Corporations certainly would bend to consumer demand if consumers were wise enough to boycott and make demands. But the question is whether consumer wisdom would ever advance on a scale to make that happen. I think I have little hope of seeing it in my lifetime.

There are 35 million Mexican adults (38%) without a bank account. So living unbanked is at least an option, and more than ⅓ find it viable.

Nonetheless, it’s interesting to hear that all banks in Mexico are digital and that not a single one offers offline service. And that not a single digital bank offers logins w/out 2FA, or 2FA by SMS (which includes feature phones), or 2FA by using a card reader. If all that is true, consider posting about it in !smartphone_required@lemmy.sdf.org.

This is extremely reductive and oblivious to the actual realities of banking in various countries.

I think you will be hard-pressed to find a country that does not have a single bank that can serve those w/out smartphones. If you find such a country, plz post about it in !smartphone_required@lemmy.sdf.org and send me the link. Then we may be able to make a case for ppl in that specific country not being boot-lickers, if at the same time being unbanked is illegal.

If you think it’s easy to be “unbanked” then I would suggest that you try it yourself first.

I have been simulating an unbanked life for years now. 5 creditors are threatening lawsuits for non-payment after refusing my cash. One took me to court and it was an easy win for me. I just appeared without a lawyer and pointed to the law.

It’s also worth noting that unbanked is more extreme that simply choosing a bank that does not require a smartphone.

It’s banking:

https://slrpnk.net/post/28294479

The army of corporate boot lickers in the mobile phone context is largely composed of people who think banking on a smartphone is wise, despite the attack surface and despite the bank being empowered to monitor their customers more closely. Banking apps are the most significant culprit for gluing people to Android.

We may never see the day when more than 5% of the population realises the importance of FOSS enough to shake free of their addiction to convenience.

Facebook/TikTok/whatever you old people

That’s your gen buddy. Gen-x is Usenet, IRC, not this enshitified advertising-rich garbage that millennials and gen-z got easily baited into. There are now public universities that depend on Facebook for communication. Students w/out FB accts are excluded from that content, but it’s only a problem for gen-Xers returning to uni for an extra degree because /all/ gen-z is on FB anyway. Not a single student among the young pushes back against it. It’s sad to see.

FOSS is reaching new heights

New heights in easy-to-use dumbed down UIs and a stupid amount of resources are going toward phone platforms that are vulnerable & obsolescent by design. At the same time, there has been a steep decline in terminal apps for proper platforms. The only terminal app for Lemmy is broken. Yet there are many phone apps for Lemmy. Gen-z has suckered for the smartphone hysteria.

gopher/gemini

Gopher is before your time. Your gen was not wise enough to adopt Gemini, which is why we are still chained to an enshitified web.

There are plenty of people out there reasoning about design and software dev better than ever before

Nonsense. They go straight to code. No design. Managers actually block devs from doing model work now.

picking up Python on the way.

Yikes. Shit language that gives meaning to whitespace. At the same time, gen-z lost sight of the single most important language, Ada, which was “too complex” for brains conditioned on easy GUIs and shiny buttons. So you needed a dumbed down and watered down replacement: rust. This is the same reason LaTeX is a dying art. Gen-z wants the easiest path: WYSIWYG.

On top of all that we got self-hosted and homelabbing and actual politicization of FOSS and open willingness to push back against corpos

Bullshit. You bent over to lick Microsoft’s boots. Gen-z dances for MS and Google. Most unis lost the competency to self-host email. They outsource to Google and MS now. Gen-z lacks the discipline to reject MS and Google mail servers, which blocks homelabs on the basis of IP reputation. Pushovers have been bred on such a large scale that there isn’t enough pushback to take back the self-serving power gen-x had w/home servers. Gen-X unis were self-sufficient w/out dependency. Campuses were not dependant on tech giants like they are now. It’s sad to see the competency drain away as schools set a poor example of capability and self-sufficiency.

Universities are not leaders anymore. They used to teach gen-X what industry was doing wrong so students could make it better. Now modern day universities are followers… they look at what industry is doing, and factory-train students to accommodate.

On a recent visit to a college of science and engineering (~5 or so years ago), every student had a laptop running Windows or iOS. Not a single student running linux or the like. Also not a single UNIX or linux lab was in the school. There was strong resistance to LaTeX and text editors. These future science/tech students clung to Google Docs for writing scientific papers. It was sad to see.

You’ve got your Xs and Zs confused.

boomers: assembly, c, vax vms
gen-X: text terminals, emacs, RMS’ principles, proper high level langs, design first then code, OOD/OOP, UML
millenials: GUIs only, javascript, IDEs, facebook addiction
gen-Z: GUIs only, FB addiction, snapchat, programming by asking chatGPT to write a program, programming by drag-and-drop.

