81–90 of 280 posts
Classic literature: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095101
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…
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The perceived significance of the reward is irrelevant and doesn't affect whether its degradation is "enshittification" or not. It's not excluded from that categorization because it's considered a "trivial" feature. In fact, I'd argue it's specifically a good example of enshittification because it's one of the very few things that's actually just "a nice thing" the developers added, that was previously a nice friendl…
> The perceived significance of the reward is irrelevant Completely false. A vanity badge that's based on some effort, has a value equal to the effort required. Unlike increasing requirements for core functionality where you have increased effort for the same reward, increasing requirements for an effort-based vanity item increases its value in exact proportion to the effort.
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Nah it happens to all public companies (see hasbro with magic/d&d) even when users are not the product. It happens when nobody wants to be the first to show flagging growth and investor expectations have not reset yet after a period of growth. It’s just easier in tech to manufacture growth metrics you cant get checked on
Sure, but in those industries the users leave, the company suffers and the executives get fired. VC are attracted to moaty business models where users cant leave.
By fired, do you mean receive multimillion dollar payouts and jobs from their friends at another place where they can do it all again?
I felt like I wasn't going to write this comment again, but here we go: I don't like the word enshittification. People glom onto it because they like shaking sticks more than solving problems, and Corey Doctorow is excellent at exploiting that desire. It's annoying how he enables that sense of defeatism when he's obviously aware of resilient and game-changing alternative software (like FOSS) that has revolutionized t…
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This only happens when the users are the product or its a marketplace. Most business models dont suffer from shittification. But VCs love investing in the ones that do.
Nah it happens to all public companies (see hasbro with magic/d&d) even when users are not the product. It happens when nobody wants to be the first to show flagging growth and investor expectations have not reset yet after a period of growth. It’s just easier in tech to manufacture growth metrics you cant get checked on
A perfect example with the recent changes at Twitter: > Most Twitter users barely tweet and don't care about followers - a "heavy user" tweets on average less than three times a week. So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good. > It is exactl…
Heavy users I follow tweet more than 3 times a day.
> The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good.
No, it was a biased algo that's still being removed (as recently as 2-3 weeks ago they discovered another throttle which was impacting many users, including Elon).
The main problem is that all centralized platforms have to deal with government-mandated censorship in large markets such as the EU, which kills content and engagement and also negatively impacts paying users (because despite the payment, their content still gets shadow-banned). That's not Twitter's fault, but they're relatively more impacted than social networks that focus on art and have no political content.
When is this from? A few days ago (when it was already posted with a different url) or earlier in the year Februaryish when Doctorow wrote his stuff on enshittification of TikTok etc? Is this actually new?
I compare this mentally to: * autotesting music for 'hit worthy' == music blandifies to the bangers and you never get interesting voices any more. but .. it works (for profit) * kindle genres like 'in the style of' and the tendency to more and more but worse and worse in fiction because.. it works (for profit) * politics descending to the lowest grab, not the highest goal.