this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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I think it's specifically about copying text from PDFs, which seems to have gotten harder and harder as time went on
I have not found it to be a challenge. There are so many FOSS PDF readers that also do OCR.
That's what they are saying too (although Apple's, not FOSS), as directly copying text is getting obscure, to the point where OCR makes it easier than trying to directly copy text
Right, so you use a PDF reader with OCR. I just don't see how that is enshittification of the PDF format.
There still is not a better option I can think of than PDF for many applications, and I also rarely have a problem copying text from a PDF unless you're talking something like a scan of an old book.
He’s not talking about bad ocr or pdfs being bad in principle, he’s talking about all the drm bullshit in pdfs now that prevent working with them simply as they used to work back in the day. Things like disabling highlighting and copy paste and breaking compatibility with different pdf renderers.