30 ms·

Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

283 points by Trouble_007 3y ago

Trouble_007 3y ago
Users, Advertisers – We are all trapped in the ‘Enshittification’ of the Internet (2023-03-11): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-advertisers-we-are-all-trapped-in-the-enshittification-of-the-internet https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-... "Enshittification" - Wiktionary : https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification Cory Doctorow - Enshittification : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#Enshittification I downloaded the podcast from here (mp3) : https://mediacore-live-production.akamaized.net/audio/01/jo/Z/8a.mp3 https://mediacore-live-production.akamaized.net/audio/01/jo/...
- bobmaxup 3y ago
  https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/enshitification https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/enshitific...
- jeffchien 3y ago
  Transcript generated by Whisper (medium.en) with timestamps: https://pastebin.com/59mABz3L https://pastebin.com/59mABz3L Without timestamps: https://pastebin.com/F1NVMeQq https://pastebin.com/F1NVMeQq
astrange 3y ago
[flagged]
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  > "Enshittification" is not a needed word because we already have "degradation" or "regression". Given the quick spread of the term, I suspect there's more nuance to the linguistic story.
  - haunter 3y ago
    > I suspect there's more nuance to the linguistic story Yes people spend too much time online and they pickup the current buzzword quickly https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification I never even seen used it outside HN by normal people.
    - esafak 3y ago
      It was only coined in March!
  - Animats 3y ago
    It's reached Wikitionary.[1] We do need a word for reduction in quality for the purpose of increasing profits. For liquids and foodstuffs, the terms are "denatured" or "adulterated", and for solid materials "ersatz". None of those are applicable to services. "Enshittification" captures the concept of reducing quality to increase profits not by reducing product cost, but by degrading the user experience to make the product more profitable. It's not the same as "quality fade", where the product keeps getting worse and the seller hopes no one will notice for a while. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
- drpixie 3y ago
  I like the term "enshittification" - it implies a deliberate intention that is missing from degradation. Regression merely implies reversion towards a previous state. Enshittification is a deliberate process: provide a (typically cheap/free) service, dominate the field, lock users into it, and exploit to the maximum possible in the short term, ultimately destroying the service.
- typon 3y ago
  Justin Roiland, Dan Harmon
- LegitShady 3y ago
  But it's funny to say.
- tremorscript 3y ago
  hehe. Im sure the xkcd guy is happy to have your approval, random internet person.
- lencastre 3y ago
  Would you explain why the XKCD was like this as well? Or provide some examples please?
  - margalabargala 3y ago
    I think OP is probably miscategorizing him. Randall Munroe (xkcd) is still in his 30s and is a millenial, while Cory Doctorow is in his 50s. Are there some xkcd comics that were somewhat fringe or haven't aged as well as one would hope? Sure. But if OP is complaining about grown men in their 30s acting like they're trying to impress college friends, well, Randall was in college when he started writing xkcd. At any rate, Cory Doctorow is a professional spokesperson and spends his life doing ideological marketing. Coining a more memorable term like "enshittification" that clearly gets more mindspace and traction than something like "regression" is just an example of him doing his job properly.
  - astrange 3y ago
    Back in the day it was a comic about a guy wearing a fedora who made overly smart quips about everything, and there were some rather embarrassing comics where the author pined over a woman named Megan in a way that made it seem like he was either an incel or not over his ex.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- UberFly 3y ago
  I'm wondering what's the word for what you're doing edgy internet guy.
  - astrange 3y ago
    Expert advice. This is very important information to know if you run an Internet forum, social media site, gaming convention, etc, anything where a lot of guys show up who call women "females" in conversation.
- omnicognate 3y ago
  If you turn that judgemental eye on your own post I'm sure you'll be able to see which internet stereotypes you're conforming to and why it's being downvoted into oblivion.
  - astrange 3y ago
    No, that means I'm right. It's almost always the case that when I post real valuable information that I get paid to know in real life, or else unreported but true things about the insides of major tech companies, it gets voted to -2-ish or people argue with me and tell me it's impossible. This is called job security. What gets you upvoted is common knowledge you were already ready to hear.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
ftxbro 3y ago
There is a possibly more general phenomenon where a brand gets good reputation and then begins cutting cost and people will still buy at the high price. I don't know if that one has a name or if it's the same concept as enshittification.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- vanderZwan 3y ago
  I'd say it is often part of the enshittification process, but also something that can exist outside of it.
- flir 3y ago
  Value engineering is the art of making almost the same thing, but cheaper. That could be it. See also: muntzing.
  - brezelgoring 3y ago
    TIL about Muntzing. From the Wikipedia page about the practice [1]: > he reduced his costs and increased his profits at the expense of poorer performance [...] so the Muntz TVs were adequate for a very large fraction of his customers. And for those [...] where the Muntz TVs did not work, those could be returned at the customer's additional effort and expense, and not Muntz's. He focused less resources in the product [...] and focused more resources on advertising and sales promotions. While reading this I thought "This guy is a used car salesman if I've ever seen one", and he was! haha [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing
    - ftxbro 3y ago
      > "when he felt that one of his builders was overengineering a circuit, he would begin snipping out some of the electronics components."
  - fuzztester 3y ago
amatecha 3y ago
Funny timing, as I just described Duolingo's recent trajectory as being an example of "enshittification" to someone who was angry that they have to do even more "quests" this month than any previous one, to earn the monthly badge (merely a fun thing on your profile to look back on). Gotta drive that engagement and keep users in-app as long as possible...
- manvillej 3y ago
  to be fair, practicing is a pretty essential component to learning a new language. "increasing engagement" also means more practice. Its not an entirely selfish motivation.
  - ccooffee 3y ago
    I disagree in this case. Duolingo formerly had conversational language lessons, which were 100% audio (not even able to see text on screen). These were phenomenal for actually learning to speak <language>, compared to the generated garbage in the lessons. Duolingo formerly had lessons that explain new concepts, like a particular verb tense. It doesn't seem to have any of them once changing over the to completely linear lesson tree. I believe that Duolingo has fallen into a logical trap. They can easily track app engagement. It is known that regular practice is the key to learning a language, but they incorrectly forget the quality of the interactions. I've got my Duolingo 800 day streak still kicking, but I've learned almost nothing with the changes over the last year or so. I'm not terribly sure why I even use the app anymore, as there are plenty of anki decks with the same quality content. (The only thing I'd lose is the speech recognition, but that's so laughably bad that it reinforces incorrect pronunciation.)
    - forgotusername6 3y ago
      Their learning experience has got progressively worse with each update. Literally every time they do a major change to the UI they remove something useful. At the moment the tree is now divided into multiple sections. It used to be divided into concepts so I could choose what to learn about. Not really possible anymore. The only reason I am still using it is to preserve my streak. If I ever forgot and break it I'm pretty sure I'll just give up. It stopped teaching me a long time ago.
smoldesu 3y ago
