24 ms·

While I think we've all settled on Cory Doctorow's concept, I really wish it wasn't called "enshittification". It's hard to take the phenomenon seriously when I

• bqmjjx0kac 3y ago
  Crappetizing?
  • bombcar 3y ago
    crappetbagging slumping into the melt reversion to the mean and nasty californication
    • hgsgm 3y ago
      Silicontemptuous Valuedestruction?
  • krapp 3y ago
    It doesn't need its own word, it isn't a novel concept. It's literally just a description of the way capitalism works.
    • lickmygiggle 3y ago
      CIDaaS - Capitalism Induced Decay as a Service
    • thesuitonym 3y ago
      The problem is that people think that's a good thing.
  • runamuck 3y ago
    crappening
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• supertrope 3y ago
  "capturing the consumer surplus"
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  We do, it's also called market capture and rent seeking. Those sound benign and unassuming though.
  • goodpoint 3y ago
    rent seeking sounds benign now?!
    • horsawlarway 3y ago
      Rent seeking by itself no longer seems to be enough to garner any sort of regulatory action in the US. Which is not especially new - rent seeking in general is explicitly not illegal. But historically, it was viewed as a general negative for society, and something to be addressed through policy. Now it seems to be "business as usual" in the race to accumulate as much wealth as possible, consequences to society at large be damned.
    • ModernMech 3y ago
      Yes, as more and more people place themselves in a position to collect rent, they make a million excuses as to why they rent they collect is okay.
    • FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Guess that is the problem. Seems people want a nicer word than "Enshittification". Something more polite. But then the 'nicer' word like 'rent seeking', half the people don't recognize that it is bad, or what it is. So think that is the argument that "Enshittification" is a good description, because people instantly get what it means, Definition->'something is happening and it is taking something good and turning it into shit'
      • js8 3y ago
        > because people instantly get what it means I think that's an illusion. Proponents of capitalism and privatisation will argue that things go bad because of the goverment policy, not because of rent seeking and privatization. You really can't sum up history in a single word, it's prone to disinterpretation.
• jl6 3y ago
  “Please, seize, squeeze”.
  • hgsgm 3y ago
    Same or different from "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"?
    • jl6 3y ago
      Different - the objective of EEE is to kill an opponent. The objective of PSS is to maximize the profitability of a product at the expense of the customer. It's really nothing new, this is how every business works - but this force is supposed to be tempered by the existence of competitors, who will take your customers away if you drop the quality of your products too low. In monopoly scenarios, there is nothing to stop a runaway squeeze. All the corporations accused of acting this way are network-effect quasi-monopolies. That's the root cause.
      • alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
        Exactly. In fact you might employ EEE as a sub-strategy when working towards your larger "PSS" goal.
  • everybodyknows 3y ago
    A perfect epigram -- do you know who coined it?
    • jl6 3y ago
      Me, earlier today. If you like it, that’ll be $0.79 per use or $5.99 per month on the value-saver subscription.
• 23B1 3y ago
  Cory Doctorow is the king of cringe and always has been, which makes it super hard to take his thinking seriously despite the many times he's been right. But maybe it requires people who are that shrill and eyeroll-inducing to change things?
  • krapp 3y ago
    The premise that using this tryhard meme word will actually change things is silly. All it will do is make these conversations frustratingly annoying until the meme falls out of favor.
    • VerminOctopus1 3y ago
      “tryhard meme word”? Really?
      • krapp 3y ago
        Yes. It's a meme created by a fringe nerd blogger, primarily taken up by nerds on the internet, that no one else cares about. It's not a scientific term, legal term or term of art, nor is it needed to describe some novel process. It's just a buzzword people like to use because it contains the word "shit."
  • jzb 3y ago
    Cory is kind of the Jello Biafra[1] of technology. If you go back and listen to some of Jello's older spoken word albums... damn. The guy is right, a lot. Also extreme and definitely not for mainstream audiences -- which is unfortunate because those audiences really need to hear his message. But it's delivered in a way that is wholly unpalatable to anybody who's not already close to his thinking. [1] Former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, continues to dabble in music with various bands / backing bands and has a YouTube series called "What Would Jello Do?" Also did a lot of spoken word shows but may have cut back on that in the COVID era.
