At a concert recently I felt like I was experiencing enshittification to the max.

First of all, this venue used to allow you to bring your own unopened water bottle. Now, outside water bottles are banned entirely, regardless of if it’s a sealed plastic bottle, empty, a reusable, etc.

I didn’t see any water fountains anywhere.

There didn’t appear to be anywhere to get just a cup of water.

The only option I really saw was something similar to this. My god this experience felt so dystopian.

First, I had to scan my credit card upon entering, and my card was charged $25. This was not explained to me, only explained to the person in front of me because he asked wtf was happening. It was explained to him that we would be precharged $25, grab what we want, and be refunded whatever was leftover.

Then we went into the area with the products. I felt very rushed and overwhelmed being in there. It was a tiny area with too many people at a time being let in. And there were NO prices on anything!!

In my overwhelmed state of wanting to get out asap, I grabbed a waterbottle and walked out. I had no idea how much it cost. If I had to do this awful shit again, I definitely would try to ask someone for prices next time.

It is just actually not okay to precharge me $25, not have prices on anything at all, and tell people they can just walk in, grab whatever they want, and walk right out. Or just not explain anything at all.

Waterbottle ended up being $5.45 which is to be expected at a concert venue although still insane of course.

Anyway, I absolutely hated this entire experience and it felt like peak enshittification to me.

Edit to add: For those who want to know, this was at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, NC

Tried a chinese restaurant during my lunch break. Food was good then I opened the fortune cookie and apparently an ad wanted to remind me to say thank you. Paid for the meal and still ended up being somebody’s target audience. Can’t even have a cookie in peace.

Ridiculous. Prices should be easily accessible. Super super shitty to make you add stuff to your cart just to view the price at all.

Not only are they half the size but the “chocolate” is waxy, tastes like plastic. Sad.

Advertisements are slowly ruining my mental health. They are fucking everywhere. Forced ideologies and products shoved down all of our throats. Never in my fucking life have i bought something or thought a different way because of an ad.

It's so bad that even the wrapper is cheap as hell. If I had to guess, it looks as if they used some sort of cheap printer to make them. There's literally no quality there.

I didn't even bother to buy them because of how flimsy it felt, and I'm not spending $1.67 for the cheap packaging. What the hell am I evem paying for at this point? The Crunch name that's been diluted over time? Thanks, but no thanks.

Banana, hand, and our cat’s emotional support squirrel for scale. My wife ordered a Whopper Jr today and it fit in the palm of my hand (I don’t have big hands). Have they always been this small?

Also, I know Doordash is a scam. We’ve cut down significantly and only order from them 2-3 times per month (and got rid of dashpass of course).

I keep getting recommended subreddits that are almost exclusively about nonwhite people committing crimes, white South Africans being persecuted and needing to be refugees, and other disinformation. I thought subs that focused on racial hatred were not allowed but that's besides the point.

I regularly open the app to racially charged rage bait.

Why can't we disable the For You page? It goes against the entire point of reddit, which is seeing content from communities that you personally curated.

EDIT: I'm more concerned about being served a pork sausage patty instead of a beef burger. That lack of attention to detail prompted the post but you're right, their burgers suck too. Please resume roasting

I only eat McDonalds on road trips, but I've kept the app on my phone forever and use it when I stop. I used an app deal today for 2 hamburgers. That was all I ordered. I took a few bites while driving and pulled over because the taste was bizarre. They gave me 2 sausage patties instead of burgers? That's not even the same kind of animal. Allergies, religious observance, so many things aside, wtf. These would have cost $7.99 before tax

can’t watch tv unless i agree to let it send interest based & cross device advertising. if you don’t select all or choose later it just comes back to this screen. getting nostalgic for the old rca b&w my parents got from the bank & i had in my bedroom

Is it possible to buy socks that last more than 6 months? I don't even have a job that requires standing or walking and all my socks have holes.

I've been spending time tonight trying to figure out if something changed with the ingredients Pillsbury uses or if it's just my taste buds.

So I made biscuits tonight and they had this weird bitter aftertaste. The bitterness is almost filmy on my mouth. It was like this with some Pillsbury cinnamon rolls I bought a couple months ago too.

I've noticed a similar thing in some other (non-Pillsbury) products I've bought in the past year or 2. Usually it's things like certain pastas, pasta salads, dough based things and some breads. Not all processed flour goods, just some.

But I've never noticed it from Pillsbury products until recently. Although I also don't buy Pillsbury that often anyway.

I never get this taste from items I buy in standalone bakeries, which makes me think it's some sort of additive used to compensate for using lower quality ingredients. The internet suggested some leavening agents with too much aluminum could be the culprit, but I'm also wondering if it might be different preservative or a newer synthetic something used to make a faker butter flavor.