I felt like I wasn't going to write this comment again, but here we go: I don't like the word enshittification. People glom onto it because they like shaking sticks more than solving problems, and Corey Doctorow is excellent at exploiting that desire. It's annoying how he enables that sense of defeatism when he's obviously aware of resilient and game-changing alternative software (like FOSS) that has revolutionized the world in his lifetime. Putting pearls before swine makes for nice fiction, but it's a bad tool for explaining real life phenomena like this. "Enshittification" is a very fun and usable thesis. It also obfuscates the problem and fetishizes it's own victimhood instead of enabling users to resist lock-in.
- camdenlock 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Corey is just an anomaly. Sometimes those "twee neologisms" like the GNU Public License do their job, and bring platforms to their knees. When applied well, great thinkers can use the system to their advantage and come out on top. Doctorow is a good-natured person who just loves to languish in his own helplessness, and it feels like none of us are the better for it.
- tremorscript 3y ago
  Naming things is not easy. Naming things is hard. I am glad that we have this word now and it is catching on. Because all of us know and see and understand what the problem with platforms are. I don't think it obfuscates the problem. Step 1 to fixing a difficult problem. Give it a good name. The Traveling Salesman problem could well have been called "The NP-hard problem" but TSP is a good name.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- vanderZwan 3y ago
brezelgoring 3y ago
I espouse a belief that apps have two cycles, one of growth, another of exploitation. In the first, cash is burnt/used to give free goodies and provide good quality services. Rents are a byproduct and not a goal during this phase of the operation, the goal here is to build goodwill and market share through measures that the competition can't match. All in all, it is a good experience to use the service during this stage. The second stage of the operation is all about rent-seeking. Portions get smaller, ads are deployed in full force, all of the bridges in and out are lifted so value can stay inside the ecosystem. Prices in general go up and it is time to cash out all of that goodwill and market share for money. Owners and founders generally sell during or before this stage, as the business will lose consumer confidence and competitors will gnaw at its heels until it becomes just another bad app/store in a very saturated market. I remember reading a multiwork series on The Office (US) and it used terms like 'psychopaths' and 'sucker' to describe how organizations grow and die when the 'psychopaths' at the top decide to cash out, I'd point to their exit as the turning point in my text. I can't back up what I feel with books or research, just what I've seen by looking at the progression of big businesses in my country. Apps, burger boutiques, consulting firms, even the furniture builder guy that lives around the block, all of them went through this cycle.
- verve_rat 3y ago
  The 4 Xs in 4X games seems to map pretty well to app life cycles. Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate.
- jackgolding 3y ago
  Great comment, I can fill in some of your references. The Essay you were referring to is the brilliant "The Gervais Principle" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... Reforge talks about your cycle - I can't find the exact artcile but you can see it with marketplaces a lot - i.e. Facebook creates APIs for events, 3rd parties build platforms on these APIs, Facebook kills the API access. This is the closest article I could find related to "tactics" https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-loops https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-loops
ggm 3y ago
I compare this mentally to: * autotesting music for 'hit worthy' == music blandifies to the bangers and you never get interesting voices any more. but .. it works (for profit) * kindle genres like 'in the style of' and the tendency to more and more but worse and worse in fiction because.. it works (for profit) * politics descending to the lowest grab, not the highest goal.
- 7373737373 3y ago
  so what kind of algorithm would lead to the best outcome?
  - ggm 3y ago
    How about a heuristic instead of an algorithm.
- jmeister 3y ago
  The problem is decline in elitism(in the arts, in politics, in the academy..) but nobody wants to hear that in these populist times. Democracy+markets are working extremely well for the masses, giving them exactly what they want. Ted Gioia the music critic has made a lot of good observations on these issues. In particular, artists, intellectuals and politicians of old used to lead, persuade, and pull their audience along with them. Today, everyone simply panders.
  - ggm 3y ago
    Strong agree, but said hypocritically as a net beneficiary of the degree dilution of the 70s and 80s.
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
How much of enshitification can be explained by rampant managerialism? Managers need to feel powerful, hire more managers. Managers need to meet their performance targets or just want to carve their own little Mt Rushmore face in the product, wacky user hostile decisions ensue.
- otikik 3y ago
  I think it can be explained better by a different -ism.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
When is this from? A few days ago (when it was already posted with a different url) or earlier in the year Februaryish when Doctorow wrote his stuff on enshittification of TikTok etc? Is this actually new?
- rvense 3y ago
  Doctorow writes a lot, gives a lot of interviews and goes to a lot of conferences. He doesn't tell an entirely new and original story each time.
- tomstuart 3y ago
  This “podcast” is a radio show which was broadcast on July 2nd: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/cory-doctorow-enshittification-platform-capitalism/102492918 https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/co...
_eypq 3y ago
I've been thinking about how enshittification, venture capital, shareholders and the life cycle of a company are in some ways related. Any company that has external investors is bound to go through this cycle of - building a great product - taking in external funding money - growing and then either being acquired or going public (or more commonly shutting down) - then all the head scratching decision making starts It's head scratching to users and outside observers, but the incentives are such that there is pressure to grow on a quarterly basis, get those charts looking good and individuals in the management chain are doing what they can to optimize their career growth leading to short term decision making at the cost of users and customers. The big picture thinking and long term decision making are incredibly hard. Very few companies are able to do this over the long term. Micosoft and apple are doing great currently and it will be interesting to see how stripe and openai navigate this process. My current opinion is that only small founder owned companies or foss organizations can avoid this trap over the long term and it involves not trying to squeeze out every last bit of value. Both of these require a certain level of financial security + there's the opportunity cost vs just going the vc route. VC funding is incredibly valuable and it opens up a lot of possibilities that small orgs can never hope for. I guess what I'm saying is: expect enshittification and enjoy the ride while it lasts and then jump ship when trouble starts. Jumping ship becomes incredibly hard with network effects, so that's the challenge we are seeing with social media companies now. Also once companies become too big to fail, it's a drag on society. Personally I would still go the VC route since I don't have a few million lying around and tell myself this is just the cycle of life (for corporates) to avoid existential questions and going down the rabbit hole of questioning everything around me. Sorry about the disconnected thoughts.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  It is some sort of scam I think. The shareholders don't have the detailed knowledge and insight into the everyday work so the managerial class can squeeze out a dime for a dollar of some hard to measure asset like consumer trust or whatever. Also, I got this feeling bigger shareholders might think they are smart and part of the scam and that they will jump ship (sell the stock) before smaller shareholders notice. I guess e.g. Ben and Jerries would be all vanilla ice cream at this point of they were run in this way. You could always decrease the amount of nuts and fillings with 1% more without anyone noticing ...
sturadnidge 3y ago
Any chance we could get the link pointed to the source[1] rather than this podcast aggregator? 1. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/cory-doctorow-enshittification-platform-capitalism/102492918 https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/co...
yarg 3y ago
