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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 orde
by 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 agoThat's a really nice metaphor.
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoThe 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 agoIn 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 agoIt's just a corny rebrand of commons enclosure. I guess it's good if it gets more people to look into that concept though.