How to Deal with Largescale Enshittification?
Enshittification has emerged as a viable business strategy because companies have realized that the value they offer is big enough that it prevents them from being shunned at large.
e.g. Reddit has reduced the quality of its platform because it knows its zombie scrollers are going to come back [2]
Airbnb has reduced its user experience with hidden charges and commercializing because it knows that people need places to rent when they travel.
Youtube once it realized its value in the market, started to shove more ads to force its users to pay to increase revenue. It also started to shove shorts everywhere to invite zombie scrollers, to improve engagement and hence revenue.
LinkedIn became cringe (I don't understand what design decisions they made) hence inviting more influencer-esque posts to drive engagement and hence again revenue.
There are many more examples of prominent companies in the past who have enshittified their offerings and it is safe to say many more companies will follow.
So my question is what can we do as users to keep the quality of our lives up to our indivisual standards.
In my opinion,
- we can make many decisions that improve our indivisual quality of life but,
- there is very little that we can do to improve the standard of living of the society as a whole because of network effect.
e.g. I as an individual can refrain myself from using tiktok to value my time, privacy and mental health but there is very little that I can do to help other people fall into the same cess pit. Writing a blog to educate people will reach out to a few 1000s of people a month but I am sure tiktok recruits more zombie scrollers than that each day. Network effect for them is so strong that it is hard(impossible?) to prevent them as a whole unless you are a law maker or a person rich enough to influence the companies.
My conclusion: In these modern times or what indian people call kalyug [3], the most we can do is look for ourselves, make sure our own mental health is maintained, your own privacy is not compromised and we are not exposed to polarizing and/or fake news. Even looking out for your loved ones is a dubious proposition at best, let alone the society as a whole.
I want to start discussion about this and see how you all perceive this phenomenon and how you think we can deal with it (if you think we should at all).
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification [2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_Yuga