this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
1686 points (95.0% liked)
Technology
60084 readers
4760 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Enshittification," an inevitable part of the cycle of capitalism...
Not really the right use I think. It was coined specifically to describe platforms' lifecycle of changing who they benefit. What's above is just constant churn in the attempt of infinite growth or just hanging onto market share trying to decide what people want (or tell them what they should want).
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.
A paid subscription service like O365 or spotify isn't too similar to the advertising "business partners" of a social media platform like tiktok. Of course language is descriptive rather than prescriptive but I feel like overusing this term loses the perceptive observation (and the message Doctorow wants to promote) of how these businesses work. Microsoft adding new features and spotify changing things to either make their app management easier (they claimed that's why they got rid of android widget for a while) or promote their own stuff doesn't seem to fit.
Normal part of monopolization.