Enshittification: How Platforms Die | Hacker News Reader

Enshittification: How Platforms Die

pluralistic.net

64 pointscryoz10 comments

Costco has a fairly unique retail model: it charges a fixed markup on just about everything, and aims to basically make money only from its membership fees. That means if a supplier comes along with a hot new item that wholesales for $25, while other retailers will spend their energy trying to maximize the price they can extract from the consumer, Costco will instead work with the producer to get its price down even further, and pass along the savings.

Is there room for a similar model for internet-facing businesses? Could you have a company that focused solely on optimizing user experience, rather than short-term profit? What would Google, Amazon, Reddit look like if they acted like that?

I'd say micropayments are the only real way to get content to the point that it can stave off enshittification as it becomes popular.

But, again, that requires the micropayments not to be enshittified as they'd have the same type of enshittification business purpose.

This will eventually happen, right now everything online has to be about growth above all else or it won't attract investment.

The internet is slowly becoming less wild west and more Ohio. I will be sad to see it go, but it has some perks too.

Why does it need investment? Any reasonable explanation I can think of is a rephrasing of "fraud".

Generally because people don’t have the funds to start up and then they need to pay out those investors.

There was, it was called woot.com They'd buy bulk, usually final inventory and resell, but the big grabs were "woot offs" where they fire saled all remaining inventory at discounted prices until sold out and then went on to the next.

But they too turned to shit and profit maximizing

Because they sold their soul to Amazon for a quick buck and dipped.

That's the thing I feel a lot of these companies are overlooking.

Look at Notch. Made into a billionaire by selling Minecraft to Microsoft. Went off the deep end, now he has no passions and no joys other than starting arguments with people.

Tom, the guy that sold MySpace, got his 600 million and dipped, and now does whatever he wants to do, but the MySpace community was completely uprooted and decimated in the process, and millions of account with images and music and stories that could not be found anywhere else were "accidentally deleted" soon after, never to be recovered again.

That's what happens to companies that sell out. The soul is always a part of the deal, and it almost never recovers. Harley Davidson sold out in the late 60's but was bought back in the late 70s only to go public in the mid 80's and slowly decline into nostalgic mediocrity. Same with Jeep. When AMC sold out to Chrysler in the late 80s, the Jeep lost something in the process. They became even boxier than before if that was possible, and even though now they look pretty they are overpriced and soulless.

Maybe soul isn't some misty glowing orb of immortal value, but it is something that can only exist under certain circumstances. If it is lost it is essentially impossible to recover, and selling the body of the company that possesses such a soul is the best way to destroy it.

I see people using enshittification incorrectly. It's not just that a service is poor.

The point is that people make a free and good service to cultivate users. Then, once people are established and moving to another platform is expensive, the bean counters reap from the disgruntled users.

Sounds just like reddit the last few years

I imagine that's exactly the reason OP is reposting this article from January at this particular moment.

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