[roywiggins]

Enshittification usually refers to companies that run two-sided markets ("platforms"), like rideshare and delivery apps. Adobe raising prices on everyone isn't really the same thing. Enshittification works by first subsidizing everything for everyone, then alternately squeezing the sellers and buyers on the platform by increasing their cut and raising prices. It's about playing a game where you alternately squeeze one side or another of a marketplace that you control.

Adobe doesn't really run a platform, they're selling a product and finding ways to raise the price.

[Retric]

Ensnittification definitely applied to home appliances like washing machines.

IMO inkjet printers where the front runner here before online platforms really took off.

[roywiggins]

I don't think any of that stuff really follows the definition as quoted though. That definition is all about a middleman squeezing buyers and sellers. That people use it to mean "any scummy business practice that uses lock-in or corner-cutting to squeeze customers" doesn't make those uses fit that definition.

That stuff is not new, enshittification was coined to refer to the relatively new ways that platforms started to squeeze people.

[Retric]

The original word is really just descriptive of the unpleasant side of optimization you see in commerce.

Walmart finding the minimum product quality they can sell is no different than Facebook finding the maximum number of Advertisements people will tolerate.

[roywiggins]

People can use words however they want, but it wasn't coined to refer to that in general. You can read the blog post: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

> "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, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them." (emphasis mine)

All I'm saying is that citing back to the original definition (which is talking about platforms) does not bolster the case that what Adobe is doing counts, because it plainly doesn't fall under that definition. Adobe is not running a two-sided market. For it to be enshittification you need to use a much more expansive definition. Which is fine, but in that case you can't cite the original definition!

[Retric]

He applies the word to more than just that kind of 2 sided market. https://doctorow.medium.com/googles-enshittification-memos-2...

In his own words the enshitificstion of Google is: “curse of bigness.”

> With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, “growth” has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.

Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much.

How did a company like Unity — … — turn into a protection racket?

So, while he may describe Enshittification as platform decay he’s not limiting its use to such.

[cdoctorow]

> Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-...

[LocalH]

They subsidized things for everyone by turning a blind eye to personal piracy for so many years. They got entrenched as a defacto standard, and then they started tightening the vice.

It's enshittification. Why defend a multibillion dollar corporation who doesn't care about you one bit?

[roywiggins]

I'm not defending them, I'm saying that their behavior is probably a different sort of bad. There are lots of ways for companies to extort consumers, they can't all be "enshittification".

If enshittification is anything a company does that involves delivering a worse product for more money, that's fine, but then it becomes a less useful concept.

My attitude in general is that diluting useful ideas to the point where they encompass an entire vibe is unhelpful. If anything anti-consumer a company does is enshittification, the causes are so disparate that solutions seem impossible. If you draw a tighter boundary around it, you can try to nail down causes and solutions.

[LocalH]

The point I mentioned isn't enshittification by itself so much, but combined with the predatory dark patterns, I personally consider it enshittification as a whole.