The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse incentives. This seems to be universally true, and when it becomes apparent that advertising doesn't work and isn't profitable, dark patterns are the best that you can hope for. Short of a company having the internal need for a generally useful distributed communications platform, as well as a willingness to release it relatively freely, I struggle to see how this gets resolved.
- troupo 3y ago
  > The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse incentives. The need to have profit is the goal of any business. The problem isn't that. The need for profit has been entirely replaced with the need for continuous unimpeded growth. Which is decidedly not the same thing, but no one cares anymore, and profit doesn't even come into equation anymore.
  - yarg 3y ago
    When the goals of the customers and the goals of the company are at odds, things will never work out long term. But I disagree that the continuous growth model is the cause, although I certainly believe that it frequently adds fuel to the fire (growing a company when it's making a loss on a per customer basis frequently leads to accelerating death spirals as well as all manner of desperate measures).
    - troupo 3y ago
      > But I disagree that the continuous growth model is the cause, When is the last time you've heard a company evaluated on profits (the actual measure of a successful business) and not on growth (of random metrics)?
      - criddell 3y ago
        Public benefit corporations (like Bluesky) can be run like that.
  - 3y ago
wunderland 3y ago
A perfect example with the recent changes at Twitter: > Most Twitter users barely tweet and don't care about followers - a "heavy user" tweets on average less than three times a week. So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good. > It is exactly that content that Twitter's new model relies on promoting - and those newly-minted blue ticks are quickly learning that there is no magic behind the checkmarks. New followers are not magically heading their way. The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good. > That means lots of blue ticks stop paying - but everyone else is forced to read the low-quality content that the remaining blue ticks produce. This is what is powering the enshittification of Twitter. (From: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitter/ https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitt...)
- Proven 3y ago
  Garbage "analysis". Heavy users I follow tweet more than 3 times a day. > The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good. No, it was a biased algo that's still being removed (as recently as 2-3 weeks ago they discovered another throttle which was impacting many users, including Elon). The main problem is that all centralized platforms have to deal with government-mandated censorship in large markets such as the EU, which kills content and engagement and also negatively impacts paying users (because despite the payment, their content still gets shadow-banned). That's not Twitter's fault, but they're relatively more impacted than social networks that focus on art and have no political content.
  - dcow 3y ago
    I think the strong response is to your opening statement. Cory is a thoughtful writer. The analysis may be inaccurate in your opinion, but that doesn't make it garbage. I happen to agree with your actual take: biased unfair algos are the result of platforms being coerced (internally and/or externally) to ultimately serve some socio-political agenda, and thus their content enshittifies. No blue checkmarks needed.
  - 3y ago
giantbanana 3y ago
[dead]
RandomLensman 3y ago
Institutional isomorphisms (to use a more technical term) are far older than current platform capitalism and are often a reaction to uncertainty. I'd see the current phenomena as a natural extension of the original concept. Classic literature: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095101 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095101
nologic01 3y ago
The question is: can / will something be done about anytime soon. The age of innocence is long gone. The textbook on surveillance capitalism has been written. The importance of sane digital interactions and its role in helping solve other more stuborn problems is also obvious.
andyjohnson0 3y ago
I wonder what the people at the top of large corps (Pichai, Zuckerberg, Musk et al) think of this perspective and how its increasingly dominating the narrative about what they do. Are they mystified or perplexed by it? Worried? Or do they just think: hey, you figured it out in the end?
- prox 3y ago
  I think the latter. These guys aren’t consumers in the same way most of the public is. They are beholden to other bounds and checks which keeps them in place. I had the pleasure to go along for a week with a bunch of CEOs, one was a former billionaire and he had stories that really emphasize how insulated they are from the rest of society. I mean imagine that traveling is all by jet, that everyone you meet is at least a millionaire, that work can be done everywhere on the planet.
  - mojo74 3y ago
    I was listening to a programme on the radio the other day and they highlighted the same thing as you. Put a billionaire in a party with average people (with money, health worries etc) and they would be unable to relate to any of the other party goers. So removed they are from general life that they might as well be aliens was the conclusion.
javajosh 3y ago
Enshittification is a (very good) name for when you start off with naturally non-scarce information resource, and later impose artificial scarcity on it in order to make the moneys. It's like building a theme park, and only later adding walls and a turnstyle that checks for tickets. Of course people are going to hate you for doing that.
- djmips 3y ago
  That's a really nice metaphor.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  The analogy is good but I don’t think the name is very apt. It seems that we are just increasing the price of something not making the quality worse. Often that leads to higher quality—why do people prefer Disneyland to cheaper parks?
  - javajosh 3y ago
    In my view, every software product has two parts: the product, and the artificial scarcity. Rarely is the later simply a paywall anymore, as in the metaphor. Instead, business school graduates are tasked with finding every angle to make a profit, from injecting ads, to building a marketplace, to selling surveillance data for profit, and a thousand other schemes. In reality there is a combinatorial explosion of profit schemes, since they sometimes are only viable in brittle combinations. (As engineers we often see this on the front end when an iframe loads a script which pulls a script from somewhere which rewrites the page, and so on. This is where the rubber meets the road, and the tech reflects the complexity of the deals.) The net result for the user may not be a paywall, but a slower, less responsive, more brittle product. For the eng team, it feels like coding in molasses.
- l3mure 3y ago
  It's just a corny rebrand of commons enclosure. I guess it's good if it gets more people to look into that concept though.
fsckboy 3y ago
the YCombinator powers-that-be preach that a positive outlook is a key asset to propel you and your projects forward. The word "enshittification" seems to be a Maxwell's Daemon designed to concentrate all the stray negative thoughts into (this) one huge snipe session.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Unlikely, the word comes from Doctorow -- a person with anti-capitalist opinions and hardly a Silly Valley shill -- not from hackernews or YComb. (Anyways, as annoyed as I am by plenty of other commenters here, there's also plenty of people who contribute here who don't fit your stereotype.)
  - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    Is he really anti capitalism? I always thought he’s just against “big” everything (tech, corporations, government) and pro individual freedom.
    - nologic01 3y ago
      Dumbifying and polarizing the debate, pro-business or anti-business (no matter what the "business" is up to), pro-government or anti-government (ditto) is the pattern of our times. Its part of the enshittification process and ultimately a tool for control. Informed people who understand the nuance, tradeoffs and choices involved are, in a sense, the enemy.
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        I said "with anti-capitalist opinions" not "is an anti-capitalist" or "anti-business" -- maybe I should have made it clearer: has some anti-capitalist opinions? In any case, it's not meant as a slur but a compliment, in my case.
fzeroracer 3y ago
