Stop complaining about enshittification. Use the alternatives

I try to do a lot of this, but it's rather exhausting and a moving target, due to acquisitions or shifting priorities and directions from various providers. When work and life get busy, I just don't have the energy for it.

I often envy the people who simply seem to not care or notice.

I've been trying to clean up my account sprawl for years. Every so often when I have some time off I'll try to tackle it. I think I've deleted over 100 accounts, but I still have over 300. It's a lot of work on some of these sites. I spent 45 minutes on hold with Sony just for them to tell me no and hang up on me before I could reply.

I've also tried moving off Gmail several times, but this usually just ends in more account sprawl... I now have 3 inboxes to manage. Rome wasn't built in a day, but 1500 years later the ruins remain. That's how migrating email feels to me. I don't think I can ever actually delete an email account I used for over 20 years. If I switch to another provider (or one I've already half moved to) what will they look like in another 20 years. With email being our identity online, it isn't so trivial, unless you've only ever signed up for 5 websites and a handful of people have your address. For some reason I have an issue with the idea of setting up a forwarder to push everything to one place. Pushing spam around just feels like it makes a bigger mess.

Complain more so it reaches the people doing it, there are few alternatives, as illustrated by this very blog:

> Google is arguably THE ads business ... find way better than Google Search.... I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as default search engine since…

DDG relies a lot on Bing, from MS, and how does Bing earn money? "We run ads, senator" And it's not "way better", cite at least a few search examples where you think it is

> few other alternatives which I haven’t tried, like Brave or Ecosia.

So even worse? At least try them before recommending!

The problem is scale. Trying to replace something big like Reddit/Browser/some-huge-library requires enormous resource investment which is inviting the same forces that enshittified the original. The original reddit was a link list with voting, no comments/media/etc it was cheap, and as it grown into social media giant with insane complexity, it became much more expensive and slower to process(both on client and server). But the users loved it, they now don't need to host the video/image/comments elsewhere, its all included inside the walled garden, and reddit which was 100% links to outside resources is now mostly self-contained media with pictures, videos, blog posts(self.subreddit) being most of content and hyperlinks to "outside" being mostly mainstream "big websites" with social clout.

All good things to do, but I think a different Doctorow thing is worth citing here too:

"Shopping isn't politics" [0], which I would summarize as "Consumption choices are vastly inferior to actual politics, never pursue the first at the expense of the second."

[0] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-05-21...