Comment on Lemmy is the best social media
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 5 months agoHmmm interesting. I was under the impression that enshitification was “making something shittier in the pursuit of (eg) greed”, I didn’t realize that it only applies to when the creator (controller? owner?) of the thing does it.
Has it always been used for this specific case? If so, what is the word for the more general case I described?
Shyfer@ttrpg.network 5 months ago
The original use is specifically a service platform that’s made worse by the owners to get more money after first being good to everyone to collect a large user base, then by squeezing the end users, then by squeezing the business customers to collect value for themselves.
It sounds like a really specific definition, but you’d be surprised by how often it applies. He originally thought of it to apply to Tik Tok after noticing it following a similar pattern as Facebook, Amazon, and I think Google. Then the internet realized it could keep applying his term to so many more companies, like Spotify, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Reddit, Microsoft, Apple, all streaming companies, and physical product companies like car companies or John Deere, etc and it’s shot up in popularity and use since then.
Not sure of the general use case you describe, but the person who invented the term in that article I linked sounds like he doesn’t mind if it’s used in a more general case for things getting worse from greed, so feel free to go ahead and keep using it I guess lol. Although maybe we should come up with a different, more general term for that if there isn’t already one? I’ve got nothing, but if anyone has suggestions lol.