The shittification comes for us all
Feb. 6th, 2026 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressSo Forest appears to be enshittifying, which is a huge bummer --it had been a genuinely good app with a great premise1. It did not need to go insane with bonus features and subscription plans. It was exactly the sort of thing that I was thrilled to have purchased, once.
(Honestly, I was even thrilled to have purchased it twice, because owning it on both iOS and Android was okay, actually).
But every single time I've opened it, it's immediately thrust a "HAVE YOU CONSIDERED TRYING PLUS?!" ad into my face. I believe this has also been the case when I finished planting my most recent tree. I have it running now, and if it does that again, I might honestly be through, because...gross. Part of the reason for buying the "pro" version was so that it didn't have ads. Ads for your own product still count as ads, fuck off.
It is my most curmudgeonly opinion that the internet was genuinely better when I was a child. It is also irritatingly correct. And yeah, obviously I am making this post onlivejournaldreamwidth, because nowhere else is even close to the acceptable place to do so.
(Okay, I mean, someday I'll get around to actually making my own website and that would be okay for it. But until then!)
Anyways, I really set this particular Forest timer to keep me off my phone while I try and wrap up at work and go home for the weekend, so while writing my words3 isn't *un*productive, it's also not quite optimal. Ta!
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Set a timer to plant a tree. If you use your phone for any purpose2 before your timer is over, your tree withers and dies. Otherwise, it gets put in your little "forest" which you can browse by day, week, month, or year. There's also a thing where you get a little bit of "coins" every time you successfully plant a tree, and so you can use those to purchase more species and stuff to diversify your forest.
2: You can set a small whitelist of approved phone uses, so like, an emergency phone call from your parents will still get through or whatever
3: Man, speaking of enshittified websites. I stayed on the original.750words for like three years after they launched the new site, until it finally got too buggy/deprecated. And the new site is just...bad. It has so many stupid glitches and irritating quirks and I'm acutely aware of this right now because I wrote my words there, and they can't fucking figure out the difference between enter as single and double spacing, which means when I copypaste words from there to here, I have to go through and delete two extra blank rows between every paragraph.
Also I can't use tab to indent and ctrl-z doesn't work. I love the concept of the site so much, and I genuinely want to help them with their current little push of "actually we'd love to see if we can get a lot of users" by writing a nice advertisement, but your product is worse than it was in 2010 and I kinda can't promote that for you.
(Honestly, I was even thrilled to have purchased it twice, because owning it on both iOS and Android was okay, actually).
But every single time I've opened it, it's immediately thrust a "HAVE YOU CONSIDERED TRYING PLUS?!" ad into my face. I believe this has also been the case when I finished planting my most recent tree. I have it running now, and if it does that again, I might honestly be through, because...gross. Part of the reason for buying the "pro" version was so that it didn't have ads. Ads for your own product still count as ads, fuck off.
It is my most curmudgeonly opinion that the internet was genuinely better when I was a child. It is also irritatingly correct. And yeah, obviously I am making this post on
(Okay, I mean, someday I'll get around to actually making my own website and that would be okay for it. But until then!)
Anyways, I really set this particular Forest timer to keep me off my phone while I try and wrap up at work and go home for the weekend, so while writing my words3 isn't *un*productive, it's also not quite optimal. Ta!
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Set a timer to plant a tree. If you use your phone for any purpose2 before your timer is over, your tree withers and dies. Otherwise, it gets put in your little "forest" which you can browse by day, week, month, or year. There's also a thing where you get a little bit of "coins" every time you successfully plant a tree, and so you can use those to purchase more species and stuff to diversify your forest.
2: You can set a small whitelist of approved phone uses, so like, an emergency phone call from your parents will still get through or whatever
3: Man, speaking of enshittified websites. I stayed on the original.750words for like three years after they launched the new site, until it finally got too buggy/deprecated. And the new site is just...bad. It has so many stupid glitches and irritating quirks and I'm acutely aware of this right now because I wrote my words there, and they can't fucking figure out the difference between enter as single and double spacing, which means when I copypaste words from there to here, I have to go through and delete two extra blank rows between every paragraph.
Also I can't use tab to indent and ctrl-z doesn't work. I love the concept of the site so much, and I genuinely want to help them with their current little push of "actually we'd love to see if we can get a lot of users" by writing a nice advertisement, but your product is worse than it was in 2010 and I kinda can't promote that for you.
no subject
on 2026-02-07 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
on 2026-02-10 05:51 pm (UTC)Focus friend
on 2026-02-16 03:53 pm (UTC)The li'l guy is a bean with a booty, and it knits socks during focus sessions. You can trade socks for room decorations. I've been using the app to keep myself from picking up my phone to google things while I'm trying to fall asleep.
I never knew about Forest, but I pour one out for its basic functionality.