this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2026
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[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

objectively worthless pet project

Regardless that Musk is a nazi-saluting asshole, lots of folks in working class rural regions around the world would disagree with calling it worthless. As an example, I visited southern Alaska recently and Starlink is very much in use there on working class small homes.

[–] marxismtomorrow@lemmy.today 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

While starlink is a relatively cheap alternative to other satellite providers, and at one point provided a better experience, both the price value and experience has continued to degrade over time. It would be a great UN-provided project. Genuinely we should have a similar system (better engineered and designed) available to be used by anyone at cost. But SpaceX is a public company, it's only going to continue to enshittify and will eventually become a worse value consideration than alternative satellite providers; it's already enshittified with many customers reporting consistently double the ping and half the download speeds from their original experience.

It's not the idea of a truly globally accessible internet that makes it worthless, it is the fact it is being done by a for-profit publicly-traded company owned by a trillionaire. Any one of those three things would mean the product is guaranteed to get worse eventually, all three mean it is guaranteed to get worse as quickly as possible.

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

it’s already enshittified with many customers reporting consistently double the ping and half the download speeds from their original experience.

I don't think that is an example of enshitification in this case. In the technical world there are measurements for this call SLAs (Service Level Agreements). This means that if you pay for a specific service with contractually delivered performance. The service needs to deliver at least that level of performance, or you are entitled to refunds/credits/resitution for the service provider not meeting their obligations.

Now, just because a service provider is required to deliver a minimum of service, they can (and frequently do) provide even better service than they are obligated to. This is pretty typical of technology services where a new platform is being built out and there is lots of spare capacity as users are just being onboarded. I have no doubt that there were Starlink users that got fantastic performance when only a fraction of the network was in use by others. If this is their baseline, then from their perspective, they are getting less than they did before. If the performance still meets what was sold to them contractually, then they're still getting what they paid for they're just not getting a whole bunch more they never paid for.

It’s not the idea of a truly globally accessible internet that makes it worthless, it is the fact it is being done by a for-profit publicly-traded company owned by a trillionaire. Any one of those three things would mean the product is guaranteed to get worse eventually, all three mean it is guaranteed to get worse as quickly as possible.

That's .... a pretty questionable definition of "objectively worthless" then. By that definition all products or services from non-government owned companies would meet that definition of "objectively worthless". I'm confident that moves the definition from "objectively worthless" to "subjectively worthless".

You're very welcome to hold that opinion, but I think the majority of its subscribers would disagree with you.