have misunderstood my comment.
But to answer the specific questions posted:
Yes, it has been my job for fifteen years.
Not only do I speak with them several times a workday, I am usually the one solving said problems meaning I get to experience it all.
My point stands, I don't even see yours.
Fair enough, and I appreciate the clarification. That actually reinforces my point. You and I both work with people who use Windows daily and encounter these verbose errors—but they almost never understand them. They don’t use these messages to develop troubleshooting skills—they just get stuck and frustrated.
So while I get the appeal of a detailed error message in theory, in practice, it doesn’t help most users learn anything. If anything, it just creates more dependency on people like us to fix things for them.
Thank you for accepting my initial rant, I am all for a proper discussion.
I get what you mean, and while true that most people won't get better at troubleshooting because of a verbose error message, even back in the Windows 95/98 days where you had verbose error messages, most people would still not be capable of understanding them, myself included at that time.
But my point is that the small minority of people who would start troubleshooting the stuff, myself included these days, would be vastly more helped by a verbose error message than a generic "Whops! Something went wrong, please wait!"
Modern software are not even giving people the same initial chances to troubleshoot the issue as older software did.
Oh, on that I totally agree. And not just with Microsoft with everything I run into Microsoft is especially bad because their attitude seems to we need to do something. You don’t need to know what it is and we’re not gonna tell you how long it takes so just fuck right off Which is monumentally annoying of course Apple does give a bunch of code and stuff for errors when something goes wrong and you can send it the developers, and I have never taken the time to try to figure out what any of that stuff is because I am not gonna be able to fix whatever it is and so I’m not gonna take the time. However, in my line of work where I’m supervising a lot of file ingestion people, data, architects, and software engineers, it definitely behooves me to understand what the errors I’m seeing with our own in-house proprietary products are. It’s especially frustrating when some of the higher up software engineers want to exclude me from meetings about the products going down because they claim it’s too technical for me. It’s not, of course, it’s not even the real reason; they just want to exclude me because they’re afraid of sharing their weaknesses or something. I have completely figured out what they are worried about yet, but it’s maddening.