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That statement fundamentally misunderstands what enshitification means. I think it might help if you read Cory Doctorow's original exposition.

by jaggs 3y ago

gregjor 3y ago
I know what it means. Making up a meme word is not exposition. “Degrading quality” is mostly in the eyes of the user. If Microsoft never changed anything in Github again they didn’t “degrade” it, but it will get called “enshittified” for not having dark mode or a Rust SDK or whatever it is that counts as “degraded quality” to some subset of users. Calling advertising in free products “enshittification,” I think the most common use of the word, has a solution: pay for services you find valuable.
- jaggs 3y ago
  Again, you're showing that you don't know what it means. There is a distinct process which is done to qualify. This goes beyond simple degrading quality. Bad customer support is degrading quality, but that's not enshitification. You may not like the word, but it was created not as a meme, but by a well respected wordsmith to describe this process. :)
  - gregjor 3y ago
    I know what it’s supposed to mean. We may not agree on the interpretation or whether it describes this or that product. Doctorow offers as evidence his opinion that Google search “suuuuucks.” That’s not a metric. Google search is full of SEO crap and ads, sure. It’s still useful, but most important to me: it’s free. Monetizing the user base looks like degradation if you start from free and expect that companies owe you something for nothing. Otherwise it’s just profit-seeking. That may make the platform or product feel shittier to some users, but the “enshittification” comes from disappointed expectations, or opinions about how something should work. It’s not an objective property of the product or platform. I don’t use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. They seem like shit to me, but hundreds of millions of people get value from those things. I pay for YouTube and GitHub, paying not to see the ads and other junk. So those platforms aren’t enshittified for me, but people using them for free have to put up with the shit. This discussion a while back was good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35864049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35864049

That statement fundamentally misunderstands what enshitification means. I think it might help if you read Cory Doctorow's original exposition.

by jaggs 3y ago

That statement fundamentally misunderstands what enshitification means. I think it might help if you read Cory Doctorow's original exposition.

gregjor 3y ago

I know what it means. Making up a meme word is not exposition. “Degrading quality” is mostly in the eyes of the user. If Microsoft never changed anything in Github again they didn’t “degrade” it, but it will get called “enshittified” for not having dark mode or a Rust SDK or whatever it is that counts as “degraded quality” to some subset of users. Calling advertising in free products “enshittification,” I think the most common use of the word, has a solution: pay for services you find valuable.

jaggs 3y ago
Again, you're showing that you don't know what it means. There is a distinct process which is done to qualify. This goes beyond simple degrading quality. Bad customer support is degrading quality, but that's not enshitification. You may not like the word, but it was created not as a meme, but by a well respected wordsmith to describe this process. :)
- gregjor 3y ago
  I know what it’s supposed to mean. We may not agree on the interpretation or whether it describes this or that product. Doctorow offers as evidence his opinion that Google search “suuuuucks.” That’s not a metric. Google search is full of SEO crap and ads, sure. It’s still useful, but most important to me: it’s free. Monetizing the user base looks like degradation if you start from free and expect that companies owe you something for nothing. Otherwise it’s just profit-seeking. That may make the platform or product feel shittier to some users, but the “enshittification” comes from disappointed expectations, or opinions about how something should work. It’s not an objective property of the product or platform. I don’t use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. They seem like shit to me, but hundreds of millions of people get value from those things. I pay for YouTube and GitHub, paying not to see the ads and other junk. So those platforms aren’t enshittified for me, but people using them for free have to put up with the shit. This discussion a while back was good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35864049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35864049