Enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author of The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse:
“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.”
“Enshittification,” Cory Doctorow’s coinage describing the process by which internet media platforms become increasingly unusable and un-quittable, has been named 2023’s “Digital Word of the Year.” Here, we break down what the term means and Doctorow’s solution to the internet’s relentless enshittification.
The article ends with:
it is only going to get shittier
(in reference to a comment that Musk had said to advertisers to go ‘fuck themselves’, so meaning i.e. X, not necessarily overall, i.e. Fediverse)
*Twitter
I usually say Twitter/X, but Musk began the process of cancelling the Twitter part, and the part that will continue to get shittier is X :-P.
Like Disney did to Star Wars, he took people’s community engagement and feelings of ownership, and… well he just took them. Things don’t truly belong to us unless we keep them out of the hands of billionaires - like “our” media, now “their” media. It’s a life lesson I suppose.
Article about an article. Hey, at least the site isn’t filled with ads. Oh wait.
While 99% of the news media at this point is clickbait, this one at least adds new information: “Enshittification… has been named 2023’s Digital Word of the Year.” The original article did not say that:-).
Also, yes there are ads, but also it’s not blocked by a paywall so… checks and balances. Whereas X is basically just fully trash at this point, now that Musk has cancelled Twitter:-P.
The original “article” isn’t an article, it’s just an announcement.
https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/
As for this article, it’s a blog post attached to a book store, expanding on Doctorow and their book. There’s a lot more context being added in this blog post than in that announcement. There’s ads but they’re just ads for the books available in this store. I.e. relevant to people who are visiting a book store’s website.
Not saying shitty sites don’t lazily re-write articles all the time to harvest views, but this isn’t a good example of that.
It’s a publisher, not a book store FWIW.
I believe there is a balance between viable online businesses and bad products due to overloading of ads.
I bought The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow since Amazon refused to publish it. Talks about how big tech is out of control. Nothing new but still a good book.
Looks like it’s on Amazon though?
Yeah it’s there now actually. Interesting…
Not really. It wouldn’t sell well enough before so why host ammo to the enemy?
Now it has pull tho, and capitalists will sell us the rope we hang them with
Ah, looked it up and apparently it’s the audiobook that isn’t listed.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation
2022’s word was the suffix -ussy. We’re in for an linguistically amusing decade.
I’m glad that Debussy finally got some recognition with the younger generations.
Start with Debussy, end on Deback?
Sounds kinda sussy to me.
That sounds like a word that’s only used by people who are really into Linux.
How about enshitussy?
Edit: this is more cursed than I intended
If you haven’t, and you enjoy scifi/cyberpunk fiction, you should read Cory’s book “Radicalized”. Four short stories, all of them damn relevant to today.
The first story, “Unauthorized bread”, is my fav. Hackers versus the coldness of corpos and shitty landlords.
I haven’t read Unauthorized bread but you’ve just reminded me of Stallman’s “Right to Read” very short story, which is about a future where, God forbid, you might read someone else’s book without paying a licensing fee. Not the most amazing story, but it perfectly presaged things like scientific journals being paywalled today.
I’ve seen people consider RMS an overly radical hippy, but man he is a true fucking visionary things he warned us about in the 1990s, 2000s are happening now
American Dialect Society
Whom?
You son of a bitch… You’re baiting me.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist.). :)
Whomst.
We want a web where users are in control. That means a web where we freely choose our online services from a wide menu and stay with them because we like them, not because we can’t afford to leave. We want a web where you get the things you ask for, not the things that corporate shareholders would prefer that you’d asked for. We want a web where willing listeners and willing speakers, willing sellers and willing buyers, willing makers, and willing audiences are all able to transact and communicate without worrying about their relationships being held hostage or disrupted to cram “sponsored posts” into their eyeballs.
I feel this deeply, but I worry we’re long past it. A platform has to facilitate these things. which means you have to surrender to the way the platform works to participate. And the truth is, no matter if it’s volunteers or a corporation, there is going to be an interfering element that you have to trust not to fuck with you.
The fediverse feels like it’s part of the solution, but not all of it. There are still gatekeepers here who are capable of abusing that position to “disrupt”, maybe not for “sponsored posts”, but for other reasons.
Craigslist can do it, it can be done.
Craigslist is the Achilles heel to the big tech bros, proof that they’re wrong, and Craig flag out refuses to change the site. It is what it is. And that’s it. I fucking love Craigslist, besides the various niche forums, all self hosted from their website -fuck reddit, it is hands down my favorite part of the internet.
Everything else is advertising, trackers and opportunists. The whole Internet feels like walking down a seedy alley full of grabby sex offenders in Mumbai.
