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Staying opinionated as you grow

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Re: Staying opinionated as you grow

#21

Post by hlassiege »

jdpage wrote: post #2

Point of order: "enshittification" does not mean what the author's using it to mean. It does not just mean "the product got worse". It means "the product was purposefully made worse in order to capture additional value from the customer," i.e. a rug pull. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd hate to see such a useful term for corporate malfeasance diluted.

I get the impression I hit a sensitive spot with my use of "enshittification" :)

Sorry about that. I realize this term has a very strict meaning in English, but it's a bit less true in my language (French).

I responded to this in another comment above, but basically I was using the term to encompass everything that contributes to degrading a product. Everything that makes it more complex, often tied to company growth (I started a company in 2012 that's now 700 people).

But I get the point. I see this touches on another topic around corporate malpractice. I honestly wasn't even aware of that.

Now I know :)

Re: Staying opinionated as you grow

#22

Post by watwut »

MangoToupe wrote: post #19
btilly wrote: post #9

This brings to mind the Tony Hsieh quote, "You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down." All successful startups are fighting a battle against entropy. And entropy is becoming indistinguishable from all the other companies out there. Which means losing what made them succeed in the first place. This is why company culture is important. You need to know what your values are. And then you ne…

> You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down. This reads more like some corporate-aimed PR than earnest words that left the mouth of a human

It is actually true. If you have an option to defraud people and dont take it, then you actually have "not defrauding" as a value.

If you take bigger salary in exchange of defrauding people, say by denying insurance payment to people who should have it, you dont have "not defrauding" as a value.

Re: Staying opinionated as you grow

#23

Post by btilly »

MangoToupe wrote: post #19
btilly wrote: post #9

This brings to mind the Tony Hsieh quote, "You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down." All successful startups are fighting a battle against entropy. And entropy is becoming indistinguishable from all the other companies out there. Which means losing what made them succeed in the first place. This is why company culture is important. You need to know what your values are. And then you ne…

> You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down. This reads more like some corporate-aimed PR than earnest words that left the mouth of a human

And yet, they left the mouth of a human.

The point that he was explaining when I saw the quote was why the hiring process at Zappos had a "culture fit" part of the interview process. Because you can't maintain a culture, if you have employees who aren't aligned on values. Maintaining this requires passing up on opportunities to hire people who will be productive, because you think that they will undermine the culture.

The importance of culture as a value to the organization is demonstrated by passing up on opportunities that would undermine it. Even if those opportunities are otherwise good.

Re: Staying opinionated as you grow

#24

Post by MangoToupe »

btilly wrote: post #23
MangoToupe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down. This reads more like some corporate-aimed PR than earnest words that left the mouth of a human

And yet, they left the mouth of a human. The point that he was explaining when I saw the quote was why the hiring process at Zappos had a "culture fit" part of the interview process. Because you can't maintain a culture, if you have employees who aren't aligned on values. Maintaining this requires passing up on opportunities to hire people who will be productive, because you think that they will undermine the culture…

The semantics are fine, putting aside the bullshit about corporate culture. It just sounds like a press release rather than natural language. The key signal here is “opportunities”.

Re: Staying opinionated as you grow

#25

Post by topaz0 »

hlassiege wrote: post #20
pettertb wrote: post #7

"They get worse because they need to keep pleasing new users, new needs, address every edge case." That is not what enshittification is about, and not who it is about. You don't enshittify to please users, you do it to please shareholders.

Fair point. I realize that "enshittification" has a more specific meaning in English (I'm french). My bad I was using it in a broader sense, connecting it to my previous company (700 people, I co-founded it in 2012). I was thinking more about all the factors that increase product complexity, and it's far from being just about shareholders: * The more people you add to a company, the more complexity you add because in…

If you're interested in the specific thing that other people mean by that word, the original Cory Doctorow essay that coined it is well worth a read: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

Of course he followed it up with a book, so there's that as well if you want a deeper dive, but the essay is fairly comprehensive at least in laying out what he intends by the term.

Re: Staying opinionated as you grow

#26

Post by btilly »

MangoToupe wrote: post #24
btilly wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, they left the mouth of a human. The point that he was explaining when I saw the quote was why the hiring process at Zappos had a "culture fit" part of the interview process. Because you can't maintain a culture, if you have employees who aren't aligned on values. Maintaining this requires passing up on opportunities to hire people who will be productive, because you think that they will undermine the culture…

The semantics are fine, putting aside the bullshit about corporate culture. It just sounds like a press release rather than natural language. The key signal here is “opportunities”.

The human in question was a CEO for around 20 years. People who spend that long in the C-suite absorb a certain amount of corporate language.

And while you may consider corporate culture to be bullshit, others don't. Where others includes every entrepreneur who built a large company that I've ever seen speak on the subject.

I've been lucky enough to see good versus bad corporate cultures first hand. So I also fit into that other bucket. Though admittedly more looking at the issue from somewhere near the bottom, rather than the view from the top.

Re: Staying opinionated as you grow

#27

Post by moravak1984 »

jdpage wrote: post #2

Point of order: "enshittification" does not mean what the author's using it to mean. It does not just mean "the product got worse". It means "the product was purposefully made worse in order to capture additional value from the customer," i.e. a rug pull. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd hate to see such a useful term for corporate malfeasance diluted.

Yes, pedantry is justified in this case.

Froggies doing wrong cultural appropriation again... maybe the "Emilia Perez syndrome" is becoming a thing.

Re: Staying opinionated as you grow

#28

Post by cdoctorow »

jdpage wrote: post #18
joshbuddy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Cory recently said in a podcast we can use it to mean "product got worse", so I've become less pedantic on this point fwiw. (I think it was in the episode of Adam Conover from about a month ago)

Hmm. I am tentatively holding to my position, because I think it's useful to have a separate word, but I'll go track down the episode and see if he elaborates on that further. Thanks!

This is specifically what I've written on the subject (I quote this in the book):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi...

> The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

Re: Staying opinionated as you grow

#29

Post by jdpage »

cdoctorow wrote: post #28
jdpage wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. I am tentatively holding to my position, because I think it's useful to have a separate word, but I'll go track down the episode and see if he elaborates on that further. Thanks!

This is specifically what I've written on the subject (I quote this in the book): https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi... > The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply…

... argument withdrawn.

I suppose if I want to use the word to mean the original sense, I need to include clarification that that's what I'm doing. I'll have to think of how best to do that without coming across as judgy or condescending, since that's sort of police-y (and also just unpleasant).

Re: Staying opinionated as you grow

#30

Post by 9rx »

joshbuddy wrote: post #6
jdpage wrote: post #2

Point of order: "enshittification" does not mean what the author's using it to mean. It does not just mean "the product got worse". It means "the product was purposefully made worse in order to capture additional value from the customer," i.e. a rug pull. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd hate to see such a useful term for corporate malfeasance diluted.

Well, Cory recently said in a podcast we can use it to mean "product got worse", so I've become less pedantic on this point fwiw. (I think it was in the episode of Adam Conover from about a month ago)

> Cory recently said in a podcast we can use it to mean "product got worse"

Of course we can. We can also use it mean "product became wonderful".

The question, as always, is if we should.

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