8mo ago

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?

132 comments

Cause it's one big part of why the Fediverse and Lemmy exist in the first place.
We wouldn't need all this decentralization overhead if centralized sites were trustworthy and focussed on serving their users. The fact that they are not is what leads to privacy violations and enshittification, hence why people created the Fediverse and why we are here (at least most of us I presume).

Selection bias. Lemmy users by default are probably more sensitive to/negative about enshittification than those on reddit.
Many of us came here in response to the enshittification of reddit.
The term "enshittification" is a useful neologism because without it we'd need half a sentence to get the same concept across.
- I'd argue most of us are older but not too old to remember what the internet was as well.
  
  Yeah you're probably right. It surprised me how many people my age are here but it does make sense because we're the generation that enjoyed a less corporate internet.
- "What shit are you talking about?" asked the Redditors as they gleefully wallowed in the shit.

It's the reason we are all here...

Because most people on lemmy are here because of it.

Because the Fediverse itself is a response to enshittification.
- This is it exactly. We simply have too many examples of why we cannot trust millionaire maniacs with running a platform...

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.
- How you conflate those other things with Luddite is.... fascinating.
  
  I assume they mean in the original term, that technology should be used to make life better, not to damage peoples employment.
  
  The Luddite is an anticapitalist blog https://theluddite.org
- Oh wow that's the first time in a loooooooooong minute I've seen someone use Luddite in its pre-corrupted state; I was about to be MAD AS SHIT.
  
  Well that’s because you’re a tech-hating Luddite most likely \s
  Yeah since I learned who the Luddites were I’ve kind of fallen in love with them

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.
- catch-all for companies doing something they don’t like.
  Yes.
  But it screws up entire markets:
  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.
  
  By this metric youtube is not enshittification to some extent. They are a household name and not some weenie startup.
  It being ineffective is a necessary part of it, in my opinion.
- 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.
- 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.
- Raising prices is not enshittification, that’s inflation.
  No, it's price gouging.

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.
- and leftist
  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.
  
  Socialist: [exists]
  Nazi media: "THIS IS THE WORST THING EVER"
  Average person: "Huh. Guess they're my enemy now"
  
  I think there are some that think their beliefs and moderating is a little too extreme.
  
  Yes, that they're too leftist and are apologists.

I'd guess because since reddit accelerated it's enshitification, the people who really cared about it moved to lemmy. The people who didn't care as much stayed behind. So the people over here care about it much more.
- Sorry, this is the third incorrect "it's" that I read today, and if I don't point out it should be "its" I'm going to explode.
  I'm sorry good sir have a nice day.
  
  Scratching an itch about its it's usage today. /j Have a nice day! :)
  Here's some chaos English for others to read if they had not done so. Yes, it's about pronunciation but possibly still relevant.
  
  Its not that big of a deal
  
  It is enshitification!

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.
- Spot on imo.

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 Lemmy is one attempt to do the exact opposite. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Also, Cory Doctorow's troll army is working full time.*
**(Just joking but I refuse to do the sarcastic cute S thing)*
- So you wrote a whole sentence instead? 💀
  
  It's not about effort - it's a matter of aesthetics.
  
  You're damn right I did.
- I saw him live at Defcon without knowing who he was. I really liked his talk. Defcon itself was shit though.
- Leave it to a sh.ithead to be afraid of using fucking tone indicators. That's dedication to being a regressive sh.itbag.

I see it referenced constantly here, not quite as much on Reddit.
It's a fairly new term.
Reddit is bots and AI, and hasn't been trained on new words.

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Exactly this. It is not new, it's just a form of rent seeking.

Reddit is inside the walls of enshittification. Reddit kowtows to the techbro narrative. Dissenting voices do appear there as they aren't a full blown censorship. By and large the reddit userbase has historically been in aligned with big tech.

Because it's happening literally in every facet of society
- Literally mentioned

Selection bias. There’s plenty of overlap between the groups of people who know about it, care about it, use FOSS, use Lemmy etc. It’s basically a prominent characteristic of the stereotypical Lemmy user. We’re still a small and surprisingly homogenous group of people. If Lemmy ever grows like Mastodon, you’ll begin to see more diversity.
There’s also something you could call the “fish out of water” bias. If you’re not LGBT, you’ll suddenly notice how many LGBT people there are on Mastodon. If you’re not into ML, you’re going to notice the people who are.

It started 40 years ago, when a man was not allowed to fix his printer. We didn't have the word enshittification at the time but even then it was understood what happens when technology abuses its users in order to enrich its creators.

Sometimes I've seen it used legitimately when a service gets noticeably slower or more confusing over time as misfeatures keep getting added on. At the same time, I often see it just get applied when people don't like change. It just the latest in a long string of phrases or words that mean "you made a change I don't like."
- Those things are not enshittification, enshittification is the process where a service becomes worse as a means to extract more value from users and then shareholders, where user does not just mean the classic consumer but ad sellers, data buyers, etc.
  Not all annoying features are enshittification, but enshittification is not just misfeatures.
  You may know all this but I felt your comment was not clear enough about the distinction.

