The rise of enshittification: officially the word of the year
The rise of enshittification: officially the word of the year
Macquarie Dictionary, Australia's national dictionary, has recognized the importance of the term enshittification in today's tech by crowning it the word of the year – it also won the people's vote.
Enshittification is defined as the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
It's a helpful term for describing many of today's tech products, from Google search being a slush of ads, link farms, forum posts, and useless AI content, to social media platforms becoming a hate-filled nightmare. Don't forget those products that move from being one-off purchases to subscriptions before their quality starts becoming diluted, or once-great video game franchises that become little more than a way for publishers to push more microtransactions and season passes onto people. Companies are putting yearly increases in profits and share prices above absolutely everything else, including making sure the products they offer aren't, well, shit.
Glad to hear it. I’ve been using it here and there in daily conversation and so far no one knew about it and I had to explain it everytime.
I find it to be a pretty useful term given daily life.
textbook definition of a meme but ask any normie what a meme is and you'll likely get some variation on an image macro.
this is how the game of telephone begins. I'm excited to see what they do to this one in a few years.
It'll be (kinda already is) a synonym of "get worse".
I kind of like explaining it to newcomers. Feels good to enlighten the masses. It's the basically "lucky 10000" xkcd.
How long before some big tech corpo appropriates it and advertises one of their products as "not enshittified" or whatever
"not YET enshittified"
Or one can be proud: enshittified since 1986
If it's true and catches on, more power to them. I don't believe anyone advertising that is being truthful and I definitely don't think it will catch on.
Although by a different organization in a different continent, enshittification was also selected as word of the year for 2023 by the American Dialect Society.
>sees website complaining about ads
>disable ad blocker to test
Checks out
Wasn’t this the word of last year?
Seems like it would be the word of the first quarter of the 21st century.
Different dictionary's word of the year, I think.
Enshittification is defined as the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
I think that’s overly broad in comparison to Doctorow’s original meaning (which they also cite in the article). The critical element missing from their definition is that the enshittified product/service never had a viable business model to begin with: it uses the hype cycle to sell users and investors on an unsustainable mirage before inevitably collapsing.
That is absolutely not a critical part. One of the primary examples doctorow uses is an online marketplace like Amazon. The missing part is the specific steps the business takes of first trapping consumers, then sellers, and finally raking in that cash.
You are right, but I would go one step further: enshittification is specifically a subsidized (artificial, unsustainable) capture of a free market by a middle man, followed by a squeezing of both buyers and sellers in that market using bought leverage.
It's just another variety of antitrust that happens to be legal because society has not yet outlawed that behaviour.
There's plenty of products with viable business models that have undergone enshittification in recent years...
Enshittification does help to explain the other reason things start to suck when it has nothing to do with Eternal September. But with modern social media, it really is a near even split of both. Enshittified for profit by the corporations that run them, stuck in Eternal September by the growing number of users that strip such a place of its identity until it's watered-down for the masses to get even more users.
