This site is absolute catnip for HN. Do we know what motivates the site? Long-term SEO content authority reputation building before pivoting to affiliate links?
As to why it exists: when generation of content costs next to nothing, I think that question is harder to pin. The basic answer is "clicks".
The two companies I looked up were accurately described, according to my own experience with them.
In fact, the one industry where enshittification is widely embraced is our own, so I guess maybe it's projection?... Most other goods and services are not deliberately designed to get worse over time. We're the masters of giving people something cool for free and then progressively worsening their experience until they're forced to pay.
Things like appliances don't get worse on purpose. They sometimes get worse as a combination of market pressures and regulations. Take fridges: you can buy a full-sized kitchen fridge for less than $600, that's kinda crazy? And yes, it probably won't last a lifetime, and they won't make it serviceable because it's not worth servicing given today's labor costs - if your bonded-and-certified repairman quotes you $500, you're going to toss it out either way.
> within days of closing a Cornell partner on the new board emailed the CEO to ask, "Is there fraud going on???"
(Italicised part is the link) linking to [1].
When I search that page, I cannot find the word 'fraud' let alone anything like that quote.
It's highly suspicious when a linked claim does not support the claim.
[0]: https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-cookware-got-worse-on-...
[1]: https://fortune.com/2024/11/19/crock-pot-explosion-cornell-c...
Could be a copy/paste error, or could be an LLM trying to cite its own work by just looking at a list of sources used and guessing which one the claim came from.
Keyana Sapp is the writer behind it: https://www.worseonpurpose.com/authors/keyana-sapp
What struck most of all is the deep disconnect between author and authority. The tools one (tools are better than they've even been) stood out as a great example of this. People like to say things got worse, but it read like somebody asked a LLM to show how they got worse, ignoring all the ways in which they got better. A human who'd ever used tools would recognise the omission.