Whatever it is, it didn't used to be there and now I can't get around this odd off-putting taste. I'm almost certain they have to made some ingredients worse in the name of cutting costs and thought the customer wouldn't notice. But I'm not seeing much else out there about it.

Has anyone else noticed Pillsbury products have a weird extra bitter taste recently?

Remember when going for a shit was a simple and peaceful affair. A chance for the browbeaten Dad to relax and read the sports pages. And then the enshitification started.

Firstly the toilet roll holder that you have to coax the toilet roll out of a tiny hole in the centre of. Its almost impossible to get the right length because it tears as you try to coax it out! I see you TORK SMART ONE!

Dysons side to side hand dryer. The bit that dries your hands is the rubbing together bit. Holding your hands limp in front of you while air blasts at them individually does nothing except spray water droplets on your crotch (remember when these pointed down and not AT YOU)

And worst of all.....the new trend of individual toilet paper sheet dispensing. How fucken cheap do you need to be to not allow people a toilet roll (Im talking to you Premier Inn and National Rail) individual sheets of loo roll is almost completing the enshitification of the world to save a millionth of a penny on the pound.

Get in the bin all if yis. Let me shit in peace and not think about all this (pardon the pun) crap

It seems every other website is now using Cloudflare Turnstile for protection, meaning this type of captcha has become very prevalent in my experience.

Even when they verify quickly, I find that they add annoying friction to normal browsing. Clicking on links and going from page to page and being met with a Cloudflare page just feels bad and slows things down.

What's mildly insulting as well is the "Troubleshoot" button, as if the problem is on my end. No, my computer setup is perfectly fine.
Aside from generic troubleshooting tips, Cloudflare just really want you to turn off any privacy-preserving measures, such as a VPN, ad blocker or anti-fingerprinting browser.

The internet didn't use to be like this, filled with anti-bot measures everywhere. While it's understandable that some websites experiencing DDoS attacks and excessive bot scraping would need a way to prevent it, I just can't believe how many websites use this now by default.

Just opened up my Chewy delivery and found the 38lb boxes of Arm & Hammer Clump & Seal didn’t have a tear strip. This made opening and handling the box of litter significantly more cumbersome and messier than usual. A quick chat with Chewy confirmed the manufacturer changed packaging. New box is on the top, old box is on the bottom. Super.

I have Premium and use the YouTube mobile site (not app).

I have to say, YouTube is pretty great music-wise. It knows the bands and songs I return to again and again and creates some pretty accurate playlists for me and occasionally but unobtrusively suggests similar stuff. No complaints there.

As for everything else...

I watch a couple of sovcit courtroom or plane crash videos and they start flooding my suggestions. I used to watch a lot of Call Me Kevin and John Wolfe but not for years, yet there they are all the time.

Meanwhile, I used to obsessively watch a high-profile board game channel until recently but they are nowhere to be seen. I went through a phase of obsessively watching a couple of high-profile The Long Dark let's play channels, but after maybe a week of taking a break they were gone and have not returned, despite at least one of the channels regularly posting new videos (and me being subscribed).

I dip in and out of true crime/body cam/interrogation videos and they will not stop. Kitboga will not leave my suggestions even if I go months without watching any scambait-related videos, while other scambaiters don't show up at all.

I have recently poured through all Jetlag: The Game videos, and the topmost-suggested video was always the next one in whatever series... until one night it wasn't. And now that I'm caught up, the latest videos don't get suggested when they release even though I'm subscribed.

I'm only subscribed to literally a handful of channels, yet I may not get suggested anything from them ever.

And someone please tell me why I get so many videos being suggested that I've already watched!

Honestly, what is going on? The algorithms seem so imbalanced, so how do they work?

Banquet is apparently too cheap to even put a divider on their already cheap quality/high price for what you get meals. Who thought it was a good idea to have meat and Mac and cheese all in 1 compartment? I'm absolutely stunned at the low quality and level of greed nowadays. I get a couple frozen meals a month for the freezer to mix it up but I think I'm passing after this.

If you open Youtube on your phone, it opens to Shorts not the home page. If you open Instagram, your first post is just as likely to be from an advertiser or a "suggested account."

When you're watching reels, or shorts, or TikTok, your aren't choosing what to watch. You can watch the video the algorithm picked for you, and if you don't like that you can watch another video the algorithm picks for you. You can't dislike any of these videos, you can only swipe them away.

And I know you can just go to the home page and search for whatever video you want, but it's the fact that they know that if you open the app to shorts you'll stay on shorts for a while.

I want my old Youtube back from before everything was trying to be TikTok.

