Not just websites and online services but games, stores, restaurants, etc are they? Have you noticed significant quality reduction with nearly matching price increases?
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So I think the term “enshittification” has been latched onto and goatse’d by the community at large to the point people are now using it to mean “things getting worse because business.”
I am pretty sure everything is getting worse because business.
That’s exactly what enshittification means. That’s the name we’ll call this stage of capitalism.
That’s NOT what enshittification was coined as, and there’s plenty of other words that already mean what you want. Stop diluting terms that we need.
See also: Terrorism, Nazi
It’s an idiotic word and it’s already been abused to where it’s meaningless. I don’t care anymore whatever argument someone is making the second I see this dumbass word. It’s become the lazy go-to instead of people pointing to specifics for their arguments. Nah, just easier to generically say things are shitty now.
It’s pretty much inevitable under capitalism, because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
I wish I had a rubber stamp of the words “Marx baybeee” every time someone complains about something he already described ~200 years ago
The problem on the other hand is that other systems tend to not function either, and usually in a worse way over time.
Welcome to capitalism
Consolidation in markets has led to high prices, poor service, poor competition and bloated oligopolies.
Governments should be intervening to break up these oligopolies but have been captured by these vested interests.
Oh you mean that unregulated, capitalism gets out of hand and it needs the government to regulate these means of production to maintain fair markets and a working economy?
Gee whiz, if only such a school of thought had a name.
Welcome to the money printing scheme so called ‘Quantitative Easing’. That’s what injects ‘empty money’ into real estate which doesn’t directly impacts basic good prices short term but it does in the long term through the rent costs (delayed effect 5 - 10 years)
Yes.
Well, except for things that aren’t intended to be profitable. Lemmy doesn’t seem to be any worse.
Ok, that’s true. Basically everything open source and volunteer. Everything not run solely by the capitalists.
Your local restaurant has probably raised prices slightly but nowhere near as much as their costs have actually gone up.
Many of the big restaurant group-owned places near me have raised prices and enshittified service, but my trusty local places are holding ground.
This is very true actually. I’ve always been a fan of shopping/consuming local but one thing I have noticed in the last few years is that big store products cost just about as much as local products these days, but their quality is significantly worse.
I feel like the issue here is ALL very large businesses are enshitifiing. It’s not the restaurants fault, the services they use to operate are also getting worse while charging more. Enshitification is a trickle-down economic model.
When Luby’s got rid of their little old ladies pushing the commandment/ tea cart around, i just bought the recipe book from Half Price and stopped going. If I’m going to have to get up to refill my sweet tea, I’m gonna do it in my own house… Most likely while neked…
Edit: condiment cart, fuck this keyboard is getting worse every week
Only the expensive local places in my area are still good. The cheaper ones would be too NSFL for Kitchen Nightmares
Yes.
Enshittification, as Doctorow defined it, is really just a particular version of a much broader dynamic, and it happens, and is happening, to nearly everything on which a profit can be made. And if you expand the definition even more, it actually happens and is happening to nearly everything by which one is rewarded for providing value to others.
Broadly, what happens is that self-serving scumbags gravitate to and come to hold positions of authority in organizations, then arrange things to maximize benefit to themselves. They do that in two general ways - by shaping the organization so that self-serving scumbags like them can prosper, and by chipping away at everything of value that’s offered by the organization while running up prices as much as possible, in order to maximize the benefit to themselves.
Just as it happens, as Doctorow noted, with social media, they depend on market dominance, name recognition, political patronage, regulatory capture and the like to ensure that they can retain their market share even as they offer consistently less value for more money, so they can pocket more themselves. And since the organization is shaped to allow them to get away with that (they deliberately move away from likely earlier held virtues like focusing on quality, value, integrity, and the like - the things for which the organization was rewarded back when they were starting out), steadily more and more self-serving scumbags come to hold positions of authority, and the broad dynamic gets ever more entrenched.
It happens with all consumer goods and services sooner or later, from television to cars to breakfast cereal.
Notably, it also happens wth organizations like charities, advocacy groups and unions - as they become more influential, they can and do shift from providing a service for which they’re rewarded to rewarding themselves ever more by providing ever less actual value.
And though Lemmy won’t like this, it’s not unique to capitalism, since it happens with any hierarchical system from which value is expected and can be derived. In fact, it’s the heart of the reason that state communism so consistently fails - because state communism provides a particularly easy method by which self-serving scumbags can maximize the benefit to themselves by offering as little benefit as possible to those they’re meant to serve and relying on market dominance to ensure that they continue to hold their positions in spite of their general failure to provide anything of value to anyone else.
Broadly, yes - it’s happening to pretty much everything, and has been happening to pretty much everything to which it could happen for all of history, and will continue to. The only way I can see to avoid it is to somehow eliminate self-serving scumbags entirely, so that all that’s left are people who have the necessary integrity to hold to a virtue of providing value to others and only rewarding themselves as they genuinely deserve, and I don’t see that happening any time soon, if ever.
This should be a manifesto. Well written!
It’salways the self serving parasites without empathy that destroys everything.
Are they good for anything at all? Do they push innovation or productivity? Like would a company without these people be crushed by companies with such people (not counting on them using dirty tricks) like Marx iron law (IIRC)?
