You are making a good point here with the strict definition of “Enshittification”. But in your opinion, what is it then? OpenAI is diluting the quality of its answers with unnecessary clutter, prioritizing feel-good style over clarity to cater to user’s ego. What would you call the stage where usefulness is sacrificed for ease of consumption, like when Reddit’s layout started favoring meme-style content to boost engagement?
Comment on Enshittification of ChatGPT
easily3667@lemmus.org 1 week ago
Again, overuse of enshittification. It soon will lose all meaning, like the word meme, if you just use it to describe everything you don’t like.
esaru@beehaw.org 1 week ago
easily3667@lemmus.org 1 week ago
It’s not diluting it’s answers, it’s making them softer to accommodate the interests of many customers and to the detriment of others.
This is more analogous to Firefox semi-deprecating compact mode and marking it as unsupported. It hurts some users. It helps those with poor vision and motor skills by making everything 10 sizes too large.
In neither case is this objectively hurting customers to benefit investors. In fact they’ve already stated that making the AI softer is more expensive. The reddit change was making it’s product worse for customers in a pre-IPO cash grab. The shift from treating customers first to treating investors first to treating founders/ceos first is enshittification. A change to a product you don’t like isn’t enshittification.
esaru@beehaw.org 1 week ago
I changed the naming to “engangement poisening”, after you and several other commenters correctly noted that while over-optimization for engagement metrics is a component of “enshittification,” it is not sufficient on its own to be called as “enshittification”. I have updated the naming accordingly.