51–60 of 280 posts
This seems to be universally true, and when it becomes apparent that advertising doesn't work and isn't profitable, dark patterns are the best that you can hope for.
Short of a company having the internal need for a generally useful distributed communications platform, as well as a willingness to release it relatively freely, I struggle to see how this gets resolved.
Funny timing, as I just described Duolingo's recent trajectory as being an example of "enshittification" to someone who was angry that they have to do even more "quests" this month than any previous one, to earn the monthly badge (merely a fun thing on your profile to look back on). Gotta drive that engagement and keep users in-app as long as possible...
This seems like a weirdly trivial thing to categorize as enshittification. It's just a vanity badge, not a core component of the app experience.
Why have vanity badges, or other kinds of gamification, to begin with? Because it gives users an added incentive, through an added reward, a goal, which helps them get through something that could otherwise be too tedious or un-fun for them to endure.
And if everybody agrees that the added goal aligns with the user's actual goal, that's a great strategy.
But you get what you reward, because people like to get rewards. The dopamine rush of knowing you'll reach the goal.
If the rewards stop helping users towards their real goals, and you've trained them to work towards your goals already, you'll get people doing daily tasks to get daily rewards that they shouldn't really care about. But they do. Because you made them care.
And you might have replaced their intrinsic motivation, wanting to learn a language, with an extrinsic goal, wanting to get a reward. And if they then stop caring about the extrinsic goal, they just might stop entirely.
Messing with people's motivations is dangerous, and "driving engagement" is the absolutely most useless reason to do so.
There is a possibly more general phenomenon where a brand gets good reputation and then begins cutting cost and people will still buy at the high price. I don't know if that one has a name or if it's the same concept as enshittification.
Is this a product of the way modern MBAs are taught? Seems to be a standard playbook of building reputation, scaling and then aggressive optimisation and cost cutting.
> Facebook was going to be the social media service that never spied on you back in 2006. And once people were locked in, it, you know, did the Darth Vader MBA thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
to be fair, practicing is a pretty essential component to learning a new language. "increasing engagement" also means more practice. Its not an entirely selfish motivation.
I disagree in this case. Duolingo formerly had conversational language lessons, which were 100% audio (not even able to see text on screen). These were phenomenal for actually learning to speak , compared to the generated garbage in the lessons. Duolingo formerly had lessons that explain new concepts, like a particular verb tense. It doesn't seem to have any of them once changing over the to completely linear lesson…
I espouse a belief that apps have two cycles, one of growth, another of exploitation. In the first, cash is burnt/used to give free goodies and provide good quality services. Rents are a byproduct and not a goal during this phase of the operation, the goal here is to build goodwill and market share through measures that the competition can't match. All in all, it is a good experience to use the service during this st…
I've been thinking about how enshittification, venture capital, shareholders and the life cycle of a company are in some ways related. Any company that has external investors is bound to go through this cycle of - building a great product - taking in external funding money - growing and then either being acquired or going public (or more commonly shutting down) - then all the head scratching decision making starts It…
Also, I got this feeling bigger shareholders might think they are smart and part of the scam and that they will jump ship (sell the stock) before smaller shareholders notice.
I guess e.g. Ben and Jerries would be all vanilla ice cream at this point of they were run in this way. You could always decrease the amount of nuts and fillings with 1% more without anyone noticing ...
I've been thinking about how enshittification, venture capital, shareholders and the life cycle of a company are in some ways related. Any company that has external investors is bound to go through this cycle of - building a great product - taking in external funding money - growing and then either being acquired or going public (or more commonly shutting down) - then all the head scratching decision making starts It…
Artificially low interest rate environments lead to a lot of money in the hands of investors, which due to inflation slowly loses purchasing power over time. However, with large reserves, they can easily afford to prop up a business model which persistantly spends more money on bringing "free" features to user while charging very little. Those businesses obviously outcompete any business which do not recieve such investment.
However, as time goes on, those investments must eventually earn a return. Switching from a model which loses money every year to one which must profit every year is invariably going to affect the quality of the product. Especially in an environment where directly charging customers for your service would be a death sentence.
In the absense of such cheap credit, however, a truly competitive environment could potentially emerge, where businesses must be sustanably profitable from the ground up. Esentially this would mean the last 15 or so years has been wasted time in pursuit of this goal, as false monetary signals were steering us in completely the wrong direction.
Some of todays tech companies may survive the transition, but I believe that most will eventually be replaced by completely new ones. Unless we go back to a policy of lowering interest rates to near (or even below) 0%.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone gets angry about a badge in an app, it seems like they have a deeper issue to deal with.
If badges motivated learners to do things that benefited them, but now (they feel) badges motivate behavior that benefits the app maker more instead … that would be a clear example of enshittification. Rule 34 needs a twin: Anything can be useful. Therefore, anything can be enshittified. And will be. Period dot period. QED. I have spoken.
I've been thinking about how enshittification, venture capital, shareholders and the life cycle of a company are in some ways related. Any company that has external investors is bound to go through this cycle of - building a great product - taking in external funding money - growing and then either being acquired or going public (or more commonly shutting down) - then all the head scratching decision making starts It…
The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse incentives. This seems to be universally true, and when it becomes apparent that advertising doesn't work and isn't profitable, dark patterns are the best that you can hope for. Short of a company having the internal need for a generally useful distributed communications platform, as well as a willingness to release it relatively freely, I struggle to see how t…
The need to have profit is the goal of any business.
The problem isn't that. The need for profit has been entirely replaced with the need for continuous unimpeded growth. Which is decidedly not the same thing, but no one cares anymore, and profit doesn't even come into equation anymore.