4 ms·

It's part of the growth paradigm - that everything must continue to grow. Let's say your product is mature. Your market is pretty much saturated; everyone who

It's part of the growth paradigm - that everything must continue to grow. Let's say your product is mature. Your market is pretty much saturated; everyone who wants to use this product is using either yours or a competitor's. You and your competitors are finely balanced, you could reduce your prices and get more market share, but that wouldn't increase your profits. You have optimised your manufacturing process to the point where further efficiency would cut into resilience and create more risk than it would be worth. Your shareholders demand growth. Doing the same numbers as last year is not good enough. So what do you do? Reduce costs. Cut quality. Shrinkflate. Enshittify. Your customers won't notice immediately. Your competitors are also doing the same. You only need this strategy to work for a couple of years until you can move on to another role, and consequences are something your successor will deal with. Meanwhile your shareholders are happy and your bonus is secure.

chronogamous 17d ago
How does cutting quality, shrinkflating and enshittifying fit in a paradigm where everything must continue to grow? It is willfully destroying the value of something you know to be valuable. By engaging in such practices you are as guilty as any competitors that are doing the same, and you're as criminally insane as any shareholder that would encourage what will inevitably be the downfall of the company. You're involved in taking a quality product off the market by collaborative enshittification together with your so-called competitors: the quality product your company used to make will no longer be available to consumers, and shareholders will hold shares in whatever will be left of it, which is bound to be worth less than the quality product it once was. This has nothing to do with growth. This paradigm of constitutes a lose-lose situation, where only you (the one moving on to another role, leaving consequences as something your successor will have to deal with) will experience a temporary 'profit', until you are actually in need of the very product you used to be able to manufacture. Deliberate destruction of valuable resources, products or services does not equal growth.
- marcus_holmes 16d ago
  Because it's only profits that must grow every year. And if you can't increase prices, or market share, or the market size, then you must cut costs. And if the only way to cut costs is to destroy the product, then that's what must happen.
  - chronogamous 16d ago
    Without a product to sell, you'd think that eventually profits would seriously decrease. Then again, as you probably already gathered, I may not be the average consumer, and as such, I am quite rigid when it comes to quality. When the day comes when there are no longer any reasonably workable computers for sale, I may even stop buying computers. As for tvs, with all the trouble I would have to go through to figure out if and where I could still buy a tv that is 100% guaranteed to be dumb, I'm pretty sure I'll never buy a tv again in my lifetime (which, taken the average lifespan in my country, could likely be some 30 more years).

chronogamous 17d ago

How does cutting quality, shrinkflating and enshittifying fit in a paradigm where everything must continue to grow? It is willfully destroying the value of something you know to be valuable. By engaging in such practices you are as guilty as any competitors that are doing the same, and you're as criminally insane as any shareholder that would encourage what will inevitably be the downfall of the company. You're involved in taking a quality product off the market by collaborative enshittification together with your so-called competitors: the quality product your company used to make will no longer be available to consumers, and shareholders will hold shares in whatever will be left of it, which is bound to be worth less than the quality product it once was. This has nothing to do with growth. This paradigm of constitutes a lose-lose situation, where only you (the one moving on to another role, leaving consequences as something your successor will have to deal with) will experience a temporary 'profit', until you are actually in need of the very product you used to be able to manufacture. Deliberate destruction of valuable resources, products or services does not equal growth.

marcus_holmes 16d ago
Because it's only profits that must grow every year. And if you can't increase prices, or market share, or the market size, then you must cut costs. And if the only way to cut costs is to destroy the product, then that's what must happen.
- chronogamous 16d ago
  Without a product to sell, you'd think that eventually profits would seriously decrease. Then again, as you probably already gathered, I may not be the average consumer, and as such, I am quite rigid when it comes to quality. When the day comes when there are no longer any reasonably workable computers for sale, I may even stop buying computers. As for tvs, with all the trouble I would have to go through to figure out if and where I could still buy a tv that is 100% guaranteed to be dumb, I'm pretty sure I'll never buy a tv again in my lifetime (which, taken the average lifespan in my country, could likely be some 30 more years).