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Cory Doctorow coined it to mean something different from how it is now used: Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse

Cory Doctorow coined it to mean something different from how it is now used: Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification. It now means something like "the process where products or services become worse as a vendor tries to make them more profitable". Cory's definition doesn't really apply to B2B transactions (e.g. the word makes no sense for RedHat especially given abundance of other distros).

wilburTheDog 3y ago
I don't see that much of a difference between those two definitions. Cory's explanation was more specific, but it still referred to a service taking steps to be more profitable and in the process making the experience shittier for users and business customers.
015a 3y ago
Look at Enshitification through the lens that its basically just Inflation localized to a single company. When companies are poorly managed, they die. Except: now enters awesomely sophisticated Financial Engineering, enabling companies to metastasize far longer than the market alone would allow them. Take out debt; venture funding; unsupported valuations; high expectations; market ebbs and flows; you can fly a Cessna at 70mph just fine, but a jet going that slow crashes. Unity was running $200M in losses on $500M in revenue, per quarter. And they've never been profitable (since going public). A government can safely print money if it has the economic growth and tax base to support it; but if it doesn't have that, over enough time, you get: Inflation. The bill always comes due. Enshitification is just company-localized inflation after unsupportable financial engineering. There are really good examples in Doctorow's original piece; most of them actually cover the more-common stagflationary effect, but stagflation is just inflation through a different lens. It really doesn't have much to do with B2B versus B2C; its intimately related to attempts toward increasing profit margins, but the critical piece is the path the company walked to get there; and, in the most severe cases, the fact that they should have stopped walking and died three miles back. Or, maybe Doctorow would disagree with all of that. But that's the fun part of inventing such a meme-able, excellent term; it outgrows you!

wilburTheDog 3y ago

I don't see that much of a difference between those two definitions. Cory's explanation was more specific, but it still referred to a service taking steps to be more profitable and in the process making the experience shittier for users and business customers.

015a 3y ago

Look at Enshitification through the lens that its basically just Inflation localized to a single company. When companies are poorly managed, they die. Except: now enters awesomely sophisticated Financial Engineering, enabling companies to metastasize far longer than the market alone would allow them. Take out debt; venture funding; unsupported valuations; high expectations; market ebbs and flows; you can fly a Cessna at 70mph just fine, but a jet going that slow crashes. Unity was running $200M in losses on $500M in revenue, per quarter. And they've never been profitable (since going public). A government can safely print money if it has the economic growth and tax base to support it; but if it doesn't have that, over enough time, you get: Inflation. The bill always comes due. Enshitification is just company-localized inflation after unsupportable financial engineering. There are really good examples in Doctorow's original piece; most of them actually cover the more-common stagflationary effect, but stagflation is just inflation through a different lens. It really doesn't have much to do with B2B versus B2C; its intimately related to attempts toward increasing profit margins, but the critical piece is the path the company walked to get there; and, in the most severe cases, the fact that they should have stopped walking and died three miles back. Or, maybe Doctorow would disagree with all of that. But that's the fun part of inventing such a meme-able, excellent term; it outgrows you!