    • jzb 3y ago
• js8 3y ago
  I agree, what is wrong with calling it "privatization" or "enclosures"?
  • shigawire 3y ago
    Many view privatization as an inherent good.
  • overthemoon 3y ago
    It's more than privatization, although that's related. A service which began as a private one, like Google, but gets worse for the reasons Google has gotten worse, would be appropriately labeled enshittification, I think. But it's a goofy term, and Doctorow is indeed annoying. Bird of a feather with this writer, whose style is also incredibly irritating. Nevertheless, good points worth making.
  • _jal 3y ago
    That doesn't describe the process. We're not talking about the privatization of a previously public space, it is closer to a long running bait-and-switch con. If the telephone were invented today, we'd be listening to ads instead of ringing tones.
    • js8 3y ago
      To me, enshittification seems like privatization of human attention. It's true it wasn't considered public good, because it wasn't considered to be an economic good at all, but is that relevant? It seems to me that capitalism reinvented itself over past 100 years by privatizing things that were either previously public or nobody could imagine them to be private goods. Aside from the military, utilities, copyrights (and fair use), attention and personal data, there are also various forms of consumer debt (mortgages). So I think it's important to put all these things into same context.
• this_user 3y ago
  It is honestly hard to take anyone seriously who unironically uses that term.
  • FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Guess, what is being discussed here. If this term must be ironic. And I guess, dismissed. Then what is the non-ironic, serious word, that does capture this intent, that we can use without being dismissed.
• HeckFeck 3y ago
  Entropy?
  • yellowapple 3y ago
    Entropy doesn't quite capture the deliberate and malicious nature of enshittification.
    • HeckFeck 3y ago
      True. We should want to capture the agency, the malicious choices that drive it.
• snowwrestler 3y ago
  IMO it seems like an immature name for an immature way of thinking about the world. Yes, companies would like to make more money for doing the same work or less. So would everyone. Would you like a raise every year, even if you’re the same person doing the same job? Would you like to have passive income so you don’t have to work so hard? It explains why some things get worse over short or long periods of time, but is not great at explaining why so many things get better over time. Like if I held mobile phones from 2003 and 2023 and said “you can buy either for $600,” for most folks it would be a no-brainer. How did mobile phones, a huge market with huge investment, avoid “enshittification”? Now I know that Cory’s writing is more sophisticated than what I’m saying. But most folks who throw the term around (like this blog post) are not. It’s become a broad label for anything some people don’t like, like “late stage capitalism” or “woke.” App changes interface slightly: “enshittification!!” The original essay was interesting. The broad application of the term, I am finding tiresome.
  • uoaei 3y ago
    Equivocating companies and people is a big reason why things are getting shittier for people and better for companies in the first place. Do you have any friends who are companies?
    • snowwrestler 3y ago
      Who do you think start and run companies?
      • brodouevencode 3y ago
        Companies are an abstraction of the people that run them, invest in them, and work for them.
        • vel0city 3y ago
          Yeah but companies aren't thinking entities themselves; the decisions "a company" makes is just the decisions of the leadership (a group of people) of the company. The end results are then the actions carried out by the people of that company following the decisions of the leadership. Its all people, all the way down.
• sfpotter 3y ago
  Very insightful commentary on the article! Thanks!
• jzb 3y ago
  I dislike the word and I also feel like we're already at the point where everything people don't like is just lazily called "enshittification." I'm not sure this qualifies, but IMO it comes close. There's a lot of nuance in the whole discussion about ebooks and public libraries and handwaving about "enshittification" avoids all of it and dumps the responsibility for maintaining the concept of libraries on publishers and private companies. Consumers and communities are free to continue consuming books using the same models libraries operated under for decades. Ebooks came along and don't fit well with that model, at all. It's another public commons problem we're basically hoping that Somebody Else will solve and then complaining when the foxes guarding the hen house do what foxes do. I think Cory is about half right about enshittification but there's also a huge dose of entitlement and apathy. If you expect corporations or government to just Do The Right Thing when it's not in the interest of those in power, without regulation or continual threat of loss of power or market share, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
  • hotshiitake 3y ago
    > I dislike the word and I also feel like we're already at the point where everything people don't like is just lazily called "enshittification." Ah yes, the enshittification of "enshittification". Definitely did not see that one coming.
