Macquarie Dictionary, Australia’s national dictionary, has recognized the importance of the term enshittification in today’s tech by crowning it the word of the year – it also won the people’s vote.
Enshittification is defined as the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
It’s a helpful term for describing many of today’s tech products, from Google search being a slush of ads, link farms, forum posts, and useless AI content, to social media platforms becoming a hate-filled nightmare. Don’t forget those products that move from being one-off purchases to subscriptions before their quality starts becoming diluted, or once-great video game franchises that become little more than a way for publishers to push more microtransactions and season passes onto people. Companies are putting yearly increases in profits and share prices above absolutely everything else, including making sure the products they offer aren’t, well, shit.
>sees website complaining about ads
>disable ad blocker to test
Checks out
deleted by creator
Glad to hear it. I’ve been using it here and there in daily conversation and so far no one knew about it and I had to explain it everytime.
I find it to be a pretty useful term given daily life.
I kind of like explaining it to newcomers. Feels good to enlighten the masses. It’s the basically “lucky 10000” xkcd.
How long before some big tech corpo appropriates it and advertises one of their products as “not enshittified” or whatever
Here at bingus & bongus Co we use an anti-shitification model that ensures our clients that our products will stay the same or get better at all time.
“Our nascent AI technology…”
“…Monthly fee to ensure no enshittification…”
“…our mobile app does require GPS permissions to maximize…”
Dominos said that they’re not doing shrinkflation and instead are ‘growflating’
Then LITERALLY the next week they raised their prices for saucesgrowflating
Still inflation… (Also not sure what “growflating” would even mean)
Increasing size and price?
I’m fine with things naturally getting more expensive with time, it’s not okay to make things smaller/crappier to to hit a price target. Keep sizes the same and just inflate prices a little every year, it’ll be fine…
If it’s true and catches on, more power to them. I don’t believe anyone advertising that is being truthful and I definitely don’t think it will catch on.
Although by a different organization in a different continent, enshittification was also selected as word of the year for 2023 by the American Dialect Society.
Enshittification is defined as the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
I think that’s overly broad in comparison to Doctorow’s original meaning (which they also cite in the article). The critical element missing from their definition is that the enshittified product/service never had a viable business model to begin with: it uses the hype cycle to sell users and investors on an unsustainable mirage before inevitably collapsing.
That is absolutely not a critical part. One of the primary examples doctorow uses is an online marketplace like Amazon. The missing part is the specific steps the business takes of first trapping consumers, then sellers, and finally raking in that cash.
You are right, but I would go one step further: enshittification is specifically a subsidized (artificial, unsustainable) capture of a free market by a middle man, followed by a squeezing of both buyers and sellers in that market using bought leverage.
It’s just another variety of antitrust that happens to be legal because society has not yet outlawed that behaviour.
…in Australia.
Yup, that’s indeed what it says with the third word.
