I wouldn’t call it lazy to not want to host your own forums. Moderation, much as the average internet user loves to lambast it, is not an easy task at all. And that’s not even giving any consideration to the hosting costs themselves; that’s both money and time that many FOSS projects can’t afford.

I’ll agree that Discord is shit for a variety of reasons, but the solution is for something better than Discord to appear,^[1] not to ask FOSS projects to do even more free work.

This isn’t what enshittification is, and I can’t imagine any expanded definition that would include this either. Enshittification is when a company deliberately worsens a product for profit. FOSS projects don’t have companies,^[1] nor do they have profit. Frankly, even if they did, the intents and methods inherent to the pattern of enshittifcation aren’t present here. Unless you’re talking about Discord itself, but that’s tangential to OP’s main point.

What these projects are doing is following the path of least resistance, which happens to go toward a walled garden at present. If there’s a word for that, I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t enshittification.

It’s worth clarifying that when I say “as good as human art,” I am not speaking to a purely material perspective. Broadly speaking, AI bros don’t care for that human context, so to them those theoretically-surpassable errors are all that’s left to solve for. In there lies the idiocy.

At any rate though, I agree, and I appreciate the thoughtful comment!

The title and much of the way this is written suggests contempt on the part of the author for people who hate AI. Which leaves me wondering what this post is doing here, on a site that has a lot of people who hate AI? If I’m supposed to think it’s funny – or for that matter, meaningful – I don’t. This is a cheap gotcha used periodically by pro-AI types, who then pretend that GenAI output is somehow as good as human art just because people can’t instinctively recognize it on sight.

AI has mostly been a financial boon for the country, buoying the stock market and driving growth.

Gosh, speak for the billionaires, why don’t you? My finances, and the finances of everyone I know, have most certainly not seen any improvement. If anything, it’s getting actively worse, in ways that this very article acknowledges. All for a technology none of us want. And yet the writer still feels the need to pretend things are good because the S&P 500’s doing well, as if that means shit fuck all for the rest of us. Go figure that as usual “the economy is doing great” is shorthand for “wealth inequality is going up.”

I’m sick and tired of hearing this misleading concept, so I’m going to vent for a second: Most people do not have large stock market investments! They are too busy paying rent! What’s good for the rich isn’t what’s good for me, and I do not fucking care about the goddamn NASDAQ!

ETA: oh by the way if Steve Bannon says he agrees with something good, maybe consider not believing him

There are no doubt countless programs to scan QR codes on a desktop computer, and I know similar exists for phones. A camera is not needed.

At the same time though, that begs the question of what, exactly, is going to prevent an AI from doing the same goddamn thing? So it’s still shit.