4 ms·

This is one more step toward Enshittification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification much better expl

by ta988 2y ago

This is one more step toward Enshittification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification much better explanation than Dead Internet if you ask me.

gruez 2y ago
How is this "Enshittification" in the original sense? From the article: >>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, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. In this case what changed? Was reddit on top of spam a few years ago and deliberately let spam happen? Or did spammers realize the value and got more aggressive with their spamming? It's not clear how what's happening right now resembles "they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves". Are you just using it in the literal sense of "service got shittier"?
- swatcoder 2y ago
  I do think the term has broadened to just capture the general decay of quality across services and software, which is probably fair since we often can't make evidenced claims about why it's happening in any specific instance. Here, it's probably fair to say that spam strategies continue to innovate and reduce their operational costs while Reddit (and most of their peers) drag their feet on responding to it as long as the spam satisfies the quality norms of the site (as sufficiently delayed replays do). Reddit (et al) presumably puts a fair effort into suppressing obvious noise, but much less effort into generated content that creates engagements or appears plausibly real, and that this *amounts to a decay over time as the implicitly permitted generated content itself becomes cheaper to produce and more widespread. Their self-benefiting inaction satisfies the original usage of "enshittening" even as the term has expanded in common use.

by ta988 2y ago

gruez 2y ago

How is this "Enshittification" in the original sense? From the article: >>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, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. In this case what changed? Was reddit on top of spam a few years ago and deliberately let spam happen? Or did spammers realize the value and got more aggressive with their spamming? It's not clear how what's happening right now resembles "they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves". Are you just using it in the literal sense of "service got shittier"?

swatcoder 2y ago
I do think the term has broadened to just capture the general decay of quality across services and software, which is probably fair since we often can't make evidenced claims about why it's happening in any specific instance. Here, it's probably fair to say that spam strategies continue to innovate and reduce their operational costs while Reddit (and most of their peers) drag their feet on responding to it as long as the spam satisfies the quality norms of the site (as sufficiently delayed replays do). Reddit (et al) presumably puts a fair effort into suppressing obvious noise, but much less effort into generated content that creates engagements or appears plausibly real, and that this *amounts to a decay over time as the implicitly permitted generated content itself becomes cheaper to produce and more widespread. Their self-benefiting inaction satisfies the original usage of "enshittening" even as the term has expanded in common use.