The problem is, essentially, all of the wealth and power is concentrated inside of venture capitalists and rich stock holders. These are people who invest in a product without actually using or caring about the product, so it leads to perverse incentives to infinitely grow or corner a market at all costs. Family owned businesses, employee owned businesses, privately owned businesses etc all manage to better avoid this problem because they don't have to listen to outside voices telling them grow or die. It's not enough to be profitable and successful, but also you need to siphon as much value out of consumers as you can so you can pass along the money to these vultures. Then once the company has picked everything dry, they write it off as a failure and move on.
cschmidt 3y ago
Cory's article about enshittification of TikTok, for those that don't like audio https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
jononomo 3y ago
Airline travel has certainly become a lot shittier since I first began flying in the 1970s. In fact, it used to be comfortable, cool, fun, and glamorous, and the stewardesses used to be beautiful and polite.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Adjusted for inflation - flights are 15% cheaper today. The largest input in a flight is fuel - and that's 3x more expensive today, adjusted for inflation. Also, the taxes on flights are much higher today. It's not a surprise you could offer a much better product for 15% more money, significantly less taxes, and ~45% of your cost being 3x cheaper.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  Flying used to be expensive and rarely done by most people. Now around 50% of Americans fly every year. It went from an elite product to a commodity. Anyway first class is still pretty comfortable IMO. And airports are much nicer than before.
  - jononomo 3y ago
    Airports are not much nicer than they were before -- at least not in the US. Also, the fact that friends and family cannot go through security basically outweighs any number of luxury goods stores dotting the terminals.
resuresu 3y ago
The internet is so lame and boring now days, its become so predictable and routine. I remember the internet back in the 90s and 00s, it was a completely different place, it felt massive and mysterious like each door you opened led to a another universe with all kinds of stuff going on, discussions on any topic you could fathom were taking place 24/7 all the time. Now we have discord servers with hundreds of users but no one speaks.. the cool myspace culture that promoted individualism and self expression has been replaced by the souless uniformed facebook experience. Rather than being able to speak your mind you have to walk on egg shells everywhere you go now as to not upset the corporations or status quo mentality. The internet was the mysterious wild west, Now its just a boring corporate meeting room.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  I have also noticed this is as well. The discussion online has been double-stratified - it's either really low quality or really bland. Most people are afraid to say anything interesting or different from the popular things/status quo, because social media conditions people to not rock the boat too much because they'll get downvoted/banned. Niche or interesting things just die. The remainder of places have become incredibly toxic due to the remaining people's frustrations with everything as well.
  - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    HN is an example of that as well unfortunately
  - WA 3y ago
    Am I on the same internet? If social media taught people one thing, it is to rock the boat as hard as possible, because only this gives them attention. Twitter is called the hellsite for a reason. What is it that you want? Intelligent discussion, but not too strange, but interesting, not too toxic, but you wanna say what you think and you feel like you can't say what you think, because then "the others" come with their toxic bullshit?!
sharas- 3y ago
Platform capitalism: this was uploaded on "podtail.com" platform Enshittification: Can you scroll this shit through to skip ads?
DrScientist 3y ago
Isn't this just a function of a lot of these business models don't actually work? Ie a lot of these are the equivalent of giving away free ( investor funded ) banana fritters, getting decent uptake and using it to declare that the market in banana fritters is huge, but when you start to charge for them it turns our the market is quite small. Another way the business models don't work is the companies start off assuming no costs around policing - like a shop with no security whatsoever. Works fine for a while, but as it grows and people realise it's got no security they start to get targeted, and costs go up.
- bsenftner 3y ago
  We have an evil cabal of enshitification enforcers in the form of the entire advertising and marketing industry. They enforce the group think impressed on society, and will not put any energy into anything not following the current zeitgeist of shitty exploitation and only the legally required (reluctant) fair treatment of their consumer and their employees. Our society voices, both journalism and advertising/marketing, are owned by the Orwellian Capitalists and only what they allow get through... which is a declining human society.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I think you've missed the point of the parent comment. The point is that the entire model only exists in symbiosis with what you call "enshitification enforcers". There is no mass market social media without the "evil cabal... of the advertising and marketing industry". There is no other model that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions of active users posting their own content with mostly no restraint. The closest to an alternative model that works here is wikipedia. They achieve it by having a different default for user generated content - that it doesn't remain unless it is strictly on topic (you can't just write your random thoughts and shitposts in an article) - and by having a social mission that attracts donations. (They also run incredibly lean, which other mass market sites could definitely learn from.) Another alternative model being pursued is the federated approach. I like this approach in principle but I don't think it will ever reach the mass market hundreds of millions of active users position of the mainstream social media products. Its solution to the problem is that some subset of power users will self-host and absorb the costs, either via individual altruism or something, or by developing some other model. I think this will end up centralizing, with a small number of nodes hosting most of the usage, and probably eventually falling back to advertising to cover costs. But I dunno, we'll see, maybe this will work. Another more successful model is to just not be mass market at all, like HN and other various message boards. This reduces costs both for hosting and moderation and can then be justified by some non-financial benefit (like tacit advertisement for YC in the case of HN, or by tight community camaraderie for niche message boards). Then another model that works is subscriptions. This drops the active user count massively and generally makes it harder to get traction, but I think it works the best of any of these when the stars align. I'd rather be Netflix or the NYT than Twitter or Reddit.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Really, isn't this just all corporations? Walmart has long "Enshittification" of small towns. It is Moloch again, driving to lowest common denominator, what is the worst thing we can do (cheapest), that people will still buy. Twitter was never a bastion of democratic free speech, and was never going to be, they were always a corporation selling advertising. For a brief time when Trump was on twitter, a lot of people got riled up and though it was supposed to be a free 'town square' of discourse. But, it's just advertising and eye-balls. I think Musk got caught up in this 'free speech and democracy' hype and thought Twitter was more than it was.
christophilus 3y ago
Aside: Someone recently complained about the use of the term "enshittification". It first appeared on HN 6 months ago[0], coined by Cory Doctorow and has since shown up in over 400 comments. No point to this comment, other than that I find it interesting how these things spread. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34449504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34449504
- throw10920 3y ago
  It spreads because it's a political term that is acceptable on Hacker News (or, at least, I haven't seen dang cracking down on it), so those trying to make HN political are very enthusiastic about using it.
karmakaze 3y ago
I like the term as it's very specific and relatable, especially when applied to two-sided markets facilitated on a centralized platform. None of this should come as a surprise though and we can merely see it as one mode of capitalism working as intended. The problem wouldn't be nearly as bad if the companies were family owned rather than by venture capitalists and investors.

