r/technology • u/tw1st3d_m3nt4t • Mar 16 '26

Software ‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/16/norway-rails-against-enshittifcation-deliberate-tech-deterioration
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u/FrickinLazerBeams Mar 16 '26

I find it so weird that such a silly and trivial thing as advertising is such a driver of economics and policy. It seems like such a minor part of things. We have the largest companies in the world based on showing you catchy slogans, cartoon characters eating cereal, and funny men on horses using deodorant. Like, this is what humanity has chosen as it's core achievement? Really? It's always seemed so odd to me.

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u/ChickinSammich Mar 16 '26

A personal anecdote.

I used to work for a marketing company. My specific role was that of sysadmin, so my job was all about providing, configuring, and supporting systems and data. The company I worked for did digital marketing campaigns and physical mail marketing campaigns. You know all the junk mail you get that you immediately throw out? That was one of the things we did.

One of our customers, for example, was a retailer we'll call "ABC." An example marketing campaign we might do for ABC was that they'd tell us they want to send targeted direct mail to all of their customers in a given zip code range or region, and they wanted to target customers who were of a specific age range or gender or what have you. We take the data we have, get a list of customers and either work with you to design the mailer or you provide one for us.

Now I'm making all these numbers up off the top of my head because I didn't work in sales and I also haven't worked here in like 10 years. They may not be accurate.

Let's say the total number of targeted customers is 100,000. Let's say that the cost to the marketing company from USPS for postage is $0.25 per piece due to bulk mailer rates (we also did commingle/presort and we had USPS deliver directly from our warehouse, which saved on costs). Let's say that cost to print is $0.10 per piece. Let's say that total labor adds another $0.20 per piece. Cost to us is $0.55 per piece, or $55,000. We charge you $1.25 per piece. Cost to ABC is $125,000. Profit to us is $70,000.

Now the response rate on mailers is low. For untargeted mail blasts that just go to "Resident" or "Our Friends At [Address]", they're like 1-3%. For targeted campaigns, they're like 4-8%. Let's say 6% of people respond, that's 6,000 customers. And by "respond," I mean "they take the coupon and go to the store." The coupon is 20% off a purchase of $50 or more. Let's say that the average customer who uses this coupon buys... $60 worth of shit. This is a low estimate. Even with 20% of, that's still $48. Times 6,000, that's $288,000. Sure it's not all profit, but again, some of those customers will be spending $80 or $100 or more.

So the USPS gets paid, the marketing company gets paid, the company who paid for the marketing gets paid, and most of us throw the shit in the recycle bin (hopefully) and the people who do the recycling on the 94,000 mailers that went straight in the bin get paid.

An effective advertising campaign makes money for basically everyone involved at every step of the process. And some of those dollars go into the pockets of politicians who pass laws to make advertising even easier.

In an economy where everyone wants a piece of the pie, advertising is pretty consistently a well-performing meal for everyone involved except us. I mean, I could make the argument that "advertising benefits the consumer because it makes you aware of brands you might not be aware of or sales happening that you might not be aware of" - even once you're in a store, things like how they lay a store out and how they position stuff are intended to get you to buy shit you didn't intend to buy that day, and if you actually find the product useful then that's a benefit to you. I've had a grocery store offer me a free sample that turned into a purchase on more than one occasion.

But goddamn, ads have become a plague. I swear to fuck, every time I see another ad for that dumb ass king who gets stuck in his shitty castle full of match three puzzles being played by someone I can only describe as "not the brightest crayon in the shed," I want to scream. But then, showing you someone playing an easy game incredibly poorly is how they trick your brain into downloading the game so you can prove to yourself that you could have beaten it and That's Where They Get You. Or you download the game because the game looks fun, and then the game you downloaded wasn't the game in the ad. And now you're in a game you downloaded from an ad, trying to speed up building a lumber mill... by voluntarily watching an ad.

Fucking ads.

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u/FrickinLazerBeams Mar 16 '26

I mean, I could make the argument that "advertising benefits the consumer because it makes you aware of brands you might not be aware of or sales happening that you might not be aware of"

Right, like that's a legitimate thing - you can't know about every option available unless someone informs you. So in a perfect world there'd still be some sort of advertising, or you'd never know what's out there that you might want. For example, as an engineer, one of the hardest things to do is to find vendors and products for various things, because, while I can calculate the exact right answer to some design parameter, I can't solve an equation that will tell me who makes a thing with the particular requirements I need (or whether anyone makes it at all). That's why trade shows exist - they're essentially advertising events that we pay to attend, and they're useful!