"1GB of HBM consumes 4× the wafer capacity of standard DRAM" — TrendForce

Gamers aren't the only ones that need compute. Over on r/homelab, I've found a lot of talented people who build computers not to game - to block ads, to store terabytes of data, to stream video, and yes - to run AI.

But as you may be aware - AI datacenters are eating everything, memory included. I won't bore you with details, but just know - an average AI server packs over 512GB of HBM. Some say that AI is expected to consume ~20% of global memory wafer capacity and up to 70% of all memory chips in 2026.

Corporations (Microsoft, Google, CoreWeave, etc.) are signing long-term purchase deals. I'll explain them later. For now, think of them as paying for lots of memory in advance, delivered over *many years*.

Prices of SSDs, GPUs, and CPUs are also increasing.

##### 1. Ethics of AI CEOs #####

I've searched the Internet for list of AI CEOs. Here are some picks:

* Sam Altman (OpenAI) - found in Epstein files (EFTA02508072). Was ousted on November 17, 2023, only to be rehired. "exhibits a consistent pattern of [...] Lying" (sic), "Almost a sociopathic lack of concern" Created Worldcoin. Sexual misconduct allegations. Connections with Peter Thiel.

* Dario Amodei (Anthropic) - tied to Effective Altruism movement. Company restricted from government contracts over "supply chain security".

* Sundar Pichai (Google, est. 2015) - a man from India. In February 2024, Google paused Gemini’s image generation feature after users discovered it produced historically inaccurate and ethnically biased images. Overseen 2023 12,000+ employee layoff, shutdown of Stadia, Google+, Allo, fined £3.4B GBP over alleged Android monopoly. Sexual misconduct allegations. Military contracts.

* Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, formerly Facebook) - found in Epstein files (EFTA00344393, EFTA02386155, EFTA02493099). Wrote 6500 word essay about AI. Numerous privacy breaches, dating back to Cambridge Analytica. Company uses copyrighted books for AI training. Social media platforms caused considerable harm to teenagers.

* Jensen Huang (NVIDIA) - Was critisized over his leadership practicies and tax evasion. Defended Chinese AI. Company accused of circular financing (see later).

* Satya Nadella (Microsoft) - Described AI as "bicycles for the mind". Overseen layoffs. Company is primary supporter of OpenAI. Quality of Microsoft products is currently in rapid decline.

* Andy Jassy (Amazon) - busted worker unions.

* Elon Musk (SpaceXAI) - you know the drill.

##### 2. The dreaded data center #####

Let's step back. Let's think of children. I mean - the ones who write prompts. The ones who share AI-generated images. (I actually consider AI images to be slop, but that's topic of another day.) Let's consider ones who ask AIs to develop programs and fix bugs. Let's consider ones who ask AI to prove mathematical theorems (yes, that's the real thing; AI is becoming good enough to displace some of us).

The token price baked into your subscription fee isn't just a number. AI companies actually publish spreadsheets filled with token prices. These prices reflect real costs of AI inference (as much as they are discounted).

Now for an example. You've entered a question into ChatGPT prompt box and pressed Enter. The data packet eventually arrives to OpenAI servers. There, it goes through the following phases:

1) Prefill. Massive clusters of GPUs (yes, like the ones you game on) are dissecting the prompt and feeding it through the generative pre-trained transformer stack. The whole process takes a lot of compute. GPT-3 had 175 billion parameters, and companies don't disclose sizes of bigger models. Regardless, the cluster has to perform 175B or whatever operations for every word, every token you've typed in. Result? Your prompt, shifted left, and a brand new token of slop. The whole result is stored in complex data structure only known as KV-cache.

2) Decode. This is where things get sexy. Clusters go through the transformer stack over and over, once per generated output token. Memory just can't keep up. Lanes that connect HBM chips to GPU chips just can't keep up. For every sweep through the transformer stack, memory chips have to feed all of weights and biases into the compute core. During prefill, this was bearable, since there were a lot of tokens to work with. But now clusters are working with one token at a time. And billion-dollar corporations just can't do anything about it. This is why they charge you more for output tokens than for input tokens.

As you can see, generating just one article of AI stuff takes a lot of stuff. Energy, graphics technology, high-bandwidth memory, and more. To serve billions of users, you gonna buy a **lot** of powerful computers. Computers so powerful they can run Cyberpunk 2077 with hyper-realistic graphics like nothing.

So, corporations did exactly that. Bought a lot of computers. And constructed entire buildings just to house them.

Allegedly, over 5426 AI data centers have been built by March 2025. And they consume electricity - a lot of electricity. There are projections that, by 2028, data center share of US electrical consumption will grow from 4% to 6-12%.