283 points by Trouble_007 3y ago

Users, Advertisers – We are all trapped in the ‘Enshittification’ of the Internet (2023-03-11): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-advertisers-we-are-all-trapped-in-the-enshittification-of-the-internet https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-... "Enshittification" - Wiktionary : https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification Cory Doctorow - Enshittification : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#Enshittification I downloaded the podcast from here (mp3) : https://mediacore-live-production.akamaized.net/audio/01/jo/Z/8a.mp3 https://mediacore-live-production.akamaized.net/audio/01/jo/...

bobmaxup 3y ago
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/enshitification https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/enshitific...
jeffchien 3y ago
Transcript generated by Whisper (medium.en) with timestamps: https://pastebin.com/59mABz3L https://pastebin.com/59mABz3L Without timestamps: https://pastebin.com/F1NVMeQq https://pastebin.com/F1NVMeQq

astrange 3y ago

[flagged]

CoastalCoder 3y ago
> "Enshittification" is not a needed word because we already have "degradation" or "regression". Given the quick spread of the term, I suspect there's more nuance to the linguistic story.
- haunter 3y ago
  > I suspect there's more nuance to the linguistic story Yes people spend too much time online and they pickup the current buzzword quickly https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification I never even seen used it outside HN by normal people.
  - esafak 3y ago
    It was only coined in March!
- Animats 3y ago
  It's reached Wikitionary.[1] We do need a word for reduction in quality for the purpose of increasing profits. For liquids and foodstuffs, the terms are "denatured" or "adulterated", and for solid materials "ersatz". None of those are applicable to services. "Enshittification" captures the concept of reducing quality to increase profits not by reducing product cost, but by degrading the user experience to make the product more profitable. It's not the same as "quality fade", where the product keeps getting worse and the seller hopes no one will notice for a while. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
drpixie 3y ago
I like the term "enshittification" - it implies a deliberate intention that is missing from degradation. Regression merely implies reversion towards a previous state. Enshittification is a deliberate process: provide a (typically cheap/free) service, dominate the field, lock users into it, and exploit to the maximum possible in the short term, ultimately destroying the service.
typon 3y ago
Justin Roiland, Dan Harmon
LegitShady 3y ago
But it's funny to say.
tremorscript 3y ago
hehe. Im sure the xkcd guy is happy to have your approval, random internet person.
lencastre 3y ago
Would you explain why the XKCD was like this as well? Or provide some examples please?
- margalabargala 3y ago
  I think OP is probably miscategorizing him. Randall Munroe (xkcd) is still in his 30s and is a millenial, while Cory Doctorow is in his 50s. Are there some xkcd comics that were somewhat fringe or haven't aged as well as one would hope? Sure. But if OP is complaining about grown men in their 30s acting like they're trying to impress college friends, well, Randall was in college when he started writing xkcd. At any rate, Cory Doctorow is a professional spokesperson and spends his life doing ideological marketing. Coining a more memorable term like "enshittification" that clearly gets more mindspace and traction than something like "regression" is just an example of him doing his job properly.
- astrange 3y ago
  Back in the day it was a comic about a guy wearing a fedora who made overly smart quips about everything, and there were some rather embarrassing comics where the author pined over a woman named Megan in a way that made it seem like he was either an incel or not over his ex.
deleted 3y ago
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UberFly 3y ago
I'm wondering what's the word for what you're doing edgy internet guy.
- astrange 3y ago
  Expert advice. This is very important information to know if you run an Internet forum, social media site, gaming convention, etc, anything where a lot of guys show up who call women "females" in conversation.
omnicognate 3y ago
If you turn that judgemental eye on your own post I'm sure you'll be able to see which internet stereotypes you're conforming to and why it's being downvoted into oblivion.
- astrange 3y ago
  No, that means I'm right. It's almost always the case that when I post real valuable information that I get paid to know in real life, or else unreported but true things about the insides of major tech companies, it gets voted to -2-ish or people argue with me and tell me it's impossible. This is called job security. What gets you upvoted is common knowledge you were already ready to hear.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

ftxbro 3y ago

There is a possibly more general phenomenon where a brand gets good reputation and then begins cutting cost and people will still buy at the high price. I don't know if that one has a name or if it's the same concept as enshittification.

deleted 3y ago
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vanderZwan 3y ago
I'd say it is often part of the enshittification process, but also something that can exist outside of it.
flir 3y ago
Value engineering is the art of making almost the same thing, but cheaper. That could be it. See also: muntzing.
- brezelgoring 3y ago
  TIL about Muntzing. From the Wikipedia page about the practice [1]: > he reduced his costs and increased his profits at the expense of poorer performance [...] so the Muntz TVs were adequate for a very large fraction of his customers. And for those [...] where the Muntz TVs did not work, those could be returned at the customer's additional effort and expense, and not Muntz's. He focused less resources in the product [...] and focused more resources on advertising and sales promotions. While reading this I thought "This guy is a used car salesman if I've ever seen one", and he was! haha [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing
  - ftxbro 3y ago
    > "when he felt that one of his builders was overengineering a circuit, he would begin snipping out some of the electronics components."
- fuzztester 3y ago

amatecha 3y ago

Funny timing, as I just described Duolingo's recent trajectory as being an example of "enshittification" to someone who was angry that they have to do even more "quests" this month than any previous one, to earn the monthly badge (merely a fun thing on your profile to look back on). Gotta drive that engagement and keep users in-app as long as possible...

manvillej 3y ago
to be fair, practicing is a pretty essential component to learning a new language. "increasing engagement" also means more practice. Its not an entirely selfish motivation.
- ccooffee 3y ago
  I disagree in this case. Duolingo formerly had conversational language lessons, which were 100% audio (not even able to see text on screen). These were phenomenal for actually learning to speak <language>, compared to the generated garbage in the lessons. Duolingo formerly had lessons that explain new concepts, like a particular verb tense. It doesn't seem to have any of them once changing over the to completely linear lesson tree. I believe that Duolingo has fallen into a logical trap. They can easily track app engagement. It is known that regular practice is the key to learning a language, but they incorrectly forget the quality of the interactions. I've got my Duolingo 800 day streak still kicking, but I've learned almost nothing with the changes over the last year or so. I'm not terribly sure why I even use the app anymore, as there are plenty of anki decks with the same quality content. (The only thing I'd lose is the speech recognition, but that's so laughably bad that it reinforces incorrect pronunciation.)
  - forgotusername6 3y ago
    Their learning experience has got progressively worse with each update. Literally every time they do a major change to the UI they remove something useful. At the moment the tree is now divided into multiple sections. It used to be divided into concepts so I could choose what to learn about. Not really possible anymore. The only reason I am still using it is to preserve my streak. If I ever forgot and break it I'm pretty sure I'll just give up. It stopped teaching me a long time ago.

