Seven Rules for Internet CEOs to Avoid Enshittification | Hacker News Reader

Seven Rules for Internet CEOs to Avoid Enshittification

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Maybe I’m just a stick in the mud, but I’m curious - is anyone else tired of the term “enshittification”?

It seems needlessly crass and juvenile to describe a real and fairly obvious problem with VC backed firms striving for profitability. And it’s just not that clever of a term?

And it just leads to a lot of the same comments on HN, whenever there’s a policy change on Reddit/Uber/Airbnb - “This is another example of enshittification, as coined by Cory Doctorow”.

I actually find the term so refreshing. It’s so poignant and perfectly sums up the experience, but adds a twist of cynical humour.

> to describe a real and fairly obvious problem with VC backed firms striving for profitability

Not sure if intentional on your part but that really seemed written as it these firms are worthy of any kind of sympathy. They aren’t. They make a shiny new thing, running unsustainably to entice new users, with the explicit goal of making it worse later on to increase profits once it’s taken off. Enshittification is in the plan from day one, and they deserve every bit of scrutiny and criticism they get for it. Fuck em.

All I was saying is that this pattern of platforms becoming worse in the name of profit is a real problem worth talking about - but that the term used just makes me want to tune out of the discussion.

I’m not saying we should feel bad for these firms engaging in these practices.

Ah yes that was not how I read it but going back again I see that now.

I do totally get the desire for more sophisticated (no snark) phrasing, given the incredibly huge impact this phenomenon has on lives and livelihoods everywhere, but I think the crassness of it is effective, particularly in two ways: first, keeping the focus on the what (making things worse) more than the why (profit). Other terms I’ve seen like “value extraction spiral” don’t do that the same way. The second thing is it makes discussing it with a broader audience easier; when my very non-technical parents complain about how their facebook is so much worse now, I very briefly describe enshittification and they immediately just get it in a way that doesn’t happen when I talk about other industry concepts with them.

Will take a page from George Carlin on this, regarding "soft language" and euphemisms that conceal the underlying reality (e.g., Carlin's example of "shell shock" vs "PTSD", and many others...)

The reason "enshitification" hits so hard is precisely because it doesn't hold back; it's supposed to make you feel uncomfortable.

Would you prefer a more sanitized term? (one that more thoroughly obscures the intent with safe and harmless language?)

So predatory pricing?

Predatory pricing is certainly one way to enshittify, but far from the only one so I still think the umbrella term is more accurate (despite it, you know, not being a “real” word)

And dumping... See taxi apps.

All that should have been illegal from day 8... I can give a week of promotion, but anything beyond that should always happen at cost or above.

Nah, it's fine. It's a single word, meaning is mostly clear from context, but reading the original article is good too.

Frankly, it's refreshing to have bad products seen for what they are, instead of listening to the "experts"' MBA drivel about product-market fit and user engagement.

Maybe if tech companies didn't use the exact same playbook, we could have a term with more nuance.

I think the crassness adds some gravitas to the word. What's a good alternative? Using a "professional" word feels like being too nice to the VC culture and companies becoming hostile to their users and customers. Words have power.

The word is icky, but so are the practices it describes. So I like the connotation denotation match.

The biggest annoyance for me is that it is if this wasn't the goal from the start...

Whole operations were build on unsustainable models. And when finally we run out of "free" money the next steps are obvious.

Not that there isn't profitable companies that just strive for even more profits, but those are again driven by the system itself.

And the fact that usually the term is just dropped in the conversation. And no actually realistic solution or alternative is even provided.

> And the fact that usually the term is just dropped in the conversation. And no actually realistic solution or alternative is even provided.

Description of an issue doesn't necessarily require resolving the issue. It's ok to raise the issue without already having a proposed answer for it. I don't know where it is written that you can't raise an issue unless you also propose a fix for it.

To be fair, I'm rather glad people don't generally do that... too many armchair XXXXs already that claim to have an answer for everything

I’m absolutely with you on that. The phenomenon itself is interesting and worth discussing, but that term is just so unpalatable. Also, the term doesn’t really capture the meaning well. Ideally the word would semantically suggest the user-hostile and total capture of value, rather than just the process of becoming unpleasant.

You could call it something like the hostility spiral or value extraction spiral, but those terms don't really capture the experience of being a user on these platforms. Save them for polite company, I guess.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/582/861/e26...

I like it because it doesn't sugar coat the issue

The crassness in the terminology feels... somewhat appropriate for the phenomenon.

The experience is an extremely unpleasant, and it would be nice for users to recognize it as such -- so they avoid repeating the cycle of network effects + value extraction, so we have a chance to build sustainable platforms which don't take control away from users.

Revenue-Motivated Quality Degradation (RMQD) doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

It’s the kind of term a bunch of nerdy kids would come up with, snorting and giggling at how clever they are. This is more or less the level at which Doctorow operates.

