I see it referenced constantly here, not quite as much on Reddit. I know what it means, but just wondering why such the popularity over on this side of the fence?
Selection bias. Lemmy users by default are probably more sensitive to/negative about enshittification than those on reddit.
Many of us came here in response to the enshittification of reddit.
The term “enshittification” is a useful neologism because without it we’d need half a sentence to get the same concept across.
I’d argue most of us are older but not too old to remember what the internet was as well.
Yeah you’re probably right. It surprised me how many people my age are here but it does make sense because we’re the generation that enjoyed a less corporate internet.
What age is that 30-40?
Settlers of Catan generation.
“What shit are you talking about?” asked the Redditors as they gleefully wallowed in the shit.
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Cause it’s one big part of why the Fediverse and Lemmy exist in the first place.
We wouldn’t need all this decentralization overhead if centralized sites were trustworthy and focussed on serving their users. The fact that they are not is what leads to privacy violations and enshittification, hence why people created the Fediverse and why we are here (at least most of us I presume).
Along with the views of it’s users it’s just fun to say things like enshitification and the great enshittening
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are you comparing reddit today to lemmy today?
Because Lemmy is one attempt to do the exact opposite. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Also, Cory Doctorow’s troll army is working full time.*
*(Just joking but I refuse to do the sarcastic cute S thing)
So you wrote a whole sentence instead? 💀
It’s not about effort - it’s a matter of aesthetics.
You’re damn right I did.
I saw him live at Defcon without knowing who he was. I really liked his talk. Defcon itself was shit though.
Leave it to a sh.ithead to be afraid of using fucking tone indicators. That’s dedication to being a regressive sh.itbag.
Give me a synonym. Until then I’ll use it.
It’s funny that you used the phrase “this side of the fence”, because the fence in that metaphor is exactly the line marking the territory of “enshittification” and “anti-enshittification” ^^
New word for old phenomena
I see it referenced constantly here, not quite as much on Reddit.
It’s a fairly new term.
Reddit is bots and AI, and hasn’t been trained on new words.
Because “willful, profit-oriented degradation of quasi-monopolistic services” just doesn’t sound nice, so a man who’s passionate about that sort of stuff came up with a better word for the concept, and other people who are passionate about that sort of stuff picked it up. Those same people ended up leaving Twitter and Reddit when they underwent that process and congregated around the fediverse.
Because we’re seeing the enshittification of Lemmy itself. Like the snake eating its tail, or the human centipede feasting on its own digested shit, Lemmy is becoming the very thing it likes to harp on about.
You can’t have enshittification without the profit motive, lol.
I mean, a huge number of redditors moved here because of reddit enshittification.
I think a lot of people also misuse the word and use it as a catch-all for companies doing something they don’t like.
Raising prices is not enshittification, that’s inflation.
Not paying employees well is not enshittification, that’s under-compensation.
YouTube putting more ads in their videos including when the video is paused isn’t enshittification that’s… wait no that is enshittification.
Enshittification refers to offering the same service (often free, or at least with an option to pay more) but making it worse in order to squeeze you onto a paid (or higher paid) tier of service. This sounds good to shareholders but ultimately it alienates their customers and often leads to a company dying.
Raising prices is not enshittification, that’s inflation.
No, it’s price gouging.
Enshittification refers to offering the same service (often free, or at least with an option to pay more) but making it worse in order to squeeze you onto a paid (or higher paid) tier of service
It doesn’t have to be a paid service, it can also refer to (and usually does) a two-sided market. For example, a site with free users and advertisers. The platform first gains a critical mass of users, then they switch to focus more on the paying advertisers to increase value for shareholders. Over time, the main focus becomes the advertisers.
catch-all for companies doing something they don’t like.
Yes.
But it screws up entire markets:
new platforms offer useful products and services at a loss, as a way to gain new users. Once users are locked in, the platform then offers access to the userbase to suppliers at a loss, and once suppliers are locked-in, the platform shifts surpluses to shareholders.
So, it
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gives users a warped sense of what they deserve by giving away a costly service, and running competitors out of business.
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Then it puts a stranglehold on suppliers by holding users hostage.
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Then it fucks everybody by extracting value for shareholders.
By this metric youtube is not enshittification to some extent. They are a household name and not some weenie startup.
It being ineffective is a necessary part of it, in my opinion.
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I understand it to mean the general life cycle of corporations: first valuing users, then shareholders, then themselves, then dying. A quote from Doctorow:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
By that definition, everything you described is a likely consequence of enshittification (paying employees less, charging more, more ads, etc.). But the word itself refers to how the company’s values shift over time.
This seems similar to Wall Street’s “profits must increase every quarter” approach. Once a business gets somewhat popular, Wall St. types start sniffing around and offer to take it public. Once public, Wall St. wrings more profits out of the business every quarter until service/products collapse and customers flee elsewhere.
At a certain point, a company’s primary product becomes its stock. Share buybacks, short term gains, etc become the strategy. The goal is no longer to create value for customers, but to create value for shareholders.
Exactly. Whatever product or service a business provides, once it goes public, the primary goal becomes profit–everything else is secondary and subject to removal if it promotes the primary objective. Shareholders don’t care about the long-term viability of the business–once it peaks, they’ll sell and move on. Basically a financial swarm of locusts.
Basically a financial swarm of locusts.
Egads. Perfect anology. I’m going to steal that one. Thank you!
