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‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything (www.ft.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything::The term describes the slow decay of online platforms such as Facebook. But what if we’ve entered the ‘enshittocene’?

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Enshitification was coined by Cory Doctrow specifically for the tech space, because the tech space is uniquely poised to constantly shift and tweak a service-based product to manipulate users, creators, and the paying customers.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

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

This is on top of the normal problem of greed. Now I didn't read the article because it is pay walled (go figure). Is this article actually drawing a correct comparison to the definition of enshitification above, or is it just lazily ascribing the phenomenon of greed to that word?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Enshitification was coined by Cory Doctrow specifically for the tech space

You're not wrong it was coined this way, but he has referred to the process in other arenas where monopolies exist:

But it’s not just tech that faces the curse of bigness: your bank, your insurer, your beer company, the companies that make your eyeglasses and your athletic shoes — they’ve all run out of lands to conquer, but instead of weeping, they’re taking it out on you, with worse products that cost more.

Enshittification follows monopoly as sure as night follows day.