[jeetoid]

Such a great observation. I find this broadly applies to every aspect of humanity but especially government, more so than corporations could ever manage. Corporations at least have SOME competitive pressure, much less scope, many more constraints and far less power.

[kibwen]

Governments are actually less nefarious by this metric because they don't have a perverse incentive to make things worse. If a government wants more money out of you, it just raises taxes. If a corporation wants more money out of you, it needs to induce demand, which at the limit means actively working to make the product worse. Our modern world is proof that relying on competition isn't enough to save us from the enshittification.

[disqard]

> Governments [...] don't have a perverse incentive to make things worse.

I hate to break this to you, but in the USA, this has happened multiple times: for instance, allowing Govt to shutdown due to spending limits, to push some extra pain + score political points, and then paint oneself as a savior when the shutdown is eventually lifted.

You could argue that they're not making things worse for the folks that actually matter (and you'd be right), but there is immense hardship and pain inflicted on ordinary people routinely (esp. of late), so I didn't want to leave your comment unchallenged.

[fallingknife]

Enshitification is not something that happens to customers. Free software is not free to the advertisers, and as such, the companies will go to great lengths to meet their needs. And this makes sense. Why would a company do anything for you if you aren't paying?

If people preferred a good paid solution over a shitty free one then Kagi would be a trillion dollar company and nobody would ever have heard of Google. But that's not what people want. They want shitty but free. This is the market working as it should. Enshitification is not something done to us. It's something we do to ourselves.