Not just websites and online services but games, stores, restaurants, etc are they? Have you noticed significant quality reduction with nearly matching price increases?
Yes.
Welcome to capitalism
Welcome to the money printing scheme so called ‘Quantitative Easing’. That’s what injects ‘empty money’ into real estate which doesn’t directly impacts basic good prices short term but it does in the long term through the rent costs (delayed effect 5 - 10 years)
So I think the term “enshittification” has been latched onto and goatse’d by the community at large to the point people are now using it to mean “things getting worse because business.”
I am pretty sure everything is getting worse because business.
That’s exactly what enshittification means. That’s the name we’ll call this stage of capitalism.
It’s not really. Sure, the end result is “things getting worse because of business”, but enshittification specifically refers to the practice of hoarding users with a quality product, to then extract maximum profit from them while shedding any semblance of quality.
The meanings of words changes over time
That’s NOT what enshittification was coined as, and there’s plenty of other words that already mean what you want. Stop diluting terms that we need.
See also: Terrorism, Nazi
It’s an idiotic word and it’s already been abused to where it’s meaningless. I don’t care anymore whatever argument someone is making the second I see this dumbass word. It’s become the lazy go-to instead of people pointing to specifics for their arguments. Nah, just easier to generically say things are shitty now.
Yes.
When will Lemmy find a new buzz word?
The term that Doctrow coined, “enshittification”, doesn’t mean “something I don’t like”. It’s not a synonym for “bad”. It specifically referred to online service companies transitioning from a growth phase to a monetization phase.
Many of these companies have relatively high fixed costs, like paying engineers, and relatively low variable costs, like server time. It doesn’t matter how many customers using your online service there are – you still have to pay the engineers to go write the software behind the thing. But each additional customer likely uses only a tiny amount of server resources. The result is that it’s really, really bad for one of these companies to have a small customer count. They want to grow as quickly as possible, to get out of the period where they don’t have many customers. So the norm is for them to offer as favorable terms as possible, accept losing money, to try to grow their customer base as quickly as possible. When they get it to be fairly large, then they worry about being profitable; that’ll normally be doing something that makes them less-desirable to users than they had been, since they’re less-worried about attracting users at that point. That transition, when they become less-desirable, is what Doctrow was talking about.
So, for example, when interest rates went up a while back and capital became more expensive for many companies at the same time, losing money for extended periods of time became a problem, and many had to shift to a monetization phase at about the same time.
But the term doesn’t refer to just anything being undesirable.
Most companies don’t do the kind of degree of growth-phase-to-monetization-phase shift that online companies do, because they don’t have as much weight on fixed costs. There are some economies of scale to restaurants – McDonalds can more-easily afford to do R&D relative to a mom-and-pop – but a lot of their costs are tied to the amount of product they’re selling. Ingredients, labor of people at the restaurant, buildings.
I agree that this term was meant for online businesses but we can see the same concept happening with brands as well.
You build your image around a good product/service (ex. Fast food being cheap, tasty, and a source of calories) but then once your brand is an established go-to (i.e. McDonald’s, Oreo, Apple, whatever) you do the work to make that product cheaper to produce, even if it means a marginal decrease in quality, and prop it up behind the facade of the brand.
What we are reaching now is the point where companies are trying to toe that line of not losing customers but still making sales. But customers are starting to see that drop in quality, and with their purchasing power being squeezed, they’re taking notice. So we have a couple words for it that are becoming more popular. Shrinkflation is an example, but overall I think it still ties back to the concept of what enshittification meant. Build a brand, get the customers, cut your expenses, hope most of them don’t notice.
There are a lot of people saying “but enshittification means websites” but the fact is, it describes a business model that a lot of companies are following that ends up in a shitty product. It may not be what the word exactly meant but unless someone gets another term that fits popularized, it still fits and it’s not inaccurate to use.
I see, so it sums up as companies are switching from customer acquisition mode to money farming mode which will always be a shittier deal.
It’s usually more specifically user hostile monetization based on their dominant market position from taking losses for so long that their competitors couldn’t compete.
Part of the problem is that most monetization is inherently user hostile. If it wasn’t, they would have implemented it by now.
Vulture capitalism has a similar trend of taking something that works and running it into the ground for profits.
While there are different ways that products and services can be ruined while chasing profits for discussions about those differences, the underlying ‘something that was working well is getting shittier and shittier’ is a reasonable expansion for common usage when people care more about the outcome than the actual steps to get there.
