A few years ago, SciFi author and tech commentator Cory Doctorow coined a new word: Enshittification. Enshittification is the process where a company migrates a product from one that’s good for users to one that’s good for businesses and finally to one that’s good for themselves.
What product or company have you used that has become enshittified over the years?
I’ll start with one: Google. When Google first came on the scene, its search engine was a revelation. It generated excellent search results, and there were no ads. The links at the top of the search results were often exactly what you were looking for.
Over the years, Google added ads and sponsored results to the search results, and typically the sponsored results were at the top of the page, forcing users to look further down in the search results to find relevant links. As its business was almost entirely driven by ads, Google starting doing things to increase ad views, including manipulating search results in a way that forced users to do multiple searches (to increase opportunities to show ads).
Recently they’ve started to include AI summaries at the top of search results. These summaries are often the only thing Google users look at, and this is impacting traffic to other sites. This is putting other sites between a rock and a hard place because they can’t prevent Google from using their content to generate their AI summaries without also preventing Google from indexing their sites, which will also result in fewer click-throughs from Google search.
How about YouTube going down hill? Anything worth watching seems to be “members only” now, and 95% of the ads are out right scams. Maybe it was always bad and I’m just paying more attention. On a more serious note, health insurance seems to be in a race for the bottom. I still don’t understand that “co-pay” shit, and the high deductibles makes it almost useless.
ohhh and I want to add that my dental insurance doesn’t pay a percentage of the actual bill, they pay a percentage of what they deem the procedure should cost. Everyone’s dentist charges way more than what the insurance says is the standard rate, so how can it be the standard?
For the first 15 years of its existence, Uber operated at a loss, racking up $32 billion in loses, concentrating on locking out its competitors. After it accomplished that, it jacked up ride prices by 92%.
Uber has a long history of dirty tricks against municipalities who attempt to regulate them. They’ve consistently opposed any attempt to classify their drivers as employees, all in an attempt to bypass employee protections and to avoid paying benefits. They’ve also had a massive problem with sexual assault of passengers by drivers which could have been mitigated by more stringent background checks.
One of their initiatives against potential regulation and oversight is a system called Greyball. Whenever the Uber app detects the possibility that a customer may be a police officer or regulator (by using geolocation or credit card info), the app invokes the Greyball parallel app, which creates a bunch of “ghost cars” on the app, which don’t actually exist, in order to make it nearly impossible for those users to get a ride.
It strikes me that enshittification is merely the latest term to describe a typically human condition.
The example that springs to mind is the path a “family business” follows. Generation 1 creates the business. They build it from the ground up to the point of sustained success by working hard and offering value to the customer. They are fully invested in the vision. Their children take over. They see the value created by this vision, but are more motivated in scaling this vision to maximize profitability. When the grandchildren take over, they have no connection to the original vision. They see a cow ripe for slaughter. They proceed to ramp up the extraction machine to maximize revenue, regardless if such a path leads to loss of market capture and\or financial ruin. Last one out turns off the lights.
It boils down to success x duration = market capture. Market capture + duration = enshittification.
Yep, I live in a small Kent town called Faversham and we have a state owned waste disposal site there so, everytime I need to book a visit, I type in “faversham waste disposal site” and I get back three sponsored links before I get to the proper one. That’s fine for me but there are other searches that generate worse results and people who are not quite so computer savvy as I am could very easily end up being charged for a state service that’s free (at point of use).
I don’t use Google… currently it’s whatever Ecosia browser uses (settings says “Ecosia”) but I’m considering switching to a local docker hosted one, searXNG which has no AI or advertising.
Another example: I have a subscription to the New York Times. They give me the ability to send up to ten “gift articles” to non-subscribers every month. Non-subscribers whom I sent the links to could click on them to read the article.
That changed recently. Now, when they click on the link, they’re required to have an account and log in. The account doesn’t cost anything, but it’s still a barrier that didn’t exist before.