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?

  • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    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.

    • sudo42@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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.