smoldesu 3y ago

I felt like I wasn't going to write this comment again, but here we go: I don't like the word enshittification. People glom onto it because they like shaking sticks more than solving problems, and Corey Doctorow is excellent at exploiting that desire. It's annoying how he enables that sense of defeatism when he's obviously aware of resilient and game-changing alternative software (like FOSS) that has revolutionized the world in his lifetime. Putting pearls before swine makes for nice fiction, but it's a bad tool for explaining real life phenomena like this. "Enshittification" is a very fun and usable thesis. It also obfuscates the problem and fetishizes it's own victimhood instead of enabling users to resist lock-in.

camdenlock 3y ago
[flagged]
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Corey is just an anomaly. Sometimes those "twee neologisms" like the GNU Public License do their job, and bring platforms to their knees. When applied well, great thinkers can use the system to their advantage and come out on top. Doctorow is a good-natured person who just loves to languish in his own helplessness, and it feels like none of us are the better for it.
tremorscript 3y ago
Naming things is not easy. Naming things is hard. I am glad that we have this word now and it is catching on. Because all of us know and see and understand what the problem with platforms are. I don't think it obfuscates the problem. Step 1 to fixing a difficult problem. Give it a good name. The Traveling Salesman problem could well have been called "The NP-hard problem" but TSP is a good name.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
vanderZwan 3y ago

brezelgoring 3y ago

I espouse a belief that apps have two cycles, one of growth, another of exploitation. In the first, cash is burnt/used to give free goodies and provide good quality services. Rents are a byproduct and not a goal during this phase of the operation, the goal here is to build goodwill and market share through measures that the competition can't match. All in all, it is a good experience to use the service during this stage. The second stage of the operation is all about rent-seeking. Portions get smaller, ads are deployed in full force, all of the bridges in and out are lifted so value can stay inside the ecosystem. Prices in general go up and it is time to cash out all of that goodwill and market share for money. Owners and founders generally sell during or before this stage, as the business will lose consumer confidence and competitors will gnaw at its heels until it becomes just another bad app/store in a very saturated market. I remember reading a multiwork series on The Office (US) and it used terms like 'psychopaths' and 'sucker' to describe how organizations grow and die when the 'psychopaths' at the top decide to cash out, I'd point to their exit as the turning point in my text. I can't back up what I feel with books or research, just what I've seen by looking at the progression of big businesses in my country. Apps, burger boutiques, consulting firms, even the furniture builder guy that lives around the block, all of them went through this cycle.

verve_rat 3y ago
The 4 Xs in 4X games seems to map pretty well to app life cycles. Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate.
jackgolding 3y ago
Great comment, I can fill in some of your references. The Essay you were referring to is the brilliant "The Gervais Principle" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... Reforge talks about your cycle - I can't find the exact artcile but you can see it with marketplaces a lot - i.e. Facebook creates APIs for events, 3rd parties build platforms on these APIs, Facebook kills the API access. This is the closest article I could find related to "tactics" https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-loops https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-loops

ggm 3y ago

I compare this mentally to: * autotesting music for 'hit worthy' == music blandifies to the bangers and you never get interesting voices any more. but .. it works (for profit) * kindle genres like 'in the style of' and the tendency to more and more but worse and worse in fiction because.. it works (for profit) * politics descending to the lowest grab, not the highest goal.

7373737373 3y ago
so what kind of algorithm would lead to the best outcome?
- ggm 3y ago
  How about a heuristic instead of an algorithm.
jmeister 3y ago
The problem is decline in elitism(in the arts, in politics, in the academy..) but nobody wants to hear that in these populist times. Democracy+markets are working extremely well for the masses, giving them exactly what they want. Ted Gioia the music critic has made a lot of good observations on these issues. In particular, artists, intellectuals and politicians of old used to lead, persuade, and pull their audience along with them. Today, everyone simply panders.
- ggm 3y ago
  Strong agree, but said hypocritically as a net beneficiary of the degree dilution of the 70s and 80s.

HlessClaudesman 3y ago

How much of enshitification can be explained by rampant managerialism? Managers need to feel powerful, hire more managers. Managers need to meet their performance targets or just want to carve their own little Mt Rushmore face in the product, wacky user hostile decisions ensue.

otikik 3y ago
I think it can be explained better by a different -ism.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

When is this from? A few days ago (when it was already posted with a different url) or earlier in the year Februaryish when Doctorow wrote his stuff on enshittification of TikTok etc? Is this actually new?

rvense 3y ago
Doctorow writes a lot, gives a lot of interviews and goes to a lot of conferences. He doesn't tell an entirely new and original story each time.
tomstuart 3y ago
This “podcast” is a radio show which was broadcast on July 2nd: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/cory-doctorow-enshittification-platform-capitalism/102492918 https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/co...

_eypq 3y ago

I've been thinking about how enshittification, venture capital, shareholders and the life cycle of a company are in some ways related. Any company that has external investors is bound to go through this cycle of - building a great product - taking in external funding money - growing and then either being acquired or going public (or more commonly shutting down) - then all the head scratching decision making starts It's head scratching to users and outside observers, but the incentives are such that there is pressure to grow on a quarterly basis, get those charts looking good and individuals in the management chain are doing what they can to optimize their career growth leading to short term decision making at the cost of users and customers. The big picture thinking and long term decision making are incredibly hard. Very few companies are able to do this over the long term. Micosoft and apple are doing great currently and it will be interesting to see how stripe and openai navigate this process. My current opinion is that only small founder owned companies or foss organizations can avoid this trap over the long term and it involves not trying to squeeze out every last bit of value. Both of these require a certain level of financial security + there's the opportunity cost vs just going the vc route. VC funding is incredibly valuable and it opens up a lot of possibilities that small orgs can never hope for. I guess what I'm saying is: expect enshittification and enjoy the ride while it lasts and then jump ship when trouble starts. Jumping ship becomes incredibly hard with network effects, so that's the challenge we are seeing with social media companies now. Also once companies become too big to fail, it's a drag on society. Personally I would still go the VC route since I don't have a few million lying around and tell myself this is just the cycle of life (for corporates) to avoid existential questions and going down the rabbit hole of questioning everything around me. Sorry about the disconnected thoughts.

rightbyte 3y ago
It is some sort of scam I think. The shareholders don't have the detailed knowledge and insight into the everyday work so the managerial class can squeeze out a dime for a dollar of some hard to measure asset like consumer trust or whatever. Also, I got this feeling bigger shareholders might think they are smart and part of the scam and that they will jump ship (sell the stock) before smaller shareholders notice. I guess e.g. Ben and Jerries would be all vanilla ice cream at this point of they were run in this way. You could always decrease the amount of nuts and fillings with 1% more without anyone noticing ...

