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Why is Lemmy obsessed with the word "enshittification"? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I see it referenced constantly here, not quite as much on Reddit. I know what it means, but just wondering why such the popularity over on this side of the fence?

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 2 months ago (10 children)

I think a lot of people also misuse the word and use it as a catch-all for companies doing something they don’t like.

Raising prices is not enshittification, that’s inflation.

Not paying employees well is not enshittification, that’s under-compensation.

YouTube putting more ads in their videos including when the video is paused isn’t enshittification that’s… wait no that is enshittification.

Enshittification refers to offering the same service (often free, or at least with an option to pay more) but making it worse in order to squeeze you onto a paid (or higher paid) tier of service. This sounds good to shareholders but ultimately it alienates their customers and often leads to a company dying.

[–] owenfromcanada 11 points 2 months ago (5 children)

I understand it to mean the general life cycle of corporations: first valuing users, then shareholders, then themselves, then dying. A quote from Doctorow:

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, 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, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

By that definition, everything you described is a likely consequence of enshittification (paying employees less, charging more, more ads, etc.). But the word itself refers to how the company's values shift over time.

[–] sudo42 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

This seems similar to Wall Street's "profits must increase every quarter" approach. Once a business gets somewhat popular, Wall St. types start sniffing around and offer to take it public. Once public, Wall St. wrings more profits out of the business every quarter until service/products collapse and customers flee elsewhere.

[–] crossover 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

At a certain point, a company’s primary product becomes its stock. Share buybacks, short term gains, etc become the strategy. The goal is no longer to create value for customers, but to create value for shareholders.