Thoughts on Enshittification

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to refer to the way of online platforms, moving from awesome experience for users, to making it shitty for users to please businesses who are bringing money to the platform, and finally making it shitty for everyone as they focus solely on shareholders.

But the term works with programming and products, too. A few years ago, we signed up for a concert subscription. The first year, it was awesome. The second year, they reduced the number of concerts. Then they limited how many concerts you could sign up for at a time, so you constantly had to manage your account or get shut out of concerts because it was first-come, first-served (or get a 15% discount on full-priced tickets to account for the 15% discount you already paid for with your subscription). The third year, they raised the price of the subscription by 25%. And finally, they announced they had new restrictions, effective immediately, on bag size (only a small clutch) and banning personal water bottles.

It went from awesome to not very enjoyable, all in a three-year span. I’m trying to see it for what it is now vs. remembering what it was like three years ago. Is it worth the cost right now? We have a few months before the renewal date to decide.

But here’s the thing — in our experience, the first year was great. But we hadn’t been there for the year before that. What if people who had started their subscription a year before us thought that our year was terrible in comparison to the year they had come from? Totally possible. It only seems shitty because we have a comparison. Without a comparison, if we started now, we may think things are wonderful.

It is really hard not to think about things in comparison. To judge things as if nothing had come before.