That’s where I place advertisers in the social hierarchy, as peers to sex offenders, pedo’s and rapists, and I know I am not the only one with such designations. Maybe think twice about that marketing major, just saying.
Bill Hicks would have approved.
The problem with fedi is that you need some kind of lowest common denominator gatekeeper. So that a client can tell the server: I don’t want to see x,y,z and it works reliably.
In order to have that functionality, someone has to class that content first. You can’t trust the author implicitly, so you have to trust either the server or a moderation group.
How you define the mod group, be it random community member based on comment and post karma, or a trusted ring of insiders with votes, or some other method, data still needs a place to be stored.
isn’t that just subscribing to different communities though? and relying on the voting system, but that’s much more ostensibly democratic than just An Algorithm
Vote counting is an algorithm. I think a lot of people want a unicorn and are apalled when someone offers them a magical horse with a horn because it’s not what they wanted.
There was a project that I believe would have (will?) solve this problem of the platform, it is callede maidsafe. Basically the idea is that the users are always in control of their data and the services can only access it when the users want to use it. It worked by decoupling data and services and users own and control all the data they produce, meaning they can always take them elsewhere.
It also take remuneration of service/content provider into account, and all data is safely encrypted.
It’s been more than 10years and the project still hasn’t been released, I doubt it’s ever going to come out, but the idea was really cool.
I rember I built a small website on the system when it was in early stage, and an interface for git, it was really cool to use. Anyway…
The main driving force for enshittification is relentless greed for more profit. So the rules of the system matter, if they can’t own the users accounts that changes the possible strategies and likely outcomes.
Of course it’s possible that the sabotage the fediverse or that it sabotages itself but the underlying “energy” which feeds it development is different. And that matters.
This is part of the neoliberal propaganda, making people believe that greed does not have an effect on quality or morality of behavior, and of course that governments or non-profit can never be “efficient”. But that is mostly baseless.
You totally can create institutions with a different agenda or mandate than profit and it works. Of course they can also be captured or sabotaged.
Then, they die
I think he got this part wrong.
He was actually being too optimistic, how depressing
I’m not sure about Doctorow’s conclusion that enshittified services die. They will go worse but then rise to the minimum level of shit people can stomach and also use all their capital and influence and power to maintain their position. Including things like lobbying for more regulations that they can afford but newcomers can’t.
The obvious answer is the fediverse where accounts are not owned by one service. But it still has a long way to go and could fail, could be sabotaged, could splinter, could be regulated into oblivion, or could just fail to get enough people on board.
Closely followed by EEE - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. While not a single word, it dovetails nicely with enshittification.
And, just like enshittification, the term is being thrown about with such wild abandon that it barely means anything any more. Most of the time it seems to me that “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish!” Translates to “thing I like got popular and now may be used by thing I don’t like.”
They’ve enshittified EEE!
You’re talking micro about something that is macro. This isn’t rueing your fav indie band breaking into mainstream and now Karen at the front desk is using her new favorite band to try and bond with you.
EEE is a predatory business tactic used to assimilate and digest potential rivals instead of actually competing thru products. It’s anti-consumer monopoly shit, a siren’s song.
That’s what EEE used to mean, sure. Now it also means “a company I don’t like is using a protocol that I do like.” That dilution of the original meaning is unfortunate, IMO.
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Enshitified services don’t die, they are too big to fail unfortunately.
“Too big to fail” truly the dream of any capitalist.
Its a technical term
Also I invented the term “Couchcuntatoe” to describe a lazy ass who won’t get up from their couch. This was fairly common during the height of the pandemic. But a true couchcuntatoe can still be assumed to be laying around somewhere 😝.
Doesn’t couchtatoe make more sense? Unless you’re really trying to include cunt in there.
Yes the cunt is included. The lazy ass must be a cunt to count as a proper couchcuntatoe.
A bad word that, predictably, nobody uses correctly.
Language evolves. What he described refers to a specific pattern relating to specific platforms, but it also speaks to an overarching pattern that can be applied to most tech and digital markets nowadays.
User entrenchment and the rise of oversized tech companies dominating the industry on multiple fronts has brought us to a tech space where companies no longer need to fear backlash or consequences for most anti-user decisions they could make, as users will simply never leave, and competition is sparse. The “Free Market” is effectively neutered because users will complain but not change their behavior if the cost for doing so means moderately less convenience.
Enshitification, to me, is when a tech company realizes this and takes advantage of it by eroding what made the thing worthwhile, knowing full well they can disregard all criticism and complaints.
It basically speaks to a moment when tech companies shift from thinking “how do we attract users?” to “What can we get away with?”
