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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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Better I say it before dang or another mod says it: Your comment, especially the unwarranted retreat to antagonistic expressions, doesn't contribute to a worthwhile discussion. I'd ask that you try to angle your comments to be more constructive.

What in particular do you mean by "antagonistic expressions"?

He forgot to put a little spin on it.

This doesn't seem like tech-based enshittification. If anything, this is a low tech and super simple (albeit not as satisfying) solution to the problem of replacing pins. We need to stop using that word before it loses all meaning.

Think of it as "tech" the industry, not "tech" as in "new technology".

Its more related to the fundamental bravado of walking into an industry you lack a deep knowledge or understanding of, but still have a strong belief you can "do it better".

Not a bowler, but this looks like the way you would expect things to work given how simple it is

>> We need to stop using that word before it loses all meaning.

So we're going to take all the fun out of the word "enshitification"? How disappointingly meta...

No, this is exactly enshittification, degrading the end-user experience purely for profit reasons.

Let's go back to the source, Cory Doctorow's article:

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...

It would seem not to apply here. Bowling alleys don't really have a two-sided marketplace; they don't have business customers to sell the fruits of abusing their bowling customers, if you could call subjecting bowlers to a more annoying set of pins "abuse".

I don't see the business-customer aspect as essential for enshittification to happen. In the end, it's about the platforms wanting to maximize value for themselves, once they've captured the user base. A third party of business customers being involved, and maybe also abused, is rather incidental, and makes no difference for the users who end up with the bad experience.

>I don't see the business-customer aspect as essential for enshittification to happen

If you don't make this distinction, then "enshittification" is no different from "P/E-style value extraction" which has been around long before tech industry. The destruction of Sears was done purely on a profit motive but did not happen in the same manner of tech platforms today.

Furthermore, I don't see how a bowling alley is now a "platform". These are individual businesses taking cost cutting measures to keep the lights on because the sport is dying.

The bowlers are not captured here. Even if we use the reduced definition, not every corner cut in the world would count as enshittification.

And users having a bad experience is even more broad. Enshittification is a specific method/cause. I would not say it's incidental.

Did you forget the part about not killing people?

"Forget" might be a strong word for something not mentioned in the article or comment chain.

Significant cost savings. Having an employee die can be the death of a business.

And that really gets to the heart of it. Safety-ism being played as a trump card is another great example. People confuse claims of enshittification with some kind of Marxist, class-based discourse, which in this case would be nullified by concerns for some worker, but that's not what it's about. Enshittification says that there can be no transcendent values, like aesthetics or adherence to tradition, but instead that money rules over all.

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