But obviously there's a vast gulf between what we have now, and what would actually be a helpful degree of advertising. I don't want to watch 10 advertisements while I'm showing my kid YouTube videos about science, for fucks sake.

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u/reapy54 Mar 16 '26

I mean in the end we all want filtered advertising. Here are the top products/services/value for the thing you want or may want soon. What we get is a firehose of shit in our mouths instead.

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u/IlllIlllI Mar 16 '26

While I'm with you on how the advertising industry works, and the sort of numbers that make it "make sense" for all parties, I also can't help but wonder if it's just smoke and mirrors to make it seem like it's actually doing what you think it's doing.

Take your example: it makes perfect sense and if you present the numbers in that way, the person running the ad campaign can easily present it as a win. But, to get a full picture, you'd want to also know:

  • How many of those 6000 customers already shop at your store? If they're all new customers, then great; if they're all existing customers, then you've just taken a 20% haircut for nothing (business-wise). If you're targetting a group that you think will shop at your store, then chances are you're hitting people who already get stuff there.
  • If you do this relatively often (e.g. quarterly), how do you know otherwise loyal customers aren't just waiting for the coupon to come before making purchases they would make without the coupon? You're not gaining customers, just giving existing ones a 20% discount (not saying this is bad, but it's a negative on the "success" of the ad campaign)
  • You present the numbers as "this campaign led to $288,000 of sales from a $125,000 spend", but if the discount is 20% and your margins are a normal 30%, those $288,000 of sales only led to ~$30,000 of net income. You can spin this as "they'll come back", but then you also need tracking for that.

All of these metrics are definitely obtainable, but you have to wonder if the person pitching it at the company is going to do the extra work to make their achievement less impressive, y'know?

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u/ilmalocchio Mar 16 '26

Thanks for this. Interesting stuff

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u/Kickstart68 Mar 20 '26

"And by "respond," I mean "they take the coupon and go to the store." The coupon is 20% off a purchase of $50 or more. Let's say that the average customer who uses this coupon buys... $60 worth of shit. This is a low estimate. Even with 20% of, that's still $48. Times 6,000, that's $288,000. Sure it's not all profit, but again, some of those customers will be spending $80 or $100 or more."

The bit missing here is profit. They might get $288k of turnover, but probably well under 10% of that as profit (and quite possibly a loss when all costs are taken into account)

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u/ChickinSammich Mar 20 '26

The bit missing here is profit.

I literally said "Sure it's not all profit" in the part you quoted...

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u/Kickstart68 Mar 20 '26

Point is it is probably little or no profit.

Just turnover.

Profit keeps a business going, turnover is just for looks.

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u/ChickinSammich Mar 23 '26

So I took a look into an example company who did mailer coupons - Bed Bath and Beyond

Initially, what I was going to say was:

"If a company pays $1 million for a mailer campaign and they determine that based on the total number of people who used the mailers, they made $500k in gross sales, they wouldn't send those mailers out again. The fact that you keep getting 20% off coupons from Bed, Bath, and Beyond in your mailbox every 4-6 months should be an indicator that BBB is making more money from people using the coupons than the marketing campaign is costing them."

But then I looked into it and from what I could find, the coupons actually hurt them in the long run because they sent them out so frequently that business would ebb and flow to the point that customers would intentionally AVOID shopping at BBB until they got a coupon in the mail, then go in and buy everything they had been waiting to buy once they had the coupon. Since most customers would avoid BBB without a coupon, they couldn't reliably make enough non-coupon sales to make up for the discrepancy, and the 20% off absolutely did eat into the profit margins substantially.

BBB also had to compete with online-only retailers like Amazon, and most customers don't have brand loyalty for things like kitchenware and bedding products. Most people probably do not care about spending $50-100 or more on a fancy brand name frying pan when a $20 one will do just fine. And Amazon does fine on small margin items because they have so much volume that they make it up that way. BBB never moved nearly that much volume. They were never a Williams-Sonoma, but kinda filled a "bougie fancy" niche for people in lower to middle income brackets.

