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Cause it's one big part of why the Fediverse and Lemmy exist in the first place.
We wouldn't need all this decentralization overhead if centralized sites were trustworthy and focussed on serving their users. The fact that they are not is what leads to privacy violations and enshittification, hence why people created the Fediverse and why we are here (at least most of us I presume).
Selection bias. Lemmy users by default are probably more sensitive to/negative about enshittification than those on reddit.
Many of us came here in response to the enshittification of reddit.
The term "enshittification" is a useful neologism because without it we'd need half a sentence to get the same concept across.
I'd argue most of us are older but not too old to remember what the internet was as well.
"What shit are you talking about?" asked the Redditors as they gleefully wallowed in the shit.
It's the reason we are all here...
Because most people on lemmy are here because of it.
People here are far more likely to be anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, pro-privacy, etc. those groups all circle the same kind of Cory Doctorow/Matt Stoller/Luddite world where the word enshittification became popular.
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.
catch-all for companies doing something they don’t like.
Yes.
But it screws up entire markets:
new platforms offer useful products and services at a loss, as a way to gain new users. Once users are locked in, the platform then offers access to the userbase to suppliers at a loss, and once suppliers are locked-in, the platform shifts surpluses to shareholders.
So, it
gives users a warped sense of what they deserve by giving away a costly service, and running competitors out of business.
Then it puts a stranglehold on suppliers by holding users hostage.
Then it fucks everybody by extracting value for shareholders.
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
It doesn't have to be a paid service, it can also refer to (and usually does) a two-sided market. For example, a site with free users and advertisers. The platform first gains a critical mass of users, then they switch to focus more on the paying advertisers to increase value for shareholders. Over time, the main focus becomes the advertisers.
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.
This place is noticeably more anticorporate - which makes sense because corporations tend to be dicks - and leftist. Enshittification is a fairly apt term for what goes on.
and leftist
Wasn't there some controversy a while back due to the political beliefs of the Lemmy developers and the instance they run (lemmy.ml)? Maybe I'm misremembering.
I'd guess because since reddit accelerated it's enshitification, the people who really cared about it moved to lemmy. The people who didn't care as much stayed behind. So the people over here care about it much more.
Sorry, this is the third incorrect "it's" that I read today, and if I don't point out it should be "its" I'm going to explode.
I'm sorry good sir have a nice day.
I think it's happening more and more in the tech industry - one theory I heard was that rising interest rates meant companies couldn't just take out loans that were practically free money, so they're cracking down on monetizing every nook and cranny.
Reddit was no exception. Many of us left this thing we once loved because of it, and came here. So on top of industry trends, there's a huge selection bias among us Lemmings.
I’m new here but I’m here precisely because of the enshittification of Reddit.
Honestly though, now that I think about it, a huge chunk of my digital experience has been enshittified. Technology and software that used to wow me still wows me at the surface but frustrates me at my core. Some UI elements and design seem outright hostile.
Maybe I’m just misremembering the past or was more patient back then. Reddit certainly has enshittified though.
Because Lemmy is one attempt to do the exact opposite. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Also, Cory Doctorow's troll army is working full time.*
*(Just joking but I refuse to do the sarcastic cute S thing)
So you wrote a whole sentence instead? 💀
It's not about effort - it's a matter of aesthetics.
You're damn right I did.
Reddit is inside the walls of enshittification. Reddit kowtows to the techbro narrative. Dissenting voices do appear there as they aren't a full blown censorship. By and large the reddit userbase has historically been in aligned with big tech.
Selection bias. There’s plenty of overlap between the groups of people who know about it, care about it, use FOSS, use Lemmy etc. It’s basically a prominent characteristic of the stereotypical Lemmy user. We’re still a small and surprisingly homogenous group of people. If Lemmy ever grows like Mastodon, you’ll begin to see more diversity.
There’s also something you could call the “fish out of water” bias. If you’re not LGBT, you’ll suddenly notice how many LGBT people there are on Mastodon. If you’re not into ML, you’re going to notice the people who are.
I see it referenced constantly here, not quite as much on Reddit.
It's a fairly new term.
Reddit is bots and AI, and hasn't been trained on new words.
It lets ppl describe late capitalism without using those words or even knowing that’s what they’re describing.
Were stuck Don’t Look Up style in a cycle of trying to find a way to explain and enumerate the things happening around us without pointing to their precursors even when we remember them from our own lives and experiences.
This is the correct answer. These "things are getting worse" terms are on the right track, but they don't describe why things are getting worse.
Class-based systems like feudalism and capitalism have overarching rising and falling phases, and in the late phases, exploitation of our labor increases drastically as the ruling classes fight over a declining surplus. This has rippling effects to every other aspect of society, from how hard we're forced to work, to the degradation of media, art, politics, etc.
It started 40 years ago, when a man was not allowed to fix his printer. We didn't have the word enshittification at the time but even then it was understood what happens when technology abuses its users in order to enrich its creators.
I'm just glad people stopped inserting the word "literally" everywhere. Literally language enshitification.
Sometimes I've seen it used legitimately when a service gets noticeably slower or more confusing over time as misfeatures keep getting added on. At the same time, I often see it just get applied when people don't like change. It just the latest in a long string of phrases or words that mean "you made a change I don't like."
I mean, a huge number of redditors moved here because of reddit enshittification.
It's funny that you used the phrase "this side of the fence", because the fence in that metaphor is exactly the line marking the territory of "enshittification" and "anti-enshittification" ^^
While there are thousands of communities on Lemmy, there are a few topics that get a lot of attention. Linux/programming is one of those, and the enshittification trend is particularly pronounced in the tech sector. Another big topic is workers' rights and other grass-roots movements, which again deal largely with fighting against corporate greed (embodied in the enshittification trend). The intersection of these two major topics (and possibly others) means you'll see more of that here right now.
Cause Cory Doctorow is a hero ?
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/112038663883385719
I think it's just everywhere now. I see it on Tumblr too.
It's because we were given a name for something that didn't have a name before but was everywhere.
This is a great thing. With a definition we can understand and discuss the topic.
Remember when things were better, before all the enshittification ? Pepperidge Farms remembers
I'm only here because I'm pissed at the enshitification of elsewhere. Of course Imma talk about it.
Because quite literally everything in the world is a victim of it, and we're basically trying to raise awareness about it so that it doesn't spread any further.
Not that raising awareness about something on a less than mainstream social platform is gonna do much, but still, at least we can escape the platforms that already suffered from enshittification.
Because "willful, profit-oriented degradation of quasi-monopolistic services" just doesn't sound nice, so a man who's passionate about that sort of stuff came up with a better word for the concept, and other people who are passionate about that sort of stuff picked it up. Those same people ended up leaving Twitter and Reddit when they underwent that process and congregated around the fediverse.
It's like the weeping angels from doctor who, the moment you take your eyes off the shit waves, you're covered in it.
I also like the phrase "rot economy", though it does reach a little wider
New word for old phenomena