this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
487 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
57472 readers
3802 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Enshittification
Enshittification will often involve doing things like this, yes. But as the link itself states, the actual meaning—per Doctorow's original definition—is an entire process, and a little more descriptive. These things are not the same, one is just frequently a symptom of the other.
Sorry if this comes across as pedantic, I'm in a personal quest, of sorts, to protect the original meaning because I think it's too important to lose. To anyone else reading this: please, don't use enshittification when you really only mean "the platform is doing something bad."
For the quoted behavior, I'm a big proponent of "asshole design."
In other words, asshole design is only one part of the enshititification process.
Yeah, I think you could say that :^)
The most important things to remember about enshittification are the reasons why it happens in the first place and the particular manner in which it does, time and time again. To anyone interested in this topic, consider giving Doctorow's talk a watch. It's great, and explains all of this really well.
You know that it's not a new concept, right? Just a new word for a specific type of rent seeking that has plagued capitalism forever.
It's nice to see people learning economics from YA fiction authors, but read some books man
Any pre-existing name for this specific type of rent seeking you'd rather people used instead? For what it's worth, I believe enshittification has its own benefits.
There are better ways to express yourself than this.
Being a YA fiction author does not diminish the worth of one's ideas or their other works. Cory also worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is absolutely a position that, coupled with his many years of studying the digital landscape, gives him a level of insight into it that makes people interested in what he has to say about it, and for good reason. It's not merely about economics.
If you think people could do the subject, themselves, or others better in this regard by consuming better material, you could point a better direction than "read some books"
I'm just annoyed that people think rent seeking is some newly discovered concept. I'm not sure if there's a name for the very specific type we're referring to and I'm not sure there needs to be.
I think we'd be much better off if people actually understand the underpinning concept rather than having a thin and shallow understanding of just one single way it manifests.
I'll let the opening paragraph of the "rent seeking" wiki page to show why:
(Emphasis mine)
On the wiki itself, each one of those items in the list I bolded has an entire wiki page about it and I'm pretty certain what is called "enshittification" fits into at least one of them.
I just wish people would care about the actual thing that's going on and not just one aspect of one type of the thing.
Edit: for any downvoters, look at my response to the reply below for clarification. Yes I'm glad that a small group of terminally online nerds in the tech industry have finally discovered one aspect (and consequence) of rent seeking. That's not really my issue.
If it is not indeed a new concept, it seems a great deal of people either didn't know about it, or refused to care. Rather than be annoyed at the rediscovery, perhaps a better outlook would be to rejoice that these same ideas are reaching more people through the new words than it did with the old?
The problem is, they're not actually learning about anything real, they're learning about one specific outcome of rent seeking in the modern world that they only noticed because of their profession. By giving this very narrow and specific concept a cute name, and making that shit popular or whatever has literally prevented young people from understanding these important economic concepts on any real level.
So yeah I'm glad that a small portion of terminally online tech nerds have finally discovered a major form of rent seeking in their industry and identified it as a problem. But then they just stop there as if it exists in a vacuum. I just wish they'd read some actual books (or hell, if you don't want to turn off the screen, audio books?) about the subject rather than just repeat some clever term over and over.
That's my problem. I guess it's nitpicky. But I do believe there are people who will now never learn another single thing about economic concepts that affect their lives because they're not even aware that this "newly discovered phenomenon" is just one small aspect of a much larger problem that is endemic to all of capitalism. They just think it's this quirky thing that only affects tech.