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