[skippyfish]

The page is entirely AI-generated and each piece is written with the same silly thesis (things used to be better and then they ruined everything). I see why this works, but it's frankly disappointing to see so many smart people fall for it over and over again. There's no human on the other end of these essays that believes these things. They're not true and not meant to be true. Yes, they're what we want to hear, but that shouldn't be enough.

As to why it exists: when generation of content costs next to nothing, I think that question is harder to pin. The basic answer is "clicks".

[vintagedave]

This page [0] didn't read as very AI-generated to me. However, it had an interesting link:

> within days of closing a Cornell partner on the new board emailed the CEO to ask, "Is there fraud going on???"

(Italicised part is the link) linking to [1].

When I search that page, I cannot find the word 'fraud' let alone anything like that quote.

It's highly suspicious when a linked claim does not support the claim.

[0]: https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-cookware-got-worse-on-...

[1]: https://fortune.com/2024/11/19/crock-pot-explosion-cornell-c...

[burkaman]

That probably comes from this article: https://www.mckoolsmith.com/assets/htmldocuments/2024%2011%2....

Could be a copy/paste error, or could be an LLM trying to cite its own work by just looking at a list of sources used and guessing which one the claim came from.

[Djonckheere]

> There's no human on the other end of these essays that believes these things.

Keyana Sapp is the writer behind it: https://www.worseonpurpose.com/authors/keyana-sapp

[oliwarner]

But how far behind? Is he writing the article or the prompt?

What struck most of all is the deep disconnect between author and authority. The tools one (tools are better than they've even been) stood out as a great example of this. People like to say things got worse, but it read like somebody asked a LLM to show how they got worse, ignoring all the ways in which they got better. A human who'd ever used tools would recognise the omission.

[metalliqaz]

> They're not true and not meant to be true.

The two companies I looked up were accurately described, according to my own experience with them.

[add-sub-mul-div]

The site may be slop and poorly made, but that doesn't invalidate that consumer products of a given quality tier are lower quality than they used to be. People like to see it confirmed because it matches their lived experience.

[skippyfish]

That's like saying "politicians are crooked, so every bad thing you can think of about politicians must be true". It doesn't and we shouldn't fall for it.

In fact, the one industry where enshittification is widely embraced is our own, so I guess maybe it's projection?... Most other goods and services are not deliberately designed to get worse over time. We're the masters of giving people something cool for free and then progressively worsening their experience until they're forced to pay.

Things like appliances don't get worse on purpose. They sometimes get worse as a combination of market pressures and regulations. Take fridges: you can buy a full-sized kitchen fridge for less than $600, that's kinda crazy? And yes, it probably won't last a lifetime, and they won't make it serviceable because it's not worth servicing given today's labor costs - if your bonded-and-certified repairman quotes you $500, you're going to toss it out either way.

[InsideOutSanta]

But they do get worse, and somebody decided to worsen them, and that website tracks these changes.