[patapong]

I agree with this - beyond the sound of the term, it is also not very obious in what it refers to. In the beginning, it was used with a very specific meaning, of platforms squeezing market participants on both sides. Now, it seems to have come to refer to all instances of online services getting worse and more user-hostile over time. Dare I say, enshittification of the term enshittification?

[rolandog]

I disagree with your definition; from Wikipedia [0]:

> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. [...]

> platforms squeezing market participants on both sides.

Wasn't that chokepoint capitalism? [1] (i.e. controlling supply and demand IIRC)

From Cory Doctorow's original article [2], one might say that enshittification is the degradation of a platform that transforms it from being customer-centric to prioritizing profit extraction at the expense of user experience. I think that the definition has expanded to include other things non-platform, but I feel that that isn't too far a stretch. Nowadays, I might say that enshittification is just unchecked capitalism doing its thing (and we need to be protected from exploiting us).

But I do concede that Cory was indeed exploring some ideas on his original post [2] that may have made it to his book (and thus, are related to your definition):

> Amazon's monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

[1]: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

[2]: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittificaiton/#relentl...

[patapong]

Fair enough! That was not precise of me.

I guess my concern is that the term is broad enough to shift this way, from a very precise (and important!) issue to a more broad concept. I feel like picking a more specific term (such as indeed, platform decay), would have made it easier to keep the concepts apart and discuss them. Alas, it is good that the term was coined at all, as it gives a word to something that many of us clearly experience.