I’d love to read more about this, but all I can find is always always tainted either by some status quo idea or basing everything on capitalism or dream thinking like communism or anarchism which just doesn’t work because of these kind if people.
Can we detect non-empatic people and not allow them to manage people? Would that be a good first step?
Are they good for anything at all?
No.
They’re a part of the system, so it seems like they need to be a part of the system, but actually it’s that the system has been warped to accommodate them.
Do they push innovation or productivity?
They specifically push it, but if and only if there’s an angle by which they can parasitize off of it. They don’t originate anything. Ever.
Like would a company without these people be crushed by companies with such people…?
Probably.
I figured out long ago that that’s the case on a personal level. The specific way it works:
People competing for a position in a hierarchy have to make decisions that will impact their chances.
People with integrity, morals, ethics, empathy, principles, etc. will have some number of potential options that they simply will not choose. People with none of those things are not so constrained - they’re able to do absolutely whatever it takes to get what they want, entirely regardless of any other condiderations. So all other things being more or less equal, amoral, unprincipled, dishonest, sociopathic pieces of shit actuyallt have a competitive advantage in hierarchies.
I hadn’t before considered whether that’s the case between businesses, but I would assume so.
I’d love to read more about this, but all I can find is always always tainted either by some status quo idea or basing everything on capitalism or dream thinking like communism or anarchism which just doesn’t work because of these kind if people.
I’m actually an anarchist in large part because of all of this, but my anarchism is very much an ideal. There’s absolutely no way that current humanity could manage it on any sort of scale, so when I advocate for it, I’m really just trying to promote the mindset that will make it possible sometime in the future.
I actually think that anarchism will not only one day be possible, but, if humanity survives, it will be inevitable. It’s vessentiallybthe adulthood of society - the point at which collectively - not just situationally and individually - we’ll be able to live without mommy and daddy state making sure we behave.
Can we detect non-empatic people and not allow them to manage people? Would that be a good first step?
I’ve actually said before that if I could leave a message for the people who will end up trying to rebuild civilization out of the rubble we leave behind, it would be, “Whatever you do, don’t let psychopaths gain power.”
I think there’s no single thing that anyone could do to improve literally everything that would be more effective than to somehow implement an international effort to identify and isolate sociopaths and psychopaths - that they do more harm to the planet and its people than anything else, and by a considerable margin.
But I don’t see any way it could happen, if for no other reason than that the psychopaths and sociopaths in the relevant positions would prevent it.
Which is exactly why I thought of leaving a message for our heirs, in the hope that they’ll do a better job of it from the start. Which I think is the only real chance humanity has.
I’m not criticising anything, you’re the person I’d love have a coffee with and discuss.
I guess socialism, communism or anarchism are all something society would tend to if there weren’t all those people living off of the abuse of others.
I’m an absurdist myself (so I do good as I can), I hope the world won’t come to a stupid end and that we can figure out billions of $ is not what a good life needs, and incidentally cure aging so that we can be there for the ride a bit longer!
Cheers
Yes.
Over time, cultural institutions (i.e., not just individual stores or game companies, but the shared processes of running such companies) evolve to perpetuate themselves as efficiently as possible. This results in an accumulation of corner-cutting techniques over time that degrades the quality of everything they produce in the process of self-perpetuation.
But “enshittification” is something more specific: as originally defined by Cory Doctorow, it’s when a company convinces its investors to pay for something that attracts users without immediate profit, with the promise of future profit extraction once a large-enough user base is captured; then destroys its user experience to extract this profit; and in the process usually loses its user base before the investors have seen the promised returns.
Sure fucking seems that way, doesn’t it?
We will be saved because eventually we will find a way to enshit the enshittification process. In our ability to enshittify we trust.
My god, a negative times a negative is a positive - this person is a genius!
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games,
A AAA game over a decade ago cost $60. Players don’t want to pay that today. While the cost of development tools and engine design have gone down, asset costs have skyrocketed given the higher fidelity.
That has pushed a lot of games into the freemium model and relying on whales to fund the game. The market won’t buy what it says it wants.
stores,
Customer service has been atomized as, except for luxury goods, price always beats out over service. Because of this, stores are trying to drive down their bottom lines to nothing as a way to get more customers. Since customers won’t pay for good customer service, they don’t get it.
restaurants,
The labor market is extremely tight, leading to combative management and labor. In order to cut costs, restaurants have chosen to cheap out on food and/or raise prices to compensate.
You’re saying “won’t” when I think you mean “can’t”… As in, the number of people who have that much disposable income has dropped to a point where there just aren’t enough people with the ability to pay… And instead of fighting to raise the minimum wage (and all wages in general), or lowering their prices to a point most people can afford, they’ve chosen to make shittier stuff
No, I mean won’t.
$60 a decade ago was worth far more than $60 now. Hell, Super Mario Bros 3 cost $50 at launch in 1994 and it isn’t like quality of life crashed that hard.
no, i can’t. Because their solution to me not wanting to buy the stuff they’re currently making (because I want the stuff they used to make) is to make their current stuff even harder!
Yes. But it doesnt have to. Vote with your wallet to see real change.
For sure. Its a race to the bottom. I was only talking about this last night with my other half. I’m a tech nerd & I yearn for the pre internet days when stuff was fun & we weren’t getting stiffed at every opportunity by “The Man”
When will Lemmy find a new buzz word?
