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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 les
by 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 agoEquivocating 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 agoWho do you think start and run companies?
- brodouevencode 3y agoCompanies are an abstraction of the people that run them, invest in them, and work for them.
- vel0city 3y agoYeah 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.
- yellowapple 3y ago> Yeah but companies aren't thinking entities themselves They don't need to be. They are automata with emergent behavior independent from the individual humans comprising them - paperclip maximizers in a very literal sense. The overly-simplistic "corporate decisions are just human decisions" take entirely ignores corporate policies, material interests, and countless other drivers of corporate decisionmaking with zero dependence on any particular actual human.
- vel0city 3y ago> corporate policies, material interests, and countless other drivers of corporate decisionmaking And those policies came from...? And those material interests relate to...? ...the ether? Jesus Christ? The "Invisible Hand"? The void? Those policies were written by people at the direction of people to be given to people to do because some people are interested in achieving that goal.
- yellowapple 3y ago> Those policies were written by people at the direction of people to be given to people to do because some people are interested in achieving that goal. And those policies continue to be in effect long after any of their authors or beneficiaries have left or otherwise ceased to be authors or beneficiaries - as highlighted in the part of my comment immediately following that which you quoted. People being involved at one point says nothing about their continued involvement or about the eventual autonomy of the thing with which they were once involved - just like how any person's decisionmaking is independent from that of one's constituent cells, and from one's parents and their constituent cells. The interests of the creation can and do diverge from the interests of the creators.
- uoaei 3y agoCompanies inherit quasi-cognitive abilities not merely from the people they make up, but the structures of their interactions, particularly power structures. This creates something emergent that wasn't there before. Your argument is like saying "we've already solved biology -- it's physics all the way down!" Except, it's not. The information-processing and entropy-generating capacities of biological organisms surpasses those that would be expected from a purely physical perspective.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agogasoline starts and runs engines, yet gasoline != engines
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- everdrive 3y ago>How did mobile phones, a huge market with huge investment, avoid “enshittification”? They didn’t. They spy on you more and more to extract more value from you after purchase. They have non-replaceable batteries and screens, which means you can’t service them easily. They are worse at being phones than plastic Nokias 20 years ago. Companies are incentivized to create apps which are trapped in the phone’s walled gardens rather than creating webpages which anyone can access. The list goes on.
- TylerE 3y agoThis is the sort of missing the forest trees people are talking about. People don’t care about replaceable batteries and voice calls. They want the magic pocket oracle to just work with a minimum of faffing about. You have to reach people on what THEY care about, not preach to them about what they should care about. (And yes, I’m self-aware enough to see the inherent irony of this comment.)
- Karunamon 3y agoMarketing and industry trends play a part in this. There is a big difference between "nobody cares about X at all" and "nobody cares about X enough, in isolation, to base their entire purchasing decision on it" For instance, Apple tends to drive how mobile phones look and what external features they have even if their changes are objective steps backwards in functionality. People generally liked headphone jacks, but not enough to cut themselves off from flagship devices. There is no way to make an apples-to-apples comparison since usually there are never two devices whose literal only difference is the specific feature under discussion.
- mcphage 3y ago> How did mobile phones, a huge market with huge investment, avoid “enshittification”? Well, based on Docorow's term, it's because there wasn't a 2 way market. Instead of phone manufacturers playing 2 sides off each other, it was a a much simpler arrangement: manufacturers sell phones to consumers, and there are enough manufacturers that they can't get entirely complacent. Perhaps in the early days, when manufacturers acted as an intermediary between the carriers and consumers, that was more prone to enshittification. And phones in those days were pretty stagnant, looking for new ways to grab a couple of bucks (remember when they charged for ringtones? Or wildly overcharged for SMS messages?). Phones becoming unlocked, and phones rapidly improving in abilities and price did happen roughly around the same time, but perhaps that's unrelated to enshittification.
- snowwrestler 3y agoThank you for a thoughtful answer!
- mcphage 3y agoYou’re welcome :-)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]