I was born in the US to a family who’s been here for generations. … I understand English.

You are free to make the claim but the mere claim doesn’t do much for you when you’ve demonstrated the contrary.

I have three years in debate.

I’m not easily convinced that someone w/3 yrs in formal debate would improperly identify an ad homenem, build a strawman and then try to double down on it when called out.

You do not get to tell someone else what their position is. That’s their job (exclusively so). It’s broken logic and it’s inherently indefensible. At best, you can try to excuse your error as an honest mistake by explaining what exactly triggered your misunderstanding (you did not quote). So you’ve failed on that too. The blind vague claim of inconsistency is useless here. It’s a futile attempt because even if you can find an inconsistency, it’s still a strawman in the end.

Exceptionally, someone w/3 yrs in formal debate might falsely restate my stance if attempting intellectual dishonesty – a deliberate use of broken logic on the gamble that others won’t spot the strawman.

You’ve been explicitly told in plain English (and re-told) that Lemmy is not enshitified. If you still cannot absorb that at this point, plz fuck off. You seem to have little hope of grasping how the Lemmy bugs support the thesis that enshitification alters perceptions of bugs.

I have spent years developing data interface tools for customers and working with user feedback.

And? This seems like an incomplete argument. Do users accept software that disregards user instructions? Do users accept software that misleads or misinforms them about execution success, such as message delivery? Do you regard s/w that disregards user instructions or s/w that misinforms users as having a defect?

Saying I must not understand because I don’t understand English is a prime example of an Ad Hominem. You commented on me instead of what I’m saying.

Speculation about not having English as a 1st language is NOT an ad hominem. People are not inferior for having a non-English mother tongue and it’s despicable that you would take this position. It displays a superiority complex.

My statement “To be clear, Lemmy is not enshitified” was included in my original post to mitigate the potential for those who legitimately lack the ability to pick up on nuances of the points. Your failure to grasp how the Lemmy bugs relate to the thesis suggest a comprehension impairment, most particularly after it has been explained and re-explained to you.

I also understand fully that the rest of your post reads like you disagree with your own statement.

You might try making this “understanding” coherent and comprehensible with supporting direct quotes.

Your post effectively reads like this:

① The effects of enshitification are becoming apparent. ② Here’s issues I have with Lemmy. ③ I think all bad software these days is the result of enshitification ④ and thus the term should apply to modern software issues. ⑤ This means Lemmy is enshitified by transitive property. ⑥ Enshitification is modifying what we accept as the norm.

(enumerations added)

Thanks for writing that. It exposes your comprehension malfunction.

① correct
② correct (Lemmy has issues but you don’t understand how the Lemmy issues relate to the thesis)
③ brain malfunction - I neither said nor implied that bullshit. I /would/ say that some s/w and a more significant portion of service is enshitified (but “result” is also the wrong word).
④ brain malfunction and crux of your failure to understand the role of Lemmy defects in the hypothesis, which have no relationship to enshitification. The perceptions of people exposed to rampant enshitification as they judge bugs is what you have missed.
⑤ brain malfunction, sequitur from brain malfunction ④
⑥ correct enough - but important to realise that having bugs is normal. My hypothesis more accurately stated: Enshitification is modifying what we consider a defect.

In fact, I’d argue that if you haven’t paid a cent for the software someone wrote, or the service you’re using - which is almost certainly your case with Lemmy - and you haven’t contributed to the project, you kind of lose your right to complain this loudly about it. Don’t you think?

Testing and reporting bugs is contributing. Full stop. Absolutely asinine to frame bug reporting as a privilege exclusive to those who spend money on a project. It’s to advocate for bug suppression and reduced quality. Bug reporting is an important part of the QA process and it’s foolish to limit that in any way.

The underlying deficeit here is the mentality that a bug report is somehow someone demanding a personal service. A bug report & potential fix is not for the reporter. It’s for the community. Bug reports are community reports, for and by the community. If you fix a reported bug, the person who originally reported it often worked around the problem and moved on by the time the fix is released. The fix is for future users.

And if they can’t code, there are other ways to contribute to a project. You can do testing, report bugs…

LOL, exactly.

It’s not creepy and it’s not cavalier,

It is creepy to tell foss contributors what to do. It’s bizarre that in 40 yrs of FOSS you have not learned that each person decides for themself how to contribute and to what extent. You should read the Debian project guides… you don’t impose or push work on people. It’s a core principle.

So I’m telling you again: if you see a bug that should be fixed, clone the repo and get coding.

And I’m telling you, fuck off. I am up to my neck in FOSS projects in languages I am productive in. And you’re telling me to push aside my productive work, learn some shitty language that I find annoying and blow time getting familiar with a codebase I’ve never looked at. All at risk of creating a patch that NO ONE WANTS. What shitty misguided manager you have appointed yourself to. You’re fired. Go mismanage someone else.