    • helpfulmandrill 3y ago
      The fact that you're misusing the term in that very sentence is either pretty stupid or supremely clever :)
      • krapp 3y ago
        A few people here are. Apart from being obnoxious and immature, "enshittification" doesn't communicate any concept beyond "something turning into shit." Being both vague and emotionally charged, semantic drift is inevitable.
        • 3y ago
• SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  I suspect that it's a translation in English of (a form of) the word "verkakte" (also spelled "facacta" ). If something is "verkakte", then it is "enshittified", i.e. it has has reached the end of the process of "enshittification". The new English word has a more specific meaning though.
• crazygringo 3y ago
  Completely agree. It makes it hard to have a serious conversation when the popular term sounds like it's something that a 13-year-old came up with. Not to mention that this piece isn't even about "enshittification" at all -- it's a long rant against a feature change which is really just "I don't like this change in behavior". The search box likely changed to show results from only your library, instead of worldwide results, because it was confusing a lot of library patrons -- who, remember, are not always very tech-savvy. The whole concept of "enshittification" is supposed to be about behavior that benefits the corporation at the expense of the user, like stuffing full of ads or jacking up prices. But this is just a UX change that the author doesn't like. So it's a misleading example of "enshittification" even to begin with.
  • paulclinger 3y ago
    > it's a long rant against a feature change which is really just "I don't like this change in behavior". The search box likely changed to show results from only your library, instead of worldwide results, because it was confusing a lot of library patrons > But this is just a UX change that the author doesn't like. That's not the case. This removed the ability for me, a library patron, to request a digital title that I had before. I can still request a printed book to be added to the catalog, but for digital title our library FAQ states (which I presume is copied from OverDrive): If you’re looking for a specific digital title that we do not have, you can use a Notify Me tag in Libby. Notify Me will alert you if the library buys the title. However, not all publishers sell their content to libraries in digital format. If you cannot find a title in Libby’s catalog, then we cannot buy the item. This looks like the control for digital purchases was removed from the libraries and moved to OverDrive/Libby, which is definitely not a simple UX change. This doesn't serve my interests at all and, according to the article, doesn't serve the library interests either, as they don't have the information they had before about who requests what books and can't control the purchase process. It's also (according to the author) a sign of the (coming) platform changes for the worse, which I tend to agree with.
  • troyvit 3y ago
    I disagree. To me the piece is about enshittification as Doctorow defined it. It's not just a UX change that the author doesn't like but rather a UX change designed to gain short-term profits for its investors at the expense of its users (both readers and librarires). Overdrive sacrificed its usefulness to its users to gain market-share with libraries, and it's achieved 95% penetration there. Now it's paring back functionality for libraries, hiding features that might enable them to leave their platform, and using its monopoly advantage to force them to pay more for features that were previously free and easy to use. The most apparent reason it's doing this is because it was bought by a notorious investment firm with a long history of squeezing as much money out of their acquisitions as possible before leaving them to die. That seems to support the original definition pretty well. I agree that the word does a disservice to its definition.
• carlosjobim 3y ago
  Decay is the word you are all looking for.
  • FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    I think we need more than Decay. Because the entire process is also optimizing. It isn't just falling apart like decay, it is being optimized towards a goal that we consider bad.
• notnaut 3y ago
  Even just shittification feels better.
• Loquebantur 3y ago
  This is blatant whataboutism. Instead of discussing the very real social consequences of companies like KKR gaming the ridiculously over-revered economic system and notable absence of any legislation preventing that. HN falls prey to simpleton spin-doctoring.