sturadnidge 3y ago

Any chance we could get the link pointed to the source[1] rather than this podcast aggregator? 1. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/cory-doctorow-enshittification-platform-capitalism/102492918 https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/co...

yarg 3y ago

The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse incentives. This seems to be universally true, and when it becomes apparent that advertising doesn't work and isn't profitable, dark patterns are the best that you can hope for. Short of a company having the internal need for a generally useful distributed communications platform, as well as a willingness to release it relatively freely, I struggle to see how this gets resolved.

troupo 3y ago
> The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse incentives. The need to have profit is the goal of any business. The problem isn't that. The need for profit has been entirely replaced with the need for continuous unimpeded growth. Which is decidedly not the same thing, but no one cares anymore, and profit doesn't even come into equation anymore.
- yarg 3y ago
  When the goals of the customers and the goals of the company are at odds, things will never work out long term. But I disagree that the continuous growth model is the cause, although I certainly believe that it frequently adds fuel to the fire (growing a company when it's making a loss on a per customer basis frequently leads to accelerating death spirals as well as all manner of desperate measures).
  - troupo 3y ago
    > But I disagree that the continuous growth model is the cause, When is the last time you've heard a company evaluated on profits (the actual measure of a successful business) and not on growth (of random metrics)?
    - criddell 3y ago
      Public benefit corporations (like Bluesky) can be run like that.
- 3y ago

wunderland 3y ago

A perfect example with the recent changes at Twitter: > Most Twitter users barely tweet and don't care about followers - a "heavy user" tweets on average less than three times a week. So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good. > It is exactly that content that Twitter's new model relies on promoting - and those newly-minted blue ticks are quickly learning that there is no magic behind the checkmarks. New followers are not magically heading their way. The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good. > That means lots of blue ticks stop paying - but everyone else is forced to read the low-quality content that the remaining blue ticks produce. This is what is powering the enshittification of Twitter. (From: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitter/ https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitt...)

Proven 3y ago
Garbage "analysis". Heavy users I follow tweet more than 3 times a day. > The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good. No, it was a biased algo that's still being removed (as recently as 2-3 weeks ago they discovered another throttle which was impacting many users, including Elon). The main problem is that all centralized platforms have to deal with government-mandated censorship in large markets such as the EU, which kills content and engagement and also negatively impacts paying users (because despite the payment, their content still gets shadow-banned). That's not Twitter's fault, but they're relatively more impacted than social networks that focus on art and have no political content.
- dcow 3y ago
  I think the strong response is to your opening statement. Cory is a thoughtful writer. The analysis may be inaccurate in your opinion, but that doesn't make it garbage. I happen to agree with your actual take: biased unfair algos are the result of platforms being coerced (internally and/or externally) to ultimately serve some socio-political agenda, and thus their content enshittifies. No blue checkmarks needed.
- 3y ago

giantbanana 3y ago

[dead]

RandomLensman 3y ago

Institutional isomorphisms (to use a more technical term) are far older than current platform capitalism and are often a reaction to uncertainty. I'd see the current phenomena as a natural extension of the original concept. Classic literature: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095101 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095101

nologic01 3y ago

The question is: can / will something be done about anytime soon. The age of innocence is long gone. The textbook on surveillance capitalism has been written. The importance of sane digital interactions and its role in helping solve other more stuborn problems is also obvious.

andyjohnson0 3y ago

I wonder what the people at the top of large corps (Pichai, Zuckerberg, Musk et al) think of this perspective and how its increasingly dominating the narrative about what they do. Are they mystified or perplexed by it? Worried? Or do they just think: hey, you figured it out in the end?

prox 3y ago
I think the latter. These guys aren’t consumers in the same way most of the public is. They are beholden to other bounds and checks which keeps them in place. I had the pleasure to go along for a week with a bunch of CEOs, one was a former billionaire and he had stories that really emphasize how insulated they are from the rest of society. I mean imagine that traveling is all by jet, that everyone you meet is at least a millionaire, that work can be done everywhere on the planet.
- mojo74 3y ago
  I was listening to a programme on the radio the other day and they highlighted the same thing as you. Put a billionaire in a party with average people (with money, health worries etc) and they would be unable to relate to any of the other party goers. So removed they are from general life that they might as well be aliens was the conclusion.

javajosh 3y ago

Enshittification is a (very good) name for when you start off with naturally non-scarce information resource, and later impose artificial scarcity on it in order to make the moneys. It's like building a theme park, and only later adding walls and a turnstyle that checks for tickets. Of course people are going to hate you for doing that.

djmips 3y ago
That's a really nice metaphor.
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
The analogy is good but I don’t think the name is very apt. It seems that we are just increasing the price of something not making the quality worse. Often that leads to higher quality—why do people prefer Disneyland to cheaper parks?
- javajosh 3y ago
  In my view, every software product has two parts: the product, and the artificial scarcity. Rarely is the later simply a paywall anymore, as in the metaphor. Instead, business school graduates are tasked with finding every angle to make a profit, from injecting ads, to building a marketplace, to selling surveillance data for profit, and a thousand other schemes. In reality there is a combinatorial explosion of profit schemes, since they sometimes are only viable in brittle combinations. (As engineers we often see this on the front end when an iframe loads a script which pulls a script from somewhere which rewrites the page, and so on. This is where the rubber meets the road, and the tech reflects the complexity of the deals.) The net result for the user may not be a paywall, but a slower, less responsive, more brittle product. For the eng team, it feels like coding in molasses.
l3mure 3y ago
It's just a corny rebrand of commons enclosure. I guess it's good if it gets more people to look into that concept though.

fsckboy 3y ago

the YCombinator powers-that-be preach that a positive outlook is a key asset to propel you and your projects forward. The word "enshittification" seems to be a Maxwell's Daemon designed to concentrate all the stray negative thoughts into (this) one huge snipe session.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Unlikely, the word comes from Doctorow -- a person with anti-capitalist opinions and hardly a Silly Valley shill -- not from hackernews or YComb. (Anyways, as annoyed as I am by plenty of other commenters here, there's also plenty of people who contribute here who don't fit your stereotype.)
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  Is he really anti capitalism? I always thought he’s just against “big” everything (tech, corporations, government) and pro individual freedom.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    Dumbifying and polarizing the debate, pro-business or anti-business (no matter what the "business" is up to), pro-government or anti-government (ditto) is the pattern of our times. Its part of the enshittification process and ultimately a tool for control. Informed people who understand the nuance, tradeoffs and choices involved are, in a sense, the enemy.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      I said "with anti-capitalist opinions" not "is an anti-capitalist" or "anti-business" -- maybe I should have made it clearer: has some anti-capitalist opinions? In any case, it's not meant as a slur but a compliment, in my case.

