'Enshittification' Is Officially the Biggest Word of the Year (gizmodo.com)
- Reference: 0175549845
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/27/0159221/enshittification-is-officially-the-biggest-word-of-the-year
- Source link: https://gizmodo.com/enshittification-is-officially-the-biggest-word-of-the-year-2000530173
> The Australians [2]define the word 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." We've all felt this. Google search is [3]filled with garbage . The internet is clogged with SEO-farming websites that clog up results. Facebook is an endless stream of [4]AI-generated slop . Zoom wants you to test out its new AI features while you're [5]trying to go into a meeting . Twitter has become X, and its owner thinks [6]sharing links is a waste of time . Last night I reinstalled Windows 11 on a desktop machine and got pissed as it was finalized and Microsoft kept trying to get me to install OneDrive, Office 360, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and a bunch of other shit I didn't want.
Writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification [7]in 2022 , and recently offered potential solutions to the age-old phenomenon in an [8]interview with The Register .
"We need to have prohibition and regulation that prohibits the capital markets from funding predatory pricing," he explained. "It's very hard to enter the market when people are selling things below cost. We need to prohibit predatory acquisitions. Look at Facebook: buying Instagram, and Mark Zuckerberg sending an email saying we're buying Instagram because people don't like Facebook and they're moving to Instagram, and we just don't want them to have anywhere else to go."
[1] https://gizmodo.com/enshittification-is-officially-the-biggest-word-of-the-year-2000530173
[2] https://x.com/MacqDictionary/status/1861168894783967241
[3] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/01/16/2137200/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find
[4] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/08/06/2116258/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from
[5] https://www.fastcompany.com/90948619/zoom-ai-features-presentation-skills-bad-at-meetings
[6] https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-links-x-twitter
[7] https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/
[8] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/01/31/2119206/cory-doctorow-has-a-plan-to-wipe-away-the-enshittification-of-tech
Enshittification is not new. (Score:2, Offtopic)
Politicians have been doing this to nations for eons, we simply finally got a word for it.
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody was claiming it was new. The article simply said that the word was chosen as word of the year.
Slashdot is not immune from this. (Score:2)
nt
just sharing links *is* a waste of time. (Score:2)
Am I the only one sick of people who post on X/facebook etc with just a link and no comment? (Few on slashdot, fortunately.)
Sufficient value-added before the the link should be enough, but on X the workaround is apparently:
"Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking."
I dont think that word means what you think it mea (Score:2)
"Last night I reinstalled Windows 11 on a desktop machine and got pissed as it was finalized and Microsoft kept trying to get me to install OneDrive, Office 360, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and a bunch of other shit I didn't want." Enshittification might imply windows and other apps were good to begin with. Win10 has gotten to the point on my system where occasionally you cant unlock the screen without clicking on one of the three icons on the bottom (temperature, stocks, or news) without edge opening up t
Re: (Score:2)
> Enshittification might imply windows and other apps were good to begin with.
You're not wrong, however the vernacular usage is that most people would agree that Windows peaked at SOME point. i.e. Win 7 > Win 8 > Win 10 > Win 11.
Look at how Windows starting becoming crap when Microsoft starting hiding file types back in ~ Win 98. What's kind of funny is that WinZip has an OLD [1]Knowledge Base 26 [winzip.com] that documents how to Show file extensions in Win 7, 8, 10, and 11. :-)
[1] http://kb.winzip.com/kb/entry/26/
Hostile Content (Score:2)
It kinda started with pinterest, hostile content that shows up in search results but then forces you to jump thru hoops and sign up.
Then it continued with even more general Enshittification, and nobody really fought against it. Even when Netflix went back on a formerly important promise and hassled everyone for more money.
So now the game is on for the greedy marketing types, they gonna squeeze harder than ever before - because you did not teach them a lesson the first time, you just let it happen.
It is goin
Maybe Next year the word will be... (Score:1)
Shitfuckery - to intentionally set out to fuck things up for others.
originating from? [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3swUOWgO7bY
Boing Boing (Score:3)
Ironic that Doctorow's Boing Boing has recently succumbed to enshitification by going hard core against any ad blocker and paywalling all of the discussions. Truly sad...
Something happened in the aughts (Score:2)
Something happened in the aughts, the years 2000-2009. The various financial bubbles sparked or peaked, medical, education, housing. Personally that's when I noticed the quality of durable goods declining dramatically. A new social paradigm took hold, driven by companies seeking to extract maximum value without regard to longer term company performance or product quality. [1]Income inequality grew [pewresearch.org]. There was some sort of paradigm shift, I suspect in business schools and in monetary policy, which has been wea
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/
An even longer word for "monopoly" (Score:2)
The only issue I have with Doctorow's term is that everything he's describing seems to be to be already covered by the concept of monopolies, and we already have a legal structure to handle it. (We only really lack the political will to enforce the existing laws.)
> "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."
Yes, that is one of the core outcomes of a monopoly. That's why we regulate them.
> "We need to have prohibition and regulation that prohibits the capital markets from funding predatory pricing,"
Yes, that is called "dumping", and we already have prohibition and regulations.
> "We need to prohibit predatory acquisitions"
Yes, also already prohibited for monopolies.
Re: (Score:2)
Gaetz dropped out of the confirmation process, so you won't get your wish. Too bad!