If you know, you know. Otherwise you don’t know.
That last paragraph is why maintainers step down from projects. Recieving vitrol like that for something they do in their free time is not healthy. And then we’ll have no vlc whatsoever, good or bad interface.
If you are that bothered by it, pin it, fork it or patch it.
Its made up! The windows people are working on windows 13 the return of the sith. Windows 13 will be forcefully implemented into our brain. We’ll be fed raisin bran and function as processing units for big AI.
Don’t kids these days know what “enshittification” really means?
VLC’s shareholders must be pleased though. /s
Lmao
raise the prices
That’s not enshitification, tho
It’s features that worked fine before and now they don’t. So enshittification.
Do you really think that’s the definition of that term? “something that no longer works”?
By that logic, my bike has been enshitified because it has a flat tire.
Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time.
If you are going to cooy and paste, copy and paste the entire thing.
Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
Examples:
Academic publishing
Between 2016 and 2022 the turn over and profit margins of academic publishers increased partly due to article processing charges from open access. This has been accompanied by predatory publishers who prioritize profit over scholarly integrity. This Academic enshittification results in a scholarly system that is “overwhelmed by quantity, distorted by profit motives, and is stripped of its purpose of advancing knowledge.”
Amazon
In Doctorow’s original post, he discussed the practices of Amazon. The online retailer began by attracting users with goods sold below cost and (with an Amazon Prime subscription) free shipping. Once its user base was solidified, more sellers began to sell their products through Amazon. Finally, Amazon began to add fees to increase profits. In 2023, over 45% of the sale price of items went to Amazon in the form of various fees. Doctorow described advertisement within Amazon as a payola scheme in which sellers bid against one another for search-ranking preference, and said that the first five pages of a search for “cat beds” were half advertisements.
Dating apps
The market for dating apps has been cited as an example of enshittification due to the conflict between the dating apps’ ostensible goal of matchmaking, and their operators’ desire to convert users to the paid version of the app and retain them as paying users indefinitely by keeping them single, creating a perverse incentive that leads performance to decline over time as efforts at monetization begin to dominate.
Due to “dark patterns”, not simply due to difference of opinion on new features.
in this case, the platform (i.e. vlc) has literally not changed. it’s essentially the same thing it’s been for going-on twenty years. there has been no updates or upgrades or changes that affect how it looks or runs. version 3.0 is like eight years old. version 2 was pretty much the same, as was version 1 before that. vlc is one of the most stable and consistent software applications on the planet.
So are you starting to see the issue here, or do you think that my bike is an online platform?
Your new bike version comes with one pedal only. You see the problem?
Problem, possibly. Just not because of enshitification, since that has a very specific meaning.
So everything in that definition cant be applied to VLC, at this point … stop digging a hole …
That’s … Not what enshittification is. “A product changed a feature and now I don’t like it” is different from “a company made this product worse in an effort to extract more profit from the product.” The latter is enshittification. The former is just how software development goes sometimes
bro, vlc is still the same player visually from 10 years ago, you touched some configs. yes, it’s so good you can also do crazy shit with it if you want to. the always on top feature is completely unrelated to vlc, that’s handled by the de you’re using.
There are no settings to bring it back to sanity! I used to think surely there was something I could do! But nah!
right click the player window. context menu comes up. tools->preferences. big fat ‘reset preferences’ button on the bottom of that window.
Agreed with others, this is not enshittification.
VLC actually has some tech debt issues compared to, say, MPV or some other projects. Maybe it’s getting some feature bloat. But it has nothing to do with those configurable UI quibbles.
skill issues
Edit: This is just a joke reply. Don’t take it personal. Frustration with software is never fun to have. Maybe delete your config file and start over.
Maybe delete your config file and start over
this.
vlc literally has not changed appearance… like, ever
dude, calm down. it’s free software, still plays pretty much every format out there
Like that?
This is free software made by people who care about it. You are not entitled to any of it so stop crying and move to something else if you don’t like it.
I personally use Media Player Classic (MPC-HC). Just in case you wanted an alternative.
Have you tried changing the ui settings
I understand why this is getting downvoted but to be honest it does “encourage conversation” and I’m learning a lot from the comments.
Make sure embedded video is selected (Tools > Preferences > “All” (bottom left) > Video > “Embeded video”)

Also are you using a distro package or the VLC Flatpak app?
Removed by mod
As much as they are making an asshat of themselves here, I fail to see how that’s relevant.
Even if you are right, that has nothing with this post. We don’t need to witch hunt here. This post is only about the frustrations of the software.