  • haunter 3y ago
    >HN falls prey to simpleton spin-doctoring. You mean HN is getting enshittified?
    • yellowapple 3y ago
      It's a subdomain of a literal venture capitalist firm; it was arguably enshittified since Day 1.
    • VerminOctopus1 3y ago
      The brains of much of the HN userbase were fully enshittified long ago
• greenie_beans 3y ago
  yeah i hate that word. makes me want to stop reading the content even though i might like to read it.
• houseatrielah 3y ago
  Complaining about the degradation of the public realm, while simulatanously degrading the vernacular. There's all kinds of vulgar words we could turn into edgy verbs, but I hope we don't.
  • VerminOctopus1 3y ago
    The pearl clutching over which words people use and “degrading the vernacular” is embarrassing. It’s just a word. Words change, languages change, there is no pristine noble ideal language to pursue or maintain here.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• anonym29 3y ago
  Enshittification is only possible because a vast majority of users will tolerate the abuse with a smile and continue to feed from the hand that slaps them across the face. They will do that because they are genuinely, in the truest sense of the word, addicts. The withdrawal symptoms may be nothing like those of alcohol, nicotine, opiates, or benzodiazepines, but they are no less addicts because of that fact. It's an old joke that the only group besides Tech Companies to call their customers 'users' are drug dealers, but there is great truth in that. When tech companies performs enshittification, it's not terribly different from a heroin dealer doubling the profits he extracts from a customer by cutting with other substances (mixing with cheaper substances to dilute the concentration of the most expensive component, for those unfamiliar with the lingo) when he knows that customer is experiencing withdrawal - he knows the customer is hopelessly hooked, addicted, and desperate for more, and he knows he can manipulatively extract even more value from the customer in such a vulnerable state. For this reason, I propose it may just as well be called something more like "Addict Abuse", or "Heartless exploitation of the vulnerable", because that's exactly what it is. That society continues to cherish and prize companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, Apple, Twitter, and others rather than regarding them with the extreme prejudice and utter contempt commonly reserved for manipulative dealers of addictive drugs is nothing short of baffling to me. P.S. Before any corporate shills accost me for using the previous names of technology companies - I know I'm using the old name. I'm using the old name for the same reason I still call Blackwater "Blackwater", even though they call themselves "Academi" now - rebranding to cover up old sins is itself a manipulative tactic to memoryhole the sins. I will be no more complicit in covering up the rampant psychological, privacy, and government-directed first amendment abuses of Facebook or Twitter than I am in covering up the war crimes of Blackwater.
  • anigbrowl 3y ago
    While I think we've all settled on Cory Doctorow's concept, You don't need to sell people on the idea. Cool your jets and reread the comment you replied to.
    • anonym29 3y ago
      My comment directly addresses the naming concerns of the parent comment. My jets were never warm to begin with.
• scythe 3y ago
  I think that "extractivization" may be a more descriptive possibility. I.e. we are describing a phenomenon whereby a platform is changed from a strategy of increasing its user base to one of extracting value from its userbase. Consequently, from a user perspective, this leads to the counterintuitive idea that you probably shouldn't trust any platform who doesn't explain how they're making money off of you.
• anigbrowl 3y ago
  Agreed. Doctorow is a smart guy and I agree with the underlying argument, but he's also using a neologism to build his personal brand, a tactic straight out of marketing.
• riffic 3y ago
  make your own term then dude; please don't bikeshed about it on orangesite
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Gladly. Unfortunately I lack the reach for it to matter.
• RC_ITR 3y ago
  I just use 'degradation.' Not everything has to be jargon.
• bjornasm 3y ago
  Somehow it reminds me of the people (that also can be found here) that decries that a programming language is "horrible", "unusable", "a mess" because of some esoteric detail. Its just ends up as a too strong description of what people are talking about. Language needs some nuances.