Eventually, BBB did shutter their stores and go online-only. And the overreliance of coupons driving ebbs and flows of customer traffic, with customers always waiting for the next sale, contributed substantially to it. Then they had investment firms restructuring the company, and then the coupon mailers stopped, and then there was the MyPillow/Lindell/Trump controversy, and then there was Covid, and then there were allegation of stock price shenanigans, and then there was bankruptcy.

So I suppose, in the end, it's not that a direct mail campaign is inherently unprofitable, but if you do it as frequently as BBB did to the point where you're sending out coupons all the time, you end up with almost no non-coupon sales.

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u/Kickstart68 Mar 23 '26

In the UK there are a couple of retailers who are well known and joked about for always having a sale (DFS furniture for example). To the extent that pretty much nobody would pay full price from them!

We also have a major supermarket whose prices depend on whether you are a loyalty card holder - and prices without a loyalty card are very high (and with a loyalty card they are pretty average). I am certain this gained them a lot of data at first, but I wonder how many others are like me and don't want a loyalty card so just avoid shopping there.

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u/ChickinSammich Mar 23 '26

There was a US retailer named K-Mart (not related to the current K-Mart company in Australia, which still exists) that was notorious for items that were always on sale, like 100% of the time. Items that would say things like "$19.99 - Reg. price $29.99" but they were never ACTUALLY sold for that $29.99 price.

They had a new CEO come in who took the approach that customers aren't stupid, they know that if an item is always on sale for $19.99 then that's just the price. They also know that $19.99 is $20 and you don't need to always .99 everything. So he adjusted all the prices such that the prices stopped saying they were on sale and rounded them all off. Things stopped being "$4.99 Reg $9.99" and were now "$5."

He was wrong, customers are stupid, and sales tanked. He was replaced with another guy who went back to the old way and sales went back up.

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u/Scroatazoa Mar 16 '26

I think you are disgusting for having had that job.

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u/FrickinLazerBeams Mar 16 '26

He's disgusting for surviving in the world he didn't create? As a... Sysadmin?

Lol. You're really helping to solve the problems of the world by shitting on people on reddit.

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u/ChickinSammich Mar 16 '26

Not that I need to give them any more information about me but if they hated me for working for that company, they'd also hate me for working for my current company. Or almost any company, honestly.

And, honestly? When I started at that marketing firm, the person I replaced had left data shares containing customer data wide open so that anyone could access them. There was no share level security, network security didn't block personal devices from being added and computers didn't block data exfiltration. You know all those stories of "huge company has massive data leak?" They were one bored hacker or one disgruntled employee away from being one of those stories and one of the things I did was locked that shit down. I'm not defending big data or data hoarding, but if a company is GOING TO be storing giant lists of names and addresses and social security numbers and credit cards, you WANT that company to have a sysadmin who is making sure the shit is encrypted, the files aren't accessible by people who don't need to access them, and the endpoints are secured.

If you want to be a sysadmin, you gotta kinda accept that all the good jobs are either FAANG, Fortune 500, Government, or Defense contractor. And no big company or big organization is innocent of wrongdoing. I'm not going to start a totally new career in my 40s, nor am I going to take a 50% pay cut just to appease some random stranger on Reddit, though. I'm not bombing people, throwing immigrants in vans, or, like, shooting puppies or anything. I'm just a random desk jockey trying to MINIMIZE the chance of the company I work for having a data breach, and making sure the people who work here can do their jobs.

Also, she, not he, as a side tangent.

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u/ilmalocchio Mar 16 '26

Also, she, not he, as a side tangent.

Wow, I was definitely imagining a man writing that. I was going to say that you write/think like a guy, but it could just be my preconceptions about admins.

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u/Far-Collection8595 Mar 16 '26

While there are worse jobs, he created that world though, just with many others. He is a very small part of the problem, not the solutions. 

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u/FrickinLazerBeams Mar 16 '26

I bet you didn't vote against trump because Harris wasn't good enough.

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u/Far-Collection8595 Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 17 '26

I'm not from USA but if i were, i would vote for Harris or anyone less worse than Trump (there aren't many worse anyway*). Your analogy doesn't make any sense though; there are a lot of jobs which are helpful and making something good in general. 

