I think enshitification will be the word of the year this year
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 call this enshittification.
Cory's definition doesn't really apply to B2B transactions (e.g. the word makes no sense for RedHat especially given abundance of other distros).
Unity was running $200M in losses on $500M in revenue, per quarter. And they've never been profitable (since going public). A government can safely print money if it has the economic growth and tax base to support it; but if it doesn't have that, over enough time, you get: Inflation. The bill always comes due.
Enshitification is just company-localized inflation after unsupportable financial engineering. There are really good examples in Doctorow's original piece; most of them actually cover the more-common stagflationary effect, but stagflation is just inflation through a different lens. It really doesn't have much to do with B2B versus B2C; its intimately related to attempts toward increasing profit margins, but the critical piece is the path the company walked to get there; and, in the most severe cases, the fact that they should have stopped walking and died three miles back.
Or, maybe Doctorow would disagree with all of that. But that's the fun part of inventing such a meme-able, excellent term; it outgrows you!
Enshitification = more profits is unfortunately correct in my mind, but most people use it with a much different meaning. I don't think Unity is going to break all profit records soon
It may work. It may work in the short term, but cause collapse in the long term. It may fail in the short term. All are enshitification.
There are two keys elements in my mind:
- the product gets worse
- in an attempt to increase profit
so even databrokers saw that word and were like "nah"
Like a politician shutting down thought and debate by simply labeling something "socialism", half the people using the word don't really know what it means, or at least, they don't know the original meaning. The word comes to be fake form of intellectual sophistication. A politician says the word and people think "oh, he knows the fancy word, he must be right", and thought ends, further discussion is difficult because nobody would dare speak in defense of something after it has been labeled. Just hearing the word raises certain peoples blood pressure 10 points and causes them to raise their voice.
And yet, I'm happy to see the good guys play psyops for a change. Like the world "socialism", "enshitification" will originally mean a specific social phenomenon, but most people will come to use it as a catch-all word for all bad corporate behavior and it will shut down thought and just hearing the world will rile people up to fight against the evil corporations. And I'm okay with that; words have power and, again, I'm glad to see words being invented to help the common people organize.
I know which one I would say in polite company.
I think it's crass nature gives it a sort of charm and really gets the point across.
It is sort of like a subset of anticompetitive behavior (dumping) but done by a small player using investor funds instead of a large company throwing weight around. Or in a field where the “cost” is something nebulous like ads, so it is harder to actually spot.
A weakness of the name is that it invites the broader definition, I think.
It's about making a product worse than it needs to be, by terrible pricing and ad infestation, in order to recoup the investment of years of underpricing to capture the market and kill competitors.
This is exactly what Unity has done.