Most certainly. I find every business is striving to make their operations very smooth and the customers operations to be very janky unless they do as the company wants. Everything is done to make any deviation from the form of payment and the way things are done are highly discourage. Mainly by not devlivering any documentation. The website is the documentation. Places increasingly don’t even have an option to download a pdf statement of any kind. All are seeking to be the only option were you pay whatever price they charge for whatever quality you get. At this point I literally am not buying anything that I don’t just have to to get by even when I have the disposable income to do so.
It’s pretty much inevitable under capitalism, because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
I wish I had a rubber stamp of the words “Marx baybeee” every time someone complains about something he already described ~200 years ago
The problem on the other hand is that other systems tend to not function either, and usually in a worse way over time.
Yup I have. However, in a weird way I’m becoming more grateful for what I have, and my family/friends. I did realize I had become very dependent on new media and new things, and this is surprisingly making me a bit less materialistic.
Movies are shittier, so why am I spending money on them. New games are shittier, why am I paying day one prices? I can wait a few months for the new graphics card when it’s cheaper, or any hardware. It’s funny, I’m actually paying less now than I ever have, my budgets are low, and it’s all thanks to them being so greedy and demanding.
I’m in a similar state but I thought I was just getting old. But with age comes greater ability to not give a fuck so maybe it’s a little of column A, a little of column B.
Enshittified used to have a very specific meaning in the lifecycle of a product/service. These days it just means “getting worse”. And yes, everything is getting worse all the time.
I don’t think a lot of people are necessarily using it wrong, though. Doctorow illustrated his concept in the context of online services but I think it really applies to a broader dynamic of modern markets in general.
Take films. Film studios want to maximize profits. They buy up competitors to reduce the number of players in the market, cut costs by producing more formulaic content, increase profits by upping their cut from theaters and expediting their premieres onto their individual streaming platforms, and spend more on advertising and cross promotions than they do on just making good movies. Couple that with a ceaseless focus on universes and crossover content and TV adaptations to ensure that it’s not possible to just enjoy a movie, you need to invest in a line of products. Theaters in turn make their experiences worse because they’re at the mercy of film studios throwing their weight around unchecked and are bleeding money, so they cut corners and charge more for tickets and are still closing left and right leaving only the small handful of big players. The end result for the consumer is that movies cost more, the theater experience sucks, the quality of films have gotten worse, there are fewer options with less originality, and the only way to enjoy them when they leave theaters is to subscribe to a streaming service or buy them digitally for 3x more than they used to cost physically.
Just about every major industry these days has a comparable dynamic at play. It’s the inevitable outcome of infinite growth models realizing that markets are finite.
So you could say that enshitification is being enshitified.
(The meaning of) enshittification is being enshittified
Even my shit is getting enshittified more and more by the minute!
Your local restaurant has probably raised prices slightly but nowhere near as much as their costs have actually gone up.
Many of the big restaurant group-owned places near me have raised prices and enshittified service, but my trusty local places are holding ground.
This is very true actually. I’ve always been a fan of shopping/consuming local but one thing I have noticed in the last few years is that big store products cost just about as much as local products these days, but their quality is significantly worse.
I feel like the issue here is ALL very large businesses are enshitifiing. It’s not the restaurants fault, the services they use to operate are also getting worse while charging more. Enshitification is a trickle-down economic model.
When Luby’s got rid of their little old ladies pushing the commandment/ tea cart around, i just bought the recipe book from Half Price and stopped going. If I’m going to have to get up to refill my sweet tea, I’m gonna do it in my own house… Most likely while neked…
Edit: condiment cart, fuck this keyboard is getting worse every week
Only the expensive local places in my area are still good. The cheaper ones would be too NSFL for Kitchen Nightmares
Yes.
Enshittification, as Doctorow defined it, is really just a particular version of a much broader dynamic, and it happens, and is happening, to nearly everything on which a profit can be made. And if you expand the definition even more, it actually happens and is happening to nearly everything by which one is rewarded for providing value to others.
Broadly, what happens is that self-serving scumbags gravitate to and come to hold positions of authority in organizations, then arrange things to maximize benefit to themselves. They do that in two general ways - by shaping the organization so that self-serving scumbags like them can prosper, and by chipping away at everything of value that’s offered by the organization while running up prices as much as possible, in order to maximize the benefit to themselves.