• ddingus 3y ago
  Depublification? Libraries are a great public service. Really, these moves to enshittify otherwise free or modest cost to use public works, can be seen as an encroaching of capitalist ways and means into what are traditionally public ways and means. And it really is not that either is bad or good. Markets, sales, money, competition, ADS and all that clearly have a place and value in society. So do public works, like libraries, parks, and the like. The branding should better reflect these realities. It is really nice to have places where there is not an expectation of spending money. Cory sees denying society of these places as "shitty" While I agree, that is toxic when it does not need to be.
• subjectsigma 3y ago
  This applies quite well to the article itself too. I don’t disagree with the base concept, but reading “I need books like I need air” and being reminded that the author is a Socialist Who Hates America five times in a few pages is so eye-rolling
• pdntspa 3y ago
  Please no. We need to stamp out this notion of 'vulgarity' and normalize this vocabulary. People cower behind being offended by fictional incantations that supposedly anger nonexistent deities. We need to stop allowing people being offended by trivial things.
  • krapp 3y ago
    No one is cowering in offense by "enshittification," nor is anyone afraid that using the word will bring the wrath of deities. If you're going to argue for normalizing this word, you need a better reason than it being edgy to the straw pearl-clutchers living rent free in your head.
    • pdntspa 3y ago
      It's not being edgy, that is literally the root of what makes vulgarity vulgarity. That and the bodily functions stuff. The former is fictional and the latter is natural. Oh no god is going to ruin our harvest because I asked him to damn everything. People being offended by 'shit' is stupid.
    • thebooktocome 3y ago
      https://www.focusonthefamily.com/family-qa/what-the-bible-says-about-swearing-and-dirty-words/ https://www.focusonthefamily.com/family-qa/what-the-bible-sa... These people do literally believe that. They represent a sizable political faction in the United States.
      • struant 3y ago
        Who gives a flying fuck what those scumbags think?
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >We need to stamp out this notion of 'vulgarity' and normalize this vocabulary best of luck with your mission. Meanwhile I simply want to convince companies to not make their products worse for short term profit.
• downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  I love the word, it gave name to a concept we have all been noticing more and more frequently. It's an awful concept that we all hate so the vulgarity is appropriate. It's also a lot less vulgar that the greedy capitalists that keep trashing online communities enjoyed by millions or billions of people for the profits of a greedy few.
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Appropriate online, where this term will remain if people don't actually care to enact change. Good luck starting an actual movement when every media will censor the word you're bannering around.
• red-iron-pine 3y ago
  "rent seeking behavior" isn't as fun to say, and people get confused by the term "rent" and think it has to do with their landlord (though it certainly can)
• southernplaces7 3y ago
  I see nothing wrong, stupid or edgy with the word enshittification. It's clever, sure, but in a good and fittingly crude way that still captures how much of modern tech and platforms, and so many other things get worse. It's amusing that so many people who comment here are so bothered by this, while using absurd words like "orthogonal" to describe a concept for which simpler words exist. Just one example.
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    > fittingly crude way that's the issue. We don't need to be crude to get a point across.
    • southernplaces7 3y ago
      Sometimes you absolutely do, and crude words are just right for describing a genuinely shitty, corrupt practice.
      • johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Who's your audience? The internet or corporate/government? I understand why the blogger chose his words. His goal isn't to propose change at Google. He wants views and the internet loves crudeness, free from the shackles of reality. But Attention is only one ingredient. And the way this is framed it will stay as some crude internet lingo and nothing more. Which is fine for a blogger, because they got the attention desired and will simply make more blogs. If your goal is simply to rant on the internet, the term is perfect. If you want this to spread to larger and larger news and around corporate meetings, we already shot ourselves in the feet.
        • southernplaces7 3y ago
          Yes yes, except Cory Doctorow, despite some flaws with his arguments, also does go quite deep into explaining just why enshittification happens. He doesn't simply spray forth so-called nasty lingo for the sake of drama. And again, enshittification is a very real phenomenon. It's pervasive on the internet and sometimes it seems that at least half the comment threads on this site veer off into lamenting it each day, so I don't see the problem with naming it crudely so that a nice, simple, rude word can summarize this very real thing that so many here and elsewhere make their daily bread in expanding.