fzeroracer 3y ago

The problem is, essentially, all of the wealth and power is concentrated inside of venture capitalists and rich stock holders. These are people who invest in a product without actually using or caring about the product, so it leads to perverse incentives to infinitely grow or corner a market at all costs. Family owned businesses, employee owned businesses, privately owned businesses etc all manage to better avoid this problem because they don't have to listen to outside voices telling them grow or die. It's not enough to be profitable and successful, but also you need to siphon as much value out of consumers as you can so you can pass along the money to these vultures. Then once the company has picked everything dry, they write it off as a failure and move on.

cschmidt 3y ago

Cory's article about enshittification of TikTok, for those that don't like audio https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

jononomo 3y ago

Airline travel has certainly become a lot shittier since I first began flying in the 1970s. In fact, it used to be comfortable, cool, fun, and glamorous, and the stewardesses used to be beautiful and polite.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
Adjusted for inflation - flights are 15% cheaper today. The largest input in a flight is fuel - and that's 3x more expensive today, adjusted for inflation. Also, the taxes on flights are much higher today. It's not a surprise you could offer a much better product for 15% more money, significantly less taxes, and ~45% of your cost being 3x cheaper.
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
Flying used to be expensive and rarely done by most people. Now around 50% of Americans fly every year. It went from an elite product to a commodity. Anyway first class is still pretty comfortable IMO. And airports are much nicer than before.
- jononomo 3y ago
  Airports are not much nicer than they were before -- at least not in the US. Also, the fact that friends and family cannot go through security basically outweighs any number of luxury goods stores dotting the terminals.

resuresu 3y ago

The internet is so lame and boring now days, its become so predictable and routine. I remember the internet back in the 90s and 00s, it was a completely different place, it felt massive and mysterious like each door you opened led to a another universe with all kinds of stuff going on, discussions on any topic you could fathom were taking place 24/7 all the time. Now we have discord servers with hundreds of users but no one speaks.. the cool myspace culture that promoted individualism and self expression has been replaced by the souless uniformed facebook experience. Rather than being able to speak your mind you have to walk on egg shells everywhere you go now as to not upset the corporations or status quo mentality. The internet was the mysterious wild west, Now its just a boring corporate meeting room.

deleted 3y ago
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Pannoniae 3y ago
I have also noticed this is as well. The discussion online has been double-stratified - it's either really low quality or really bland. Most people are afraid to say anything interesting or different from the popular things/status quo, because social media conditions people to not rock the boat too much because they'll get downvoted/banned. Niche or interesting things just die. The remainder of places have become incredibly toxic due to the remaining people's frustrations with everything as well.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  HN is an example of that as well unfortunately
- WA 3y ago
  Am I on the same internet? If social media taught people one thing, it is to rock the boat as hard as possible, because only this gives them attention. Twitter is called the hellsite for a reason. What is it that you want? Intelligent discussion, but not too strange, but interesting, not too toxic, but you wanna say what you think and you feel like you can't say what you think, because then "the others" come with their toxic bullshit?!

sharas- 3y ago

Platform capitalism: this was uploaded on "podtail.com" platform Enshittification: Can you scroll this shit through to skip ads?

DrScientist 3y ago

Isn't this just a function of a lot of these business models don't actually work? Ie a lot of these are the equivalent of giving away free ( investor funded ) banana fritters, getting decent uptake and using it to declare that the market in banana fritters is huge, but when you start to charge for them it turns our the market is quite small. Another way the business models don't work is the companies start off assuming no costs around policing - like a shop with no security whatsoever. Works fine for a while, but as it grows and people realise it's got no security they start to get targeted, and costs go up.

bsenftner 3y ago
We have an evil cabal of enshitification enforcers in the form of the entire advertising and marketing industry. They enforce the group think impressed on society, and will not put any energy into anything not following the current zeitgeist of shitty exploitation and only the legally required (reluctant) fair treatment of their consumer and their employees. Our society voices, both journalism and advertising/marketing, are owned by the Orwellian Capitalists and only what they allow get through... which is a declining human society.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I think you've missed the point of the parent comment. The point is that the entire model only exists in symbiosis with what you call "enshitification enforcers". There is no mass market social media without the "evil cabal... of the advertising and marketing industry". There is no other model that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions of active users posting their own content with mostly no restraint. The closest to an alternative model that works here is wikipedia. They achieve it by having a different default for user generated content - that it doesn't remain unless it is strictly on topic (you can't just write your random thoughts and shitposts in an article) - and by having a social mission that attracts donations. (They also run incredibly lean, which other mass market sites could definitely learn from.) Another alternative model being pursued is the federated approach. I like this approach in principle but I don't think it will ever reach the mass market hundreds of millions of active users position of the mainstream social media products. Its solution to the problem is that some subset of power users will self-host and absorb the costs, either via individual altruism or something, or by developing some other model. I think this will end up centralizing, with a small number of nodes hosting most of the usage, and probably eventually falling back to advertising to cover costs. But I dunno, we'll see, maybe this will work. Another more successful model is to just not be mass market at all, like HN and other various message boards. This reduces costs both for hosting and moderation and can then be justified by some non-financial benefit (like tacit advertisement for YC in the case of HN, or by tight community camaraderie for niche message boards). Then another model that works is subscriptions. This drops the active user count massively and generally makes it harder to get traction, but I think it works the best of any of these when the stars align. I'd rather be Netflix or the NYT than Twitter or Reddit.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Really, isn't this just all corporations? Walmart has long "Enshittification" of small towns. It is Moloch again, driving to lowest common denominator, what is the worst thing we can do (cheapest), that people will still buy. Twitter was never a bastion of democratic free speech, and was never going to be, they were always a corporation selling advertising. For a brief time when Trump was on twitter, a lot of people got riled up and though it was supposed to be a free 'town square' of discourse. But, it's just advertising and eye-balls. I think Musk got caught up in this 'free speech and democracy' hype and thought Twitter was more than it was.

christophilus 3y ago

Aside: Someone recently complained about the use of the term "enshittification". It first appeared on HN 6 months ago[0], coined by Cory Doctorow and has since shown up in over 400 comments. No point to this comment, other than that I find it interesting how these things spread. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34449504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34449504

throw10920 3y ago
It spreads because it's a political term that is acceptable on Hacker News (or, at least, I haven't seen dang cracking down on it), so those trying to make HN political are very enthusiastic about using it.

karmakaze 3y ago

I like the term as it's very specific and relatable, especially when applied to two-sided markets facilitated on a centralized platform. None of this should come as a surprise though and we can merely see it as one mode of capitalism working as intended. The problem wouldn't be nearly as bad if the companies were family owned rather than by venture capitalists and investors.