[pettertb]

"They get worse because they need to keep pleasing new users, new needs, address every edge case."

That is not what enshittification is about, and not who it is about. You don't enshittify to please users, you do it to please shareholders.

[hlassiege]

Fair point. I realize that "enshittification" has a more specific meaning in English (I'm french). My bad I was using it in a broader sense, connecting it to my previous company (700 people, I co-founded it in 2012).

I was thinking more about all the factors that increase product complexity, and it's far from being just about shareholders:

* The more people you add to a company, the more complexity you add because inherently, everyone wants to leave their mark. In the end, some people see themselves grow because they contributed to this or that new feature. Doesn't matter if it's redundant. Doesn't matter if 10 months later you realize it adds nothing. I've unfortunately seen this pattern repeat itself over and over.

* The bigger a company gets, the more it needs to respond to increasingly specific use cases. A salesperson tells you their client needs this. Customer support tells you a portion of your users are asking for that. Either you have enough perspective to say it doesn't fit your vision, or you don't, and you try to please everyone. But it's a huge source of complexity. And I could cite tons of examples from my old company.

And just to be transparent, I am using my blog as a journal, with short posts. I was not expecting that much traffic and I totally understand that it's maybe not as deep as you would expect ^^

[topaz0]

If you're interested in the specific thing that other people mean by that word, the original Cory Doctorow essay that coined it is well worth a read: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

Of course he followed it up with a book, so there's that as well if you want a deeper dive, but the essay is fairly comprehensive at least in laying out what he intends by the term.

[markerz]

While I think I understand your point, there’s probably a few ways to look at this.

One is many products start out pleasing most users, but pivots to enterprise customers because of revenue. Thus, the product shifts heavily towards the enterprise use-case of a few customers at the loss of most small-medium users. Getting more users in this enterprise world means making changes to accommodate special needs and that leads to entropy.

Another new need is to hit next quarters revenue targets, so companies find more juice to squeeze somewhere.

[topaz0]

Those things can happen, sure, but GP is saying that the term "enshittification" was coined to describe a very specific kind of phenomenon about monopoly internet platforms and