Term Du Jour: Enshittification

LeftyLoungeLizard

Roadie
TGF Recording Artist
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Stumbled upon this reading about "Shrinkflation" and found it highly amusing - because it is, once again, true.

Also got 2023 Word of the Year honors. Bravo!

Enshittification​



Enshittification is the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products such as Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, Twitter, Bandcamp, Reddit, Uber, and Unity. The term was used by writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022, and the American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year. Doctorow has also used the term platform decay to describe the same concept.
 
Enshittification is the perfect term for the idiocy of "profits/share prices must always go up" capitalism and pairing that with e.g services where you will eventually reach a point where everyone is using them and new people aren't coming in. So to keep making numbers go up, they get more expensive and/or the quality of service goes down.

The end scenario is always that people simply move to something else that offers a better deal, or stop using the service. But the people running these companies don't care because they will just take their money and go on to successfully ruin the next company.

For a fast-tracked enshittification and gutting of companies, you can just follow what Elon Musk does. He's already ruined Twitter, and is working hard to do the same for Tesla.

You can look into Jack Welch's way of leading General Electric as the template for the short-term profit driven, ultimately dooming the company way of management so popular with MBAs hired to "improve" companies. Nokia getting gutted and prepped for sale by Stephen Elop is a great example of how this goes.
 
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