This is a nonsensical and unrealistic fear/threat to be putting at the top of your list.

The biggest problems are happening right now not in some 90s sci fi films.

One of those threats is automated weaponry and mass surveillance, but not in the comic relief way you speak about it.

In that individuals can be, and that its very difficult to actually do a broad search because content that might exist in one might not exist in another, and that the types of people to run them often dont want search engines indexing them

Also, I don’t see locking data from search engines as a bad thing. The fediverse isn’t search engine searchable either

The fediverse not being searchable is one of the biggest flaws with it, and make it similarly ephemeral to Discord, except its actually worse because the sizes of communities are just in that goldilocks area of awfulness where there are echo chambers, and people are rude and toxic. Whatsmore, availability due to the small size is relatively mediocre.

However, it’s free and they have to support it somehow.

These arguments might just give me an aneurysm.

This has let so many horrible free to play games off the hook while they literally make billions in profits and have astounding profit margins.

Discord makes money.

In a non hyper greed infested world, they could simply coast at the level of wealth they are at now, still making free money for their investors, paying their workers, and improving the service, without making peoples lives shittier.

There is no reason to justify this shit.

Have you not seen the world? Everything, no matter how horrific, can always get infinitely worse.

The PIF could buy it and ban gay people. Israel could buy it and persecute people against genocide. A rich right wing billionaire could buy it and force even more nazi memes upon the youth. They could make a monetized limit to how many servers one can join that is purposefully below any sane reasonable or normal level. They could make PMs pay per message.

There are infinite ways it can get worse. Infinite.

It also makes giving or getting any kind of support a hellish time sink, but that’s almost besides the point…

You know, this comment just made me realize this might actually be the point for some companies.

Its a cheap way to pretend that you care about customer service, while actually dissuading customers strongly from actually trying. Its also completely easy to bot vs having a human on a phone line.

A great problem of our society is there being too many problems to have any group of people focus on enough to get any of them solved.

If every issue has just 2% of people caring about it, companies can easily just write those 2% off and do business as usual.

This is why to not have an enshitifed world it has to be top down, and people have to participate in politics logically as opposed to based on which groups of people they hate.

The basic maths of it just doesn’t work for any sort of bottom up action.

It would have to be a relative time of quiet and one company sticking out like a sore thumb for long enough for them to be damaged.

You have seen how rapidly things are getting worse.

There is not going to be that happening, and even if there were, it wouldn’t be enough as there are thousands more issues.

This is ultimately just punching sideways and down though.

These companies will win when your strategy is to simply shit on other people for existing.

You may not think that is what you’re doing but it is. How so? Because while you care about this area of life enough to get into the details, for other people, their areas of care are completely different, and it is unreasonable for you to expect everyone to care about precisely what you care about.

As such, punching down and sideways only serves the purpose of making an environment where only the rich and powerful band together, and the poor (us) routinely infight and chop off our own legs rather than realizing that these megacorps hiring leagues of lobbyists, psychologists, marketers, etc know exactly how to push, and know that exactly the person you are bitching at will almost certainly never see your comment, or will consider it hostile and irrelevant so it wont matter either way.

The noose keeps tightening.

Google also has been trying to argue that modifying client side javascript is equivalent to hacking.

Modifying code running on your own fucking machine, in your own fucking browser.