Enshittification is Real!

Today I was updating one of my many Google Sites. I pasted in the text I wanted to add, but when I highlighted (selected) the text to reformat it, every time I clicked on the font selector my highlighting disappeared. After a few tries, I opened my site in Brave instead of Chrome. Same result.

After a few more tries, I opened my site in Edge. Same result. I was annoyed.

I saved my changes and published the site to see if that would then let me edit the text. I didn’t want to paste the text again without formatting because I wanted to keep the hyperlinks. But, I needed to move on, so I did a Cntrl+Shift+C.

Now I had the text matching the site font, but without the hyperlinks. I highlighted the text I wanted to add a hyperlink to and clicked the link symbol to open the hyperlink dialog box. The text didn’t appear in the top field of the box like it always does so when I pasted the link into the bottom field and clicked apply, nothing happened. I tried a few times and switched browsers again. Twice. Same result.

Now I was really annoyed. I had to copy and paste the text I wanted into the top field of the hyperlink dialog box and then copy and paste the hyperlink into the bottom box to add it to the text. When I clicked “Apply” the text appeared at the beginning of the sentence, not on the text I had selected. I had to cut the hyperlinked text out and insert it over the text I wanted hyperlinked. Luckily I only had four links to recreate this way, but in more than a decade of making Google Sites, I had never had this problem before. What usually takes five or ten minutes took more than half an hour.

I hope the Google system engineers (coders) get this fixed before I have to update this site again next week. Enshittification is real!

2023 Word of the Year Is “Enshittification” - American Dialect Society

Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel, New York, NY–Jan. 5—The American Dialect Society, in its 34th annual words-of-the-year vote, selected “enshittification” as the Word of the Year for 2023. More than three hundred attendees took part in the deliberations and voting, in an event hosted in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting.

American Dialect Society - An academic not-for-profit organization that encourages the study of any aspect of all languages and dialects used or found in North America (as well as associated islands in the Pacific and the Atlantic) and in the Caribbean Basin, and the languages that influence them: spoken, signed, or written, modern or historical, Indigenous or introduced, common or rare.Ben Zimmer

"Members in the 134-year-old organization include linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, editors, students, and independent scholars. In conducting the vote, they act in fun and do not pretend to be officially inducting words into the English language. Instead, they are highlighting that language change is normal, ongoing, and entertaining."