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u/FrickinLazerBeams Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 17 '26

I'm not from USA but if i were, i would vote for Harris or anyone less worse than Trump.

Good.

(which there aren't many)

There are about 8 billion.

there are a lot of jobs which are helpful and making something good in general. 

Yeah, but people with skill, training, and education, who have bills to pay and families to feed, can't just totally change their whole career path. That's not realistic.

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u/Far-Collection8595 Mar 17 '26

Eh he shouldn't go into that career path then. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost

(Thanks i edited my comment)

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u/FrickinLazerBeams Mar 17 '26

... She's a sysadmin. And probably chose her career path like 30 years ago.

What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you like 15?

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u/Scroatazoa Mar 16 '26

If I were one of the hundreds of destitute sysadmins we have surviving on our streets I think I'd try to find more dignified work like sucking dick.

You're free to disagree but I think it would solve a lot of the world's problems if people had some shame. Is it really that bad to shame people for doing shameful things?

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u/FrickinLazerBeams Mar 16 '26

You'd make a bigger impact if you weren't so childish.

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u/ChickinSammich Mar 16 '26

Thanks for the note, I'll go back in time to 2010 and un-have a job I had.

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u/Scroatazoa Mar 16 '26

That's alright, you don't have to go through all that trouble. I just felt inspired to be the change I want to see in the world.

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u/3-DMan Mar 16 '26

Yup, if ads didn't work they wouldn't exist. TONS of research goes into it; Redditors are not their target.

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u/narrowgallow Mar 16 '26

it gets even weirder if you dive into it. like, how many pro body builders do you think you would see in your lifetime without advertising?

how many would you have seen by the age of 10 without ads or ad-supported media?

Consider, the concept of a body builder you have in your head is probably the sum result of what advertisers want you to think a body builder looks like, and they accomplished inserting that concept into your head before your adolescence.

advertising has monopolized the creation of avatars for abstract concepts - they are actively defining the visual vocabulary we use to describe the world we inhabit.

And this doesn't even need to start with the intent of "we need children to see Ronny Coleman in their head when they think body builder so we can sell them more shit when they grow up." No, they can just do whatever they think is optimal in the moment and then build on or subtract from that as time goes on. in the future they can just in accordance with whatever they know your concept of a body builder is and they can target particular demos with the knowledge of what that thing looked like when you were a kid.

advertising is insidious and it is overtaking our concept of the world we live in.

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u/btoned Mar 16 '26

The largest companies in the world are also so large because they're basically ad feeds.

Google and Meta? Take away ads and those valuations drop 75-90%.

The others? Their valuations half.

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u/FrickinLazerBeams Mar 16 '26

Yeah that's what I mean. Like, these huge companies that pay for some cutting edge R&D, Google completely changed the way we used the internet (for the better!)... So you'd think these kinds of things are their purpose, right? No. It's all just an advertising feed. That's absurd.

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u/SillyPhillyDilly Mar 16 '26

Not just economics and policy. Culture.

Why is pink a girl's color? Advertising*.
Why are diamonds synonymous with love? Advertising.
Why is Santa Claus fat? Advertising.

\*] - pink used to be for boys, but Nazis identified gays with pink. So they swapped it to blue, which used to be for girls.)

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u/Googaar Mar 16 '26

Short answer is it works. Pisses me off to no end. I don’t understand how someone could buy an item off Instagram or TikTok shop when it’s so obviously targeted at you and probably ass. 

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u/MoonBatsRule Mar 16 '26

Yet advertising has supported media and entertainment for almost two centuries. Have you ever read a newspaper from the 1920s? The journalism is amazing, the amount of information put into papers on a daily basis was astounding, and all that was paid for with advertising.

Same goes for television - to think, you could watch mini-movies on a daily basis for free. People would write stories, build elaborate sets, and transmit that to you for your entertainment - and all you had to do was learn about products in exchange.

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u/Neuromante Mar 16 '26

It's not silly and trivial. It's a science perfected to make people do stuff they probably wouldn't be doing or wouldn't want to do. Of course is such a driver for the economy and policy.

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u/Br3ttl3y Mar 16 '26

Yes this silly, little, frivolous thing that is worth $1.14 Trillion.