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Comment by marktani | Hacker News Reader

tangent, this is the fifth time very recently I've seen the word "entshittifaction" on HN, and it's always quoted as well.

It reminds me of the German word Entnazifizierung ("de-nazi-fication"), which was relevant post WWII.

Where is this new word coming from?

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"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

I forgot exactly when Cory Doctorow introduced the term, but this blog post pretty well hashes out the concept

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

In this case the push for more money is not the problem but cost reduction is. The analogy of the honeymoon where you start a relationship and are careful to do all kinds of little nice things and then you start to take the other person for granted is closer to it, rather than the scenario of Google becoming play-for-play and pushing up ad loads to the human limit of withstanding.

For me the quotes reflect both that difference and my discomfort with the word “shit” which use to be just way too popular on HN and in startup culture though I think the situation has largely corrected itself.

As others have noted, from Cory Doctorow. But you're hearing it a lot recently because it's the mot du jour that people are lazily tossing around to mean "something that I don't like."

It's kind of funny sounding, it has the word "shit" so users of it can feel a bit edgy. It just means "bad"

Doctorow actually defines it pretty wonderfully.

It doesn’t just mean “bad”. It’s a name for the process that happens to VC funded businesses.

Doesn’t matter how he defines it. It matters how it’s used.

I haven't seen it applied out of the context in which Doctorow has used it... but I have only seen it on Hacker News.

Cory Doctorow

I thought it was older than last year, but I must be mixing up presentations I saw recently by Cory. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification

It feels older to me, too. It definitely gained a lot of momentum recently around Reddit's recent API pricing changes, but Google Trends shows it having a lot of interest in 2004 and then sporadic interest over the years.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=e...

I don't use Google Trends enough to know how to interpret that data, so maybe there's some quirk of Google Trends that makes it look more significant back then.

It would be awesome if some service had a similar feature to Google Ngram Viewer, but for content on the internet instead of books. Search interest isn't quite the same as how much it's being written in content.

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