It’s the ultimate short term profit strategy squeeze the user experience, cash out on data licensing deals with AI companies, and act surprised when people stop showing up.

Good. Hopefully reddit will get worse and drive more people to Lemmy.

While Reddit is getting shittier by the minute, just an FYI: you can still search within a sub even if the sub tag is missing from the search bar. You need to type "subreddit:name-of-sub your-keywords", e.g. "subreddit:funny cute dog". I still use Reddit, because however shitty, there's a lot of good info on it that I can't find anywhere else (niche stuff or smaller communities). I do use a 3rd party Android client most of the times, though.

The site should be studied as a textbook example of enshitification

Exactly. Also the reason why they we're pushing so hard to switch to new UI is that the design of the old one made it much harder to enshitify[1].

BTW: I like Lemmy and all, but I wish Usenet could become popular again. I feel like Reddit contributed somewhat to its demise to became that replacement of it.

[1] I mean in the sense to milk profit at the cost of degrading user experience, not to just to make it bad for the sake of making it bad. You can always make things worse.

textbook example of enshitification

Textbook example of capitalism

People need to stop fucking acting like enshitification is a separate thing just because it has a catchy name.

Every example of "enahitification" is the normal and inevitable result of our economic system.

It is not some weird fringe aspect we can stop, it is what always happen with unregulated capitalism.

And the reason this is important enough to keep attempting to explain to people who blindly use buzzwords:

We need everyone to understand capitalism isn't going to work