I think the term affords the proper level of respect for those who enshittify their platforms.

Yes, I was going to make the same comment. Fully sick of seeing it. It's silly and just detracts from any legitimate argument that might be there.

Avoids the central issue, which is that "enshittification" may always have been the plan, and there may not be another actually viable path available.

Well, there is, in the sense that you could start off being, if not profitable, then at least something close to break-even. But often what users love about a new service (whether social media or dirt-cheap taxi company) is that it provides that service at cost well below what it costs to provide (in some cases, for free). There may not actually be any path, other than bait-and-switch, that results in a profit.

The "good" news, is that without very cheap financing available at the first part of this process, even the enshittification path may not be viable. If investors don't have more cash that needs investing than they have opportunities to invest, then a plan of "shovel $$ to users, then to business users, then claw it back for ourselves" may not get enough financing to even start.

I appreciate the spirit of the attempt, but the author has no evidence their “rules” would work.

The one empirical example is Amazon. Does anyone think Amazon is not already parasitizing their partners?

The author is missing the point. Amazon set itself a very audacious goal, capturing a vast amount of online shopping, and then had a surprise second act in cloud computing. It took two decades but the curve was the same as anyone else, just longer.

It's pretty clear that amazon is pretty far down this path. If they cared about their customers, they would stop being a launderer for fake goods and would stop abetting predatory behavior. If they cared about their business customers... and so on.

Thank you for this article. I think it's a recurring tragedy what happens to good things.

Good things were good because some key person invested time, effort or resources into creating something good. StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us, phpBB forums, BBS before that, IRC, Geocities, the old and early web, usenet, winamp.

Some good things stay good because some key person is immutable, such as Python's Benevolent dictator for life or Linus.

It is difficult to get people to invest in things so they last unless you demonstrate lots of value.

And if people think they'll get rich, they pour money into it such as web3 or bitcoin.

How much would you pay for a high quality resource or website? Sadly, I think it's "nothing".

I've thought about curating and paying particular high quality bloggers or wise/insightful commentators to contribute or sponsor regular posting. I would like to see deep dives into famous codebases or technologies.

I don’t like the Amazon example in this article. It’s not a good analog to social media where I’ve more often see people use the term enshittification. Amazon charges money in exchange for goods and/or services. Obviously they ran for a long time at a loss but they were able to turn some dials to change the “You give me money, I give you stuff” equation from red to black without fundamentally changing their product too much.

Social media on the other hand has a completely different problem to solve. How do I turn this _free_ service into a money maker? Obviously the users joined in the first place because venture capital funded the online utopia but now they want returns. Now I need ads, and ads make things _worse_. And I need to find ways of increasing engagement to serve more ads. And I need to get all those 3rd party client users somewhere I can serve _them_ ads so they can stop costing me so much money.

I’m sure Amazon did some stuff you could reasonably put in the enshittification bucket but as an end consumer it doesnt seem nearly as radical as what Reddit or Twitter or Instagram have had to do.

Was Amazon actually on red? I thought that they were on black, but kept reinvesting back into everything. Which is entirely reasonable model and entirely different from keeping taking loans or new funding.

Losing money and investing the capital somehow gets grouped together, but for business and society they are entirely different things.

It's a good list, it just doesn't hold up in reality because "social media" only has a single business model: selling advertising via real-time bidding platforms. Nothing else matters. There is no other way to make profits.

Paying $5/mo isn't going to make Reddit sexy enough for an IPO, and it wouldn't be anywhere close to what Reddit needs to be profitable. They are not going into boardrooms pitching NFTs and Reddit Gold as pathways to profitability either. There is only advertising.

Some niche communities are pay-to-play, especially around Patreon. Though I'm not sure how scalable it is. People self select into these communities and there may not be enough diversity to sustain interesting conversations.

Yes, there is an opportunity for '1000 true fans' type of communities, but as you said, it's not scalable enough for companies to profit off that.

Many software enterprises are similar to cattle farms: they follow seasonal cycles when at first the farmer feeds his cows and lets them multiply, creating a false impression that the farmer cares about the cows, followed by the harvest phase when the farmer beefs up the cows with steroids and sells them for as much as he can, revealing his true intent. The next year the cycle repeats. And, of course, there is a whole paper industry of gamblers on top of that where people make bets on the farm's profits, sell virtual cows that can be materialised on demand at a certain price and time, and even sell virtual average cows, known as cow indexes. The most recent developments are ear badges that track the cows movements and communicate over radio, and automated farmers that use the trackers to manage cows as inhumanely as possible in order to maximize profits.

I think this is an accurate description of what we're seeing happen to reddit, twitter, heroku, and several of the smaller startups I've worked at.

Seven rules for asking the fox to guard the henhouse.

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