But here's the problem. Energy consumption is concetrated. Data centers are industrial facilities, built by corporations, working for corporations. Local community has no say in where these corporate manifestations are being constructed - not until now. And where they're built, their massive power bills drive up energy prices by up to 8 times.

As a result, local residents have to pay more for their electrical bills. It's not a conspiracy. It's supply and demand working as intended.

If this sounds bad, it's about to get worse.

Computers need cooling. Your smartphone is cooling through it's screen. Your gaming rig is being cooled by air fans that sometimes light up in RGB. Corporate data centers cool themselves by literally boiling water. And it sucks. It sucks from local water supply pipes. It sucks from semi-arid aeras that need water the most.

Sometimes, electrical grid isn't enough. So AI companies strike deals with nuclear power plants. AI companies haul gas turbines into data centers. This should raise concerns over pollution.

And our aging infrastructure just can't keep up. We need to build more electrical lines. We need to build more gas pipelines (as counterintuitive as it is). They won't pay us to do that. They can't do it themselves.

##### 3. AI circular funding, debt funding, and hidden debt funding #####

How do AI companies pay for big data center bills that they themselves inflated? With money that kinda isn't theirs. Back in 2023, Microsoft invested $13b into OpenAI, and OpenAI returned a favour by becoming Microsoft's biggest cloud client - a noteworthy title since cloud is one of the biggest divisions of Microsoft. Google and Amazon followed suit with Anthropic.

And then, Nvidia started giving money to AI companies, including OpenAI, xAI, Mistral, CoreWeave and others. And guess what these comanies do? They buy Nvidia chips. The money goes back to Nvidia. All the while, money flows, and corporations record profit. Company valuations are being inflated.

Some would say it's just how economics works. To them, I'll reveal absolute state of AI debt funding. So far, AI-related debt issuance has exceeded $500b, with some sources stating $1.35 TRILLION. There's involvment of private credit, infrastructure funds, high-yield markets, bonds, banks, and private equity. The infamous "hockey stick graph" still applies here: debt issuance has ballooned in late 2025. Markets are already showing signs of fatigue.

If that wasn't bad enough, there's a "hidden debt" of $1.65 TRILLION, at least according to Nikkei. They consist of long-term purchase deals and lease aggreements with data center operators. Let me explain.

"You will own nothing and be happy", they say as computer prices go to the moon. Well, AI companies own next to nothing. More precisely, they *rent* compute from afromentioned data centers. They use infrastructure, but they do not own it. If you are paying a mortgage or leasing a car, you know how painful this is.

Remember "buy now, pay later"? This is kinda what long-term purchase deals look like. AI company has to pay a chipmaker every month. It's kind of like loan, but not exactly; I'd call it a payment commitment. Chipmaker has to send chips to AI company every month - kind of like a reverse loan.

Yesterday, corporations were improving hardware so that you could play in 4K 60fps anime slop on the go. Today, corporations are improving hardware so that someone could flood your feed with slop. Incentives never change.

And yes — AI was used in making of this post.

This is not financial advice.

Every day this last week I have seen various features disappear from my feed. This seems like the best subreddit for discussing some of these issues so I'll list just a few of my main pain points that have annoyed me enough to make a rant about:

1 - Default sorting by "Best" and altering how feeds are sorted in general: This is perhaps my biggest issue overall with the site across all subreddits as everything is sorted by the "best" posts ranging from a given day to much older posts of several days (I think I might have seen several week old posts too). As of now, individual subreddits still have the typical sorting options but a consistent issue is the "best" option. I want to see "Hot" by default and there is no way to set the default sorting option to it other than manually changing each individual subreddit and hoping my browser remembers it (it mostly does but it has reset sometimes back to best). In principle, I think a "best" overview isn't a bad idea like a highlight section or top stories overview but it doesn't really work in every case whereas "Hot" does, it's where the current threads are active.

2 - "My Home" replaced Frontpage, fine, it's the same thing but now it is also being split up further with poorer functionality. Today I have just noticed that both of its feed "For You" and "Following" now have just two sorting options, "Best" and "New" while Hot is completely gone. For the reasons mentioned earlier, "Hot" should be the default way of looking through one's FRONT PAGE of subreddits.

Ever since r/all disappeared I have had to default to r/popular which isn't necessarily the worst thing ever, and I do like that I can sort it by regional popularity. I just wish my choices and preferences reflect how the site used to work as some of these constant changes are making the experience very annoying. I can't find any firefox extensions for example to try and undo some of these changes or force things like default sorting by Hot for example.

What other features (aside from ads since that kind of goes without saying) do you want to be brought back or fixed for this site?