Or you can report the bug.

Read the links. The bug has been reported. Don’t like where it was reported? Read the sidebar.

If you see ambiguity in this direct quote, I cannot see how you can simultaneously be fluent in English:

To be clear, Lemmy is not enshitified

How could I have written that more clearly?

Sorry to say it’s not an ad hominem. Not everyone has English as a first language and when your display of lacking comprehension manifests it’s not an insult to have (or be regarded as having) a different 1st language.

Oh I read it. You state Lemmy isn’t enshitified, but then spend hundreds of words trying to relate issues with Lemmy to enshitification.

Admit it. English is not your mother tongue. Reading it and comprehension thereof are two different things. Yet you still struggle with comprehension after being explicitly told there is no language or cause correlating Lemmy with an enshitified product.

if you want to make it better, you’re welcome to contribute to the project. That’s the beauty of open-source 😉

I’ve noticed a recent phenomenon of (youth?) advocating for coding without design, implementing without discussion, to such a cavalier extent that they would interrupt a discussion about design and try to order people to go off and build it. It’s particularly bizarre in the context of bugs because if someone creates a patch without discussion, they are taking a rather foolish risk of wasting their time and having the patch refused. Then what? Rage fork? Over a simple patch?

As you can see, the bug is “not a bug” as people see it. So the patch would have had risky acceptance.

There is also a problem in the assumption that the tester has the skills to fix the bug they report. It’s quite bizarre that people assume that someone who can find bugs must be able to code in the language of the software under test.

You didn’t read what you’re replying to. The post explicitly stated Lemmy is not an instance of enshitification. The user reaction to Lemmy bugs demonstrates how enshitification has conditioned people. The bugs are simply bugs.

I don’t roll with Cory Docterow’s coining of the term. It was a good start but I see the term much more useful in broader application.

Sounds like Paypal, who is “not a bank”, but who operates on the basis that you must link a bank or interact with a bank to do transactions. But you say unbanked people can use it? How do you get cash loaded onto it?

I suppose it’s still far from being something I could find useable because apps that reject rooted phones would be closed-source (read: untrustworthy; misplaced control).

Wow, wtf! I would not expect that degree of mass surveillance to be economically viable. And so overtly stark in the face of the GDPR. In principle, we should be able to make a GDPR access request to the central bank to ask them where we shop with cash and which ATMs we used.

I don’t get why “QR” is described as a “payment option”. It’s still a bank account transaction in the end which is exclusively for banked people. And worse, it excludes people without recent smartphones and the Google Playstore account needed to get the closed-source app that violates our software freedom.

I have a hard time giving a shit about the novelty of not carrying a plastic card in the big scheme of things, when forced-banking is being oppressively shoved in our faces and privacy is toast, while also being vulnerable to systemic denial of service in the event of cyberattacks as acts of war. While violating our human rights (banks treat different people differently based on where they come from).

Europeans are fucked as far as privacy goes. The GDPR is unenforced. But even if were enforced, the GDPR’s data minimisation (article 5) rule only obligates data controllers to consider options that are available.

We know from all the cashless bars in Amsterdam how naive and flippant consumers are about privacy. Creating a digital footprint of alcohol consumption is one of the most foolish things consumers can do, particularly in light of that Scandinavian guy who was denied a mortgage on the basis of his drinking habits, which were known to the bank by his purchase history.

Privacy aside, there is a human rights issue because banks treat different demographics of people differently. It’s disturbing how the human rights problem is so overlooked.

In any case, Albania cannot join the EU while being cashless unless Albania keeps their own currency.

Theoretically AI could reduce delays in approvals because a machine can approve someone for cover faster than a human. But what happens with the denied people? The article does not seem to mention whether refusals still have an appeal option which would then guarantee human intervention (one presumes).

In principle, more humans should be freed up to work on appeals if AI is used for the initial decision. But knowing the Trump regime, those freed up people will have a job security problem.

In Europe, the GDPR would theoretically¹ protect people from this. Automated decision making is generally banned but has exceptions. But even when automated decision making is legal, there is a legal obligation to have the possibility of human intervention.

Some US states have their own dilluted GDPR variant, but I think none of them give a shit about automated decision making.

¹ I say “theoretically” because GDPR enforcement is a disaster.

Of course when you fail to pull the lever, the lever is guaranteed to fail.

It fails not for the reason you claim, but in situations where consumers fail to do their job. These perverse incentives you speak of come from the consumer, should the consumer fail to boycott. Do your job, pull the lever, and stop playing the fool.

It’s of course a shitty take to say don’t vote, without even having an alternative action non-voters can do that is more effective yet mutually exclusive to voting with their feet.