I'm just glad people stopped inserting the word "literally" everywhere. Literally language enshitification.
- 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'm literally a prescriptivist though. But only during reverse office hours.
- This is some sort of 4d chess. With multiverse. And time travel.

I mean, a huge number of redditors moved here because of reddit enshittification.

It's funny that you used the phrase "this side of the fence", because the fence in that metaphor is exactly the line marking the territory of "enshittification" and "anti-enshittification" ^^

While there are thousands of communities on Lemmy, there are a few topics that get a lot of attention. Linux/programming is one of those, and the enshittification trend is particularly pronounced in the tech sector. Another big topic is workers' rights and other grass-roots movements, which again deal largely with fighting against corporate greed (embodied in the enshittification trend). The intersection of these two major topics (and possibly others) means you'll see more of that here right now.
- Ah yeah that makes sense. So many tech communities here I've noticed. Always put it down to tech people being more willing/able/knowledgable to move to something better!

Cause Cory Doctorow is a hero ?
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/112038663883385719
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

I think it's just everywhere now. I see it on Tumblr too.
- It's because we were given a name for something that didn't have a name before but was everywhere.
  This is a great thing. With a definition we can understand and discuss the topic.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
  
  Gotta love linguistics
  
  If you think this didn't have a name before, then you may need to read up a bit on the history of capitalism.
  It's rent seeking.

I also like the phrase "rot economy", though it does reach a little wider

Remember when things were better, before all the enshittification ? Pepperidge Farms remembers

Because quite literally everything in the world is a victim of it, and we're basically trying to raise awareness about it so that it doesn't spread any further.
Not that raising awareness about something on a less than mainstream social platform is gonna do much, but still, at least we can escape the platforms that already suffered from enshittification.

I'm only here because I'm pissed at the enshitification of elsewhere. Of course Imma talk about it.

Because "willful, profit-oriented degradation of quasi-monopolistic services" just doesn't sound nice, so a man who's passionate about that sort of stuff came up with a better word for the concept, and other people who are passionate about that sort of stuff picked it up. Those same people ended up leaving Twitter and Reddit when they underwent that process and congregated around the fediverse.

It's like the weeping angels from doctor who, the moment you take your eyes off the shit waves, you're covered in it.
- Recent helldivers and tarkov controversy be like

New word for old phenomena

Why is the world addicted to implementing it?
- Interest rates rose above 0% for the first time in a decade and suddenly profit became more important than growth.
  Edit: actually I'm wrong and it's more complicated than that, but in essence the era of free money came to an end. Interest rates were increasing before 2020 in very gradual increments, but then went to zero, also accompanied by a lot of money being injected into the system.
  https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-chart
  So the sudden change at the end of the chart is what caused the regime change driving the trend of growth-driven companies trying to generate a profit - many not having a clue how to do it because they've never done it before.

Along with the views of it's users it's just fun to say things like enshitification and the great enshittening

It’s a word that has become popular in general in the last year-ish. But if you hear it more here. It is likely because it is a term used to describe the dynamic that pushed people from Reddit and other platforms to Lemmy. So you will here it more here, since pretty much everyone here has been personally affected by it.
Basically we are a self selecting group of people who chose to leave (or minimize use of) big tech platforms. And are therefore much more likely to be aware of the problems with those platforms.

Exactly. It's actually turning me off Lemmy completely.
And some of the times I've seen it used, the evidence was weak. Once challenged, it often resulted in the "trust me, you'll see in a few years time" line

It's not unique to Lemmy. I've heard it on other platforms first before here
- Yup I've been seeing it everywhere in YouTube comments and other social media, too.

Give me a synonym. Until then I'll use it.

Not just Lemmy, it is simply a popula word now. But for good reason.

Is it just on Lemmy?
Well, you know your platform has made it when it's spawning it's own buzzwords.

Because it perfectly embodies one thing the Lemmy hivemind hates the most about how large, for-profit corporations tend to behave

Maybe because many of us saw it happen the first time.

I think it's because enshitification is just sort of everywhere now.

Wait... I thought Lemmy liked TPB as much as Star Trek. I just like Mr. Lahey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcQW04AQ_Ok

People find a shiny new word that sounds clever. They start using it so that they sound clever too. They like sounding clever, so they use it a lot. They start using it for things that it doesn't actually mean, until it loses all meaning other than the most generic "I don't like that." The word becomes enshittified and people eventually stop using it.
Needing a substitute, people find a new word...
- Remember when everyone was accusing each other of "dying on hills"? Glad that stupid shit is over.
  
  It's a cycle. Some of the other current "suddenly popular but as a result doomed" words I'm seeing lately are "grift", "slop", and the suffix "-bro." They'll likely fade away again once they become ubiquitous and some other new shiny word appears to glom onto.
- We already have a word. Why change it?