Everything is hard when you don't know how
Quitting is tempting, but keep going
If you follow technology news, you might have heard the term “enshitification.”
It refers to the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products. Platforms (like Google, for instance) that initially provided useful services shift their focus at the expense of user experience.
In Google’s case, they changed their algorithm so that when you type in a query, you get:
Paid ads
An AI-generated answer to your query… which is probably wrong or unhelpful
Links to websites from major corporations that don’t help you
The small websites that existed solely to create helpful how-to’s and targeted listicles are now getting downranked into oblivion, which is bad for them and bad for us.
It’s making it harder to do things ourselves and accomplish our goals. It’s making it harder to sort out good sources from bad ones. It’s all just getting harder.
I found this out in the last week as I desperately tried to share an Outlook mailbox with my staff. This should have been easy. But Googl…