Just as it happens, as Doctorow noted, with social media, they depend on market dominance, name recognition, political patronage, regulatory capture and the like to ensure that they can retain their market share even as they offer consistently less value for more money, so they can pocket more themselves. And since the organization is shaped to allow them to get away with that (they deliberately move away from likely earlier held virtues like focusing on quality, value, integrity, and the like - the things for which the organization was rewarded back when they were starting out), steadily more and more self-serving scumbags come to hold positions of authority, and the broad dynamic gets ever more entrenched.
It happens with all consumer goods and services sooner or later, from television to cars to breakfast cereal.
Notably, it also happens wth organizations like charities, advocacy groups and unions - as they become more influential, they can and do shift from providing a service for which they’re rewarded to rewarding themselves ever more by providing ever less actual value.
And though Lemmy won’t like this, it’s not unique to capitalism, since it happens with any hierarchical system from which value is expected and can be derived. In fact, it’s the heart of the reason that state communism so consistently fails - because state communism provides a particularly easy method by which self-serving scumbags can maximize the benefit to themselves by offering as little benefit as possible to those they’re meant to serve and relying on market dominance to ensure that they continue to hold their positions in spite of their general failure to provide anything of value to anyone else.
Broadly, yes - it’s happening to pretty much everything, and has been happening to pretty much everything to which it could happen for all of history, and will continue to. The only way I can see to avoid it is to somehow eliminate self-serving scumbags entirely, so that all that’s left are people who have the necessary integrity to hold to a virtue of providing value to others and only rewarding themselves as they genuinely deserve, and I don’t see that happening any time soon, if ever.
This should be a manifesto. Well written!
It’salways the self serving parasites without empathy that destroys everything.
Are they good for anything at all? Do they push innovation or productivity? Like would a company without these people be crushed by companies with such people (not counting on them using dirty tricks) like Marx iron law (IIRC)?
I’d love to read more about this, but all I can find is always always tainted either by some status quo idea or basing everything on capitalism or dream thinking like communism or anarchism which just doesn’t work because of these kind if people.
Can we detect non-empatic people and not allow them to manage people? Would that be a good first step?
Are they good for anything at all?
No.
They’re a part of the system, so it seems like they need to be a part of the system, but actually it’s that the system has been warped to accommodate them.
Do they push innovation or productivity?
They specifically push it, but if and only if there’s an angle by which they can parasitize off of it. They don’t originate anything. Ever.
Like would a company without these people be crushed by companies with such people…?
Probably.
I figured out long ago that that’s the case on a personal level. The specific way it works:
People competing for a position in a hierarchy have to make decisions that will impact their chances.
People with integrity, morals, ethics, empathy, principles, etc. will have some number of potential options that they simply will not choose. People with none of those things are not so constrained - they’re able to do absolutely whatever it takes to get what they want, entirely regardless of any other condiderations. So all other things being more or less equal, amoral, unprincipled, dishonest, sociopathic pieces of shit actuyallt have a competitive advantage in hierarchies.
I hadn’t before considered whether that’s the case between businesses, but I would assume so.
I’d love to read more about this, but all I can find is always always tainted either by some status quo idea or basing everything on capitalism or dream thinking like communism or anarchism which just doesn’t work because of these kind if people.
I’m actually an anarchist in large part because of all of this, but my anarchism is very much an ideal. There’s absolutely no way that current humanity could manage it on any sort of scale, so when I advocate for it, I’m really just trying to promote the mindset that will make it possible sometime in the future.
I actually think that anarchism will not only one day be possible, but, if humanity survives, it will be inevitable. It’s vessentiallybthe adulthood of society - the point at which collectively - not just situationally and individually - we’ll be able to live without mommy and daddy state making sure we behave.
Can we detect non-empatic people and not allow them to manage people? Would that be a good first step?
I’ve actually said before that if I could leave a message for the people who will end up trying to rebuild civilization out of the rubble we leave behind, it would be, “Whatever you do, don’t let psychopaths gain power.”
I think there’s no single thing that anyone could do to improve literally everything that would be more effective than to somehow implement an international effort to identify and isolate sociopaths and psychopaths - that they do more harm to the planet and its people than anything else, and by a considerable margin.
But I don’t see any way it could happen, if for no other reason than that the psychopaths and sociopaths in the relevant positions would prevent it.
Which is exactly why I thought of leaving a message for our heirs, in the hope that they’ll do a better job of it from the start. Which I think is the only real chance humanity has.
