March 26 (Reuters) - OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads pilot in the United States has crossed the $100 million annualized revenue mark within six weeks of launch, a company spokesperson said on Thursday, pointing to robust early demand for the AI startup’s nascent advertising business.
I was annoyed enough to write all of this up. I used to go regularly, and the rewards program was genuinely a good deal, and made it worth going to Starbucks. Now, even if I set aside all of the horrible things they’re doing, I wanted to show just what an absolute shit program this is, and why there is absolutely no use in trying to “gain starbucks status”.
Most grocery stores in my country have established an App (or card) you’re supposed to use and it’s slowly but surely going down the route of enshitification.
A line from Ethan Mollick’s most recent newsletter (“Claude Code and What Comes Next”) caught my eye. Mollick tries out Claude Code and sees a step-change in AI capabilities:
In a third world country that doesn’t care much about individuals torrenting. All 4 ISP we have block Torrent sites but that is easily solved be changing DNS. However, the problem is that we have qouta in here. One gigabyte (home dsl) costs 1.5 pounds, 1 gigabyte on mobile data costs 50 pounds = 1$.
You can see the different bundles that two famous ISPs provide which is basically the same in links below:
https://eshop.vodafone.com.eg/en/internetServices/dsl/dsl-bundles
As you have probably seen, the new Legion Space update is mostly ads on the home screen. The only way to avoid this is by turning off your WiFi before opening Legion Space and turning off “Automatically Update Resources”.
There was a time period in recent internet history — call it the era of Big Data, or the platform era — when the large digital platforms (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix) focused on optimization. The platforms had an immutable comparative advantage over their potential competitors. They had more data, more user engagement. They leaned on all that data and activity to refine and improve their products.
Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? The author and activist behind the term ‘enshittification’ explains what’s gone wrong with the internet – and what we can do about it
ChatGPT head Nick Turley said he’s “humble enough not to rule it out categorically,” but hedged that OpenAI would need to “be very thoughtful and tasteful” about how ads could be integrated into ChatGPT.
Remember the "I want a white one" video? That's the first video I clearly remember having a text-to-speech voice-over. It was really bad TTS, and it was awesome. Lately, though, I find myself wishing video hosting services like Youtube and Peertube (to a lesser degree) had a filter so that I could filter out any videos with TTS voice overs. Does this bother anyone else?
I recently attended the Teardown 2025 conference in Portland, OR where Cory spoke about enshittification among related topics. A documentary film crew were present, filming some of the talks, so there should be a documentary forthcoming at some point about his perspective on the topic.
Takeaways
- We’re introducing channel subscriptions, promoted channels and ads in Status in the WhatsApp Updates tab to help you find channels and products you’re interested in.
- The growing popularity of the Updates tab makes this the right place for these experiences, in a way that doesn’t interrupt your chats.
- Nothing changes about people’s personal chats, which remain end-to-end encrypted and are not used for ads.
A few days ago I sent a GDPR request to some company to delete my personal data. They said to install their app and send a ticket from the app.
The email was sent from the email address to which the account is registered.
Is this even legal?
Nothing quite says “high-performance muscle car” like a popup ad for a Mopar Extended Warranty covering your whole center console. That’s right, Dodge Charger owners are now experiencing an exciting new feature: pop-up ads that appear every time the vehicle stops at a light. This garbage feature was spotted in the wild, take a look at how it looks.
So my internet went out on Friday at 6am. Trying to navigate the Verizon website and app has been a pure hellscape, with repeated requests to revalidate using a PIN which is denied arbitrarally, causing call to drop. If you do manage to get a warm body, they put you on hold or transfer the call will inevitably drops causing one to start the whole process again. Finally, they said it was a router problem, which was only 6 months old and no longer compatible with their service. Finally got bounced back to Sales at 5PM, who ordered a new router for me and waived the recurring fee (either $400 for a new router or $18/month for something paid for many times over). Anyway, I went to pick up said new router at the location indicated only to find that they don't stock equipment and I have to drive another 4 miles to a nondescript store in a strip mall. I finally get home and try to self-install which bombs out, necessitating another aventure into their website/app hellscape. About 18 hours after the initial outage, I'm back in service. I've never run into a company who is so blantant in their desire to piss off their customers. If only there were viable alternatives in my area.
I'm not going to deal with this, unsubscribing. I recommend everyone else to do the same, we can't let them get away with this. You can instead donate to an actually good news source, such as ProPublica. And nyt has a bunch of controversies, listed here. I can't support this with a clear conscience.
I usually spend some time on OfferUp looking at things I might be interested in buying used because why not. I am interested in seeing if I can get some Milwaukee Packout cases slightly used for a deal.
Bluesky has seen massive growth in the weeks following the US election. As of Tuesday, there are 24 million users on the social media platform. With great engagement comes great responsibility, which means Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has to do a lot to keep her promise to not “enshittify” the platform with ads while still funding its explosive growth.
Well that didn't take long. Looks like they're going the discord route and locking uploads + basic customization behind a subscription. You know, because we don't already have enough of those.
Do you think Lemmy and other parts of the fediverse will eventually enshittify? I think this would be an interesting discussion to have. There currently is not financial incentive like the ones that have led centralized platforms to enshittify. But there might be in the future. Does decentralization protect against that tendency in some way?
During the company’s Connect event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta AI can now process image inputs, allowing it to answer questions about photos and edit them. Want to know what kind of flower you took a picture of or how to make a multi-colored cake? Just ask Meta AI. See a picture of a goat on your Instagram feed and want to repost it as a picture of a goat on a surfboard? Just ask Meta AI. Not sure what to say about the goat on a surfboard? Don’t worry, Meta AI will also suggest captions for your stories on Facebook and Instagram.
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