What is it like to be a bat?

I love this, hope it takes off like "enhsittification" or "slop" have already.

I'll add it to my anti-AI bingo card

Uhgh "slop" is ok but "enshittification" was lame from the start.

Not only is it a terrible term, but it describes a concept that isn’t really worthy of having its own term. It’s really just a way of saying “people will make things worse over time”

No! Enshittification has a precise meaning, about how people will make things worse over time after making them good.

Mostly people make things better over time. My bed, my shower, my car are all better than I could reasonably have bought 50 years ago. But the peculiarities of software network effects - or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects - mean that people should give things away below cost while continuing to make them better, and then one day switch to selling them for a profit and making them worse, while they seemingly could change nothing and not make them worse.

That's a particular phenomenon worthy of a name and the only problem with "enshittification" is that it's been co-opted to mean making things worse in general.

That isn't what it means though. It means specifically that companies will make products and services worse over time for profit.

> or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects

It's not always that. After some time, software gets to a state where it's near the local maximum for usability. So any changes make the software _less_ usable.

But you don't get promoted in large tech companies unless you make changes. So that's how we get stuff like "liquid glass" or Android's UI degradatation.

It’s about the change from endeavoring to produce a product people want regardless of profit, to making profit regardless of what people want.

"Enshittification" is too twee.

You can tell it was invented by Cory Doctorow because there is a very specific kind of Gen X person who uses words like that - they have a defective sense of humor vaguely based on Monty Python, never learned when you are and aren't supposed to turn it off, and so they insist on making up random insults like "fuckwaffle" all the time instead of regular swearing.

it's more cromulent than cockwomble

It smells of penny arcade

“Enshittification” updates for the modern era the concept of enclosure, where a common resource that was formerly open and free to contributors is progressively controlled, restricted, or diminished to increase private profits.