Not just websites and online services but games, stores, restaurants, etc are they? Have you noticed significant quality reduction with nearly matching price increases?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Welcome to capitalism
Consolidation in markets has led to high prices, poor service, poor competition and bloated oligopolies.
Governments should be intervening to break up these oligopolies but have been captured by these vested interests.
Oh you mean that unregulated, capitalism gets out of hand and it needs the government to regulate these means of production to maintain fair markets and a working economy?
Gee whiz, if only such a school of thought had a name.
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)
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.
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.
Yes.
Well, except for things that aren’t intended to be profitable. Lemmy doesn’t seem to be any worse.
Ok, that’s true. Basically everything open source and volunteer. Everything not run solely by the capitalists.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yes.
Sure fucking seems that way, doesn’t it?
Yes.
From my personal experience in American I do feel many aspects are becoming shittier.
Politics
The economy versus pay
Families letting go of simple traditions and culture for bland generalized capitalist consumerism.
Worse and worse flights and other public transportation.
It honestly shocks me that Americans are just okay with being treated this way. Republicans want to call back to an imagined golden era but I think looking at many other countries there should be a call for a golden future.
It honestly shocks me that Americans are just okay with being treated this way.
Boomers are bootlickers and that’s what they been teaching younger people…
It takes hellva commitment to get “woke” on how the regime really operates. Most people don’t have mental and emotional bandwidth for it.
This is the key feature of the system too
Great point, caring is honestly exhausting
