[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-...

[Retric]

I am not saying he is using it to say ‘things are getting worse’ but rather ‘things are being optimized in ways we don’t like by large companies’ which is meaningfully different.

However, because he’s using ‘platforms’ so broadly it’s not just marketplaces but basically any business. It’s hard to draw a meaningful circle around Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Google, and Unity that excludes Walmart’s online store.

[tomcam]

Are you Cory Doctorow? That would make this contribution moderately surreal

[cdoctorow]

Yup.