[hlassiege]

Fair point. I realize that "enshittification" has a more specific meaning in English (I'm french). My bad I was using it in a broader sense, connecting it to my previous company (700 people, I co-founded it in 2012).

I was thinking more about all the factors that increase product complexity, and it's far from being just about shareholders:

* The more people you add to a company, the more complexity you add because inherently, everyone wants to leave their mark. In the end, some people see themselves grow because they contributed to this or that new feature. Doesn't matter if it's redundant. Doesn't matter if 10 months later you realize it adds nothing. I've unfortunately seen this pattern repeat itself over and over.

* The bigger a company gets, the more it needs to respond to increasingly specific use cases. A salesperson tells you their client needs this. Customer support tells you a portion of your users are asking for that. Either you have enough perspective to say it doesn't fit your vision, or you don't, and you try to please everyone. But it's a huge source of complexity. And I could cite tons of examples from my old company.

And just to be transparent, I am using my blog as a journal, with short posts. I was not expecting that much traffic and I totally understand that it's maybe not as deep as you would expect ^^

[topaz0]

If you're interested in the specific thing that other people mean by that word, the original Cory Doctorow essay that coined it is well worth a read: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

Of course he followed it up with a book, so there's that as well if you want a deeper dive, but the essay is fairly comprehensive at least in laying out what he intends by the term.