Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
The same way drowning can be used to describe all types of suffocation, sure. As long as you absolutely ignore context, words can mean anything!
Making things worse, making them stop functioning, and making them overly restrictive are three different things.
Enshittification: making online products and services worse over time to serve business interests.
Planned obsolescence is making things stop working after a period of time, not just making them worse.
I don’t know what the term is for HP printers not allowing third party ink to work or not letting a scanner in a combo printer/scanner work without ink but that also isn’t something getting worse or stopping due to an arbitrarily short end of life. Those are overly restrictive design decisions, which is different than enshittification because the printer sucked from the day it was purchased.
At this point in time, the term “enshittification” gets broadly applied to things being made progressively shittier, which is exactly what the term sounds like it says. Feel free to downvote me for saying that, but it’s how people are using it, and it fits. No part of that word suggests anything about it being specifically about online products and services, so I don’t really get the hostility towards people using it outside of that.
Oh course it does, what are you talking about? It applies to any product or service that can have its quality gradually and intentionally reduced in service of having its profit margin increase.
Originally coined it was meant to describe online software that started out useful and frequently free, then run into the ground when it came time to monetize it.
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
Just because people atarted using it to mean ‘stuff gets shitty’ doesn’t change the original meaning.
Enshittification was coined for online services, which includes roku, but doesn’t apply to all products.
Edit for the contrarians.
Whether it was coined for all products or not, it’s definitely applying to all products
The same way drowning can be used to describe all types of suffocation, sure. As long as you absolutely ignore context, words can mean anything!
Making things worse, making them stop functioning, and making them overly restrictive are three different things.
Enshittification: making online products and services worse over time to serve business interests.
Planned obsolescence is making things stop working after a period of time, not just making them worse.
I don’t know what the term is for HP printers not allowing third party ink to work or not letting a scanner in a combo printer/scanner work without ink but that also isn’t something getting worse or stopping due to an arbitrarily short end of life. Those are overly restrictive design decisions, which is different than enshittification because the printer sucked from the day it was purchased.
At this point in time, the term “enshittification” gets broadly applied to things being made progressively shittier, which is exactly what the term sounds like it says. Feel free to downvote me for saying that, but it’s how people are using it, and it fits. No part of that word suggests anything about it being specifically about online products and services, so I don’t really get the hostility towards people using it outside of that.
People use terms wrong all the time and ruin the nuance. Like calling all lying gaslighting.
Thanks for that downvote, I’ll hang it on the wall with the others you’ve given me
Stop gAsLiGhTiNg me!
Oh course it does, what are you talking about? It applies to any product or service that can have its quality gradually and intentionally reduced in service of having its profit margin increase.
Originally coined it was meant to describe online software that started out useful and frequently free, then run into the ground when it came time to monetize it.
Go fucking read about it.
Just because people atarted using it to mean ‘stuff gets shitty’ doesn’t change the original meaning.
American businessmen: “Hold my beer and watch this”