Language evolves.
That’s a thought-terminating cliche that people often use to dismiss legitimate criticism.
In this particular instance I think you’ve made a good case that broadening the definition is a good thing, but I really hate the implication no use of language is ever wrong, but rather just “evolution”, which is implied to be least be a neutral process if not actively beneficial.
I’ve seen people defend literal typos as “language evolution” and get massively upvoted while anyone who dares to disagree is mocked. A typo isn’t language evolution at all unless it becomes popular. Otherwise, to continue the biology metaphor, it’s just a language mutation, and like biological mutations, typos are harmful to communication far more often than they’re helpful.
Another example a bad use of language is how words and phrases are co-opted for political purposes. “Woke” is an obvious recent example. “Welfare” is an older much much more egregious example, where just the mere spelling of the word makes the original meaning clear, and that meaning is unequivocally positive, yet most people think “welfare” means government assistance to poor people. Or take “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”, which went from an example of something that’s literally impossible to something people are unironically told they should be doing. This sort of thing is language evolution, but it’s not neutral. It’s done with an political agenda. It impoverishes our language our language and stifles honest communication.
Cory’s original usage of the word gave it a useful and specific meaning. But that has evolved extremely rapidly with popular usage into the word simply meaning “I don’t like this thing.” Which takes away the usefulness because now it’s no longer describing a specific reason for not liking it.
It’d be like if every kind of ailment started being referred to as an “infection.” Concussions, sprains, hypothermia, etc, all being passed off as “he got infected.” We already have generic terms for that like “he got hurt,” and now when someone does get literally infected we’ve lost the word that would be used to specify that.
Languages evolve, sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s always in a good direction. In this specific case evolution is enshittifying the language and that’s worth a little (admittedly futile) push-back.
Old words fade or shift and new words will keep coming. It’s not necessarily a bad direction.
Not necessarily, but in this particular case it seems bad to me. We’re losing a specialized term for something that IMO warrants having one.
But often it is a bad direction, and it feels like it’s becoming politically incorrect to point out when that’s happening.
Watching it be used incorrectly has been excruciating given how Doctorow’s definition was so magnificently on point.
“Netflix put their prices up - eNsHiTtIfIcAtIoN!”
While Netflix raised their prices, they also have been delivering less high-quality and more low-quality content. The raised prices merely indicated to people that the services they’re paying for to get away from cable TV are becoming more and more like cable TV.
People who complain about a service instead of finding an alternative are the main problem here, as they’re doing nothing to change the situation they’re currently in.
Human nature. Voting with ones wallet will never work as long as advertising, as we know it, exists. We can’t really blame the average person to do what an average person does.
That’s not what I’m saying here. Voting with your wallet implies that you expect to see some change as a result of your decision, I’m saying that you should make your decision with the expectation that a trend towards negative quality will continue.
There are suitable alternatives to both subscription based services and filmed media. If you aren’t satisfied with something you’re paying for, it doesn’t make sense to keep on paying for that.
Its not the price hike itself that’s enshittification, it’s why they did it and whether or not it’s justified that is.
While I agree with Doctorow that said practice/phenomenon deserves a word, I still think “enshittification” is a bad choice, selected more for its shock-value and popular appeal than anything linguisticly relevant about it.
As I recall, that tends to be Doctorow’s shtick.
Yeah I agree. I suspect he didn’t know the article would blow up as much as it did
Its a good and direct word. I could guess what it meant before I even heard his definition of the word: Things that are willingly made shittier.
“Un-userfriendli-fication” would never catch on.
I could guess what it meant before I even heard his definition of the word: Things that are willingly made shittier.
Right, and that’s not what it means. Hence my statement that it’s a bad word.
“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.”
Platforms that over time is made shittier to serve the business before the user. What definition are you using?
That definition, not “Things that are willingly made shittier.” Things get shittier for an endless amount of reasons. The reason for the shittiness is very important to the meaning of the word here. That reason is also entirely unclear when just hearing the word on it’s own. Ipso flipso, bad word.
Reminds me about that post about wishing humans had a dedicated sound for warning each other about bees.
Theres no single word that can clearly communicate the entire reason, context, and meaning. If we want to tell the reason for the shittyness, then we say that in a full sentence.
Though most people would understand from context if I just said “Bees!” instead of spending an entire sentence telling them where the bees are and why they should run.
that’s literally a symptom of it though. they’re catering to businesses over consumers
Saw someone use the phrase “enshittification of AI”
I’m not sure even they knew what they meant
Yeah, I’d say that AI wasn’t ever a good enough deal to consumers to qualify for the term.