Transperancy is part of the solution and there are some basic tools built into the system like FOIA porcess, laws and regulation making process is technically public, finances are also publicly available…
That was enough to maintain the character of “democracy” until recently but with too much internet the oligarchy is being exposed and there is no pathe to modernize and reform the system.
And Ruling class is getting brazen to test the security apparatus ability to maintain the regime despite aggressively looting.
I don’t have the energy to type this out but this is the Manifesto of the parasite pretty much.
Nice note re how this is not Capitalism specific issue but our daddies sure as fuck perfected the extraction racket tho… More value means more chances to extract profit!
Fuck all y’all, I am getting paid today.
I’m not familiar with “manifesto of the parasite,” but I can guess what it refers to. And yes - they are parasites, in the purest sense of the term, and correctly and justly recognized as such.
And yeah - I don’t really fault people for condemning capitalism, since it is an especially destructive system, but I do fault them for too often taking the position that these sorts of things are exclusive to capitalism - as if, if we could only eliminate capitalism, all of the problems would vanish. The problems are more fundamental than that. They’re a function of institutionalized hierarchy, and capitalism is just one notable system by which hierarchies are established and institutionalized.
The problems are more fundamental than that. They’re a function of institutionalized hierarchy, and capitalism is just one notable system by which hierarchies are established and institutionalize
200%
not every “capitalist” society is a US style degeneracy
Lol all tankies and others down voting you because you won’t acknowledge their dream.
You’re right IMO.
Although I’d argue that they’ll all end up more or less that sooner or later. It’s baked in.
But I’d also argue that that’s the case with all systems by which some come to hold greater power and/or wealth than others, regardless of the details. The mere fact that some can hold greater power and/or wealth than others sooner or later leads to abuse of the system by the most determinedly greedy and power-hungry, and the least constrained by ethics, principles, empathy or integrity, and the system is ultimately degraded for their immediate benefit regardless of the harm done to others or to the system itself.
And 'round and 'round it goes…
No doubt but I would prefer to be in the denmark or Swiss stage of the cycle… What we got in US is just too rough and it is getting progressively more fuck faster and faster…
In last 10 years the hope got squeezed out of vast majority of population. And nobody is even shilling a trend reversal.
Oh, no doubt.
Analogously, systems like Switzerland and Denmark are like stately and well cared for cars. As they age and little bits here and there break down, they get ever closer to their inevitable end, but it’s a slow and halting process.
The US, on the other hand, is like a gigantic SUV/limo that somebody slapped together in their back yard, and that the Musks of the world drive the shit out of without bothering to even lift a finger to do the tiniest bit of maintenance or repair.
Over time, cultural institutions (i.e., not just individual stores or game companies, but the shared processes of running such companies) evolve to perpetuate themselves as efficiently as possible. This results in an accumulation of corner-cutting techniques over time that degrades the quality of everything they produce in the process of self-perpetuation.
But “enshittification” is something more specific: as originally defined by Cory Doctorow, it’s when a company convinces its investors to pay for something that attracts users without immediate profit, with the promise of future profit extraction once a large-enough user base is captured; then destroys its user experience to extract this profit; and in the process usually loses its user base before the investors have seen the promised returns.
games,
A AAA game over a decade ago cost $60. Players don’t want to pay that today. While the cost of development tools and engine design have gone down, asset costs have skyrocketed given the higher fidelity.
That has pushed a lot of games into the freemium model and relying on whales to fund the game. The market won’t buy what it says it wants.
stores,
Customer service has been atomized as, except for luxury goods, price always beats out over service. Because of this, stores are trying to drive down their bottom lines to nothing as a way to get more customers. Since customers won’t pay for good customer service, they don’t get it.
restaurants,
The labor market is extremely tight, leading to combative management and labor. In order to cut costs, restaurants have chosen to cheap out on food and/or raise prices to compensate.
no, i can’t. Because their solution to me not wanting to buy the stuff they’re currently making (because I want the stuff they used to make) is to make their current stuff even harder!
You’re saying “won’t” when I think you mean “can’t”… As in, the number of people who have that much disposable income has dropped to a point where there just aren’t enough people with the ability to pay… And instead of fighting to raise the minimum wage (and all wages in general), or lowering their prices to a point most people can afford, they’ve chosen to make shittier stuff
No, I mean won’t.
$60 a decade ago was worth far more than $60 now. Hell, Super Mario Bros 3 cost $50 at launch in 1994 and it isn’t like quality of life crashed that hard.
