Why is Lemmy obsessed with the word "enshittification"?
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?
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 had no idea the term Luddite had any meaning beyond the colloquial definition of shunning technology in general. Thanks for giving me something to read about today.
I had no idea myself until just recently. The 99% Invisible podcast had a decent episode about it which I listened to that helped put it all into context.
The short story is that it was a labor movement trying to prevent mill owners from abusing workers by using automation to bleed the maximum productivity out of the fewest people. The Luddites would break into mills and smash the “infringing” machines. Tensions rose, the Luddites were eventually crushed, and the term Luddite was intentionally rebranded by capitalists to be synonymous with ignorant/anti-intellectual so that no one would ever want to associate with them again.
It’s genuinely criminal how badly their reputations got tarred; when I heard what they were actually about I was genuinely struck like “my god there WERE people who felt the way I do”. Like-- I’m literally a communist, I don’t believe there will ever be a point of human existence where meaningful, dignifying labor has been ‘abolished’; nor do I think we should aspire to that.
Automate away the drudgery, the sinecurial, and the tedious, sure, that’s all well and good and should be done; but that which lets a person create, to make something useful, that they could be proud of? Tech shouldn’t be eliminating that, and that very much feels like the future we’re going toward.
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.
You also made me think of this relevant quote by Lenin:
People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.
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.
Language is magic. Some electrical impulses cause a bunch of electrochemical reactions in a complicated pile of meat to make air vibrate, and at a distance another complicated pile of meat turns the waves into a similar series of electrical impulses.
Of all the unlikely stuff to happen to make use… that’s still just wild…
Ok, now what is causing it to happen? Is there any value in pointing out that it is happening, or should one look to the structures of society that make that kind of thing inevitable and repeatable in every facet of society?
I believe people hope it will stop the intentional degradation of products… it’s a natural process where products are solid to develop a reputation, people buy/use the product and recognize its quality, use grows, the company cuts back as much cost as possible (with quality suffering), in order to grow, or in some case even just start to make (Uber, Amazon) profit. The growth plan often includes this step either for continual operation or as part of a plan to pay for a buy out.
If the enshittified product manages to become entrenched, people have to use the lower quality product. The real step we need to take is to assume most big product pushes are temporarily good, and drop them when it’s convenient. If the growth model isn’t sustainable, it will lose favor.
We need to stop the corporate obsession of “green line go up and no go up means worse than down reeeee” mentality. Essentially late stage capitalism where green line still needs to go up but wages have stagnated
And that, everybody, is literally not the correct usage of “enshittification”.
Jk, but for real though, it’s not a direct synonym for “degraded” or “gets worse”. It’s more specific than that.
Plus, “literally” now literally has an alternative definition in the dictionary meaning “figuratively”. So y’know, maybe get over the needless linguistic prescriptivism.
The problem is that when a word means one thing and it’s anonym at the same time, it does make it hard to tell which one they’re using. Usually it’s easy to tell, but not always. It’s not about prescriptivism, rather utility. I’m fine with language changing, but I hate losing useful words.
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 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.
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 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.
Exactly. Whatever product or service a business provides, once it goes public, the primary goal becomes profit–everything else is secondary and subject to removal if it promotes the primary objective. Shareholders don’t care about the long-term viability of the business–once it peaks, they’ll sell and move on. Basically a financial swarm of locusts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean at least when it comes to design it was shit in the past cause either it was being done by people who didn’t know much about design or it was something new and people didn’t know what would be a good design for it. Now it’s shit cause making it shit in certain ways let’s companies make more money.
Because they seem to love Cory Doctorow, while not knowing he was involved in the media harassment and witch hunting of a famous Chinese tech girl Naomi Wu.
Did you actually read this? I don’t think you did. Either that or you’re being extremely dishonest right now.
Doctorow is briefly mentioned in passing in this blog post. His only involvement was a single tweet that in absolutely no way mentioned or even implied it was about Wu. Despite that she decided to make it about her anyway, and declared that Cory was leading some kind of witch hunt against her based on no evidence other than her own decision that she automatically counted as a “garbage person” in his mind. We have zero evidence that this was actually Cory’s intent, just her assertion that it must have been his meaning.
To take that and turn it into “he was involved in the media harassment and witch hunting of a famous Chinese tech girl Naomi Wu” isa disgustingly disingenuous twisting of the available facts.
It’s not impossible that Cory shares some blame in the events described - no one is perfect, every hero is some kind of bastard, yada yada - but the evidence you’ve offered doesn’t come remotely close to backing up the claims you’re making, and it’s dangerously irresponsible to share such a claim on such a flimsy basis.
Yeah, I did read it more times than you did, which counts as atleast one. Cory has a lot of reach in mainstream media, has done AMAs on Reddit, and has strings he can pull for people. Defending Sarah’s demonic behaviour while calling Naomi a garbage person is what he chose to do. It is exactly how western establishment systematically shits on people, even though Naomi has been one of the only popular Chinese tech people to make it big.
Oh, what was Reddit again ? Ah, yes, that ad driven company that filed IPO and probably fully embraced A.I. by now and is said to be full of bots, and immediately shadow-bans Tor and VPN users since years /s
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.
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.
Yes, they are tankies. Arguably tankies are No True Leftist or they wouldn't be fellating right-wing regimes, but at least purportedly and self-identified...ly... they are not only "leftist" but "Communist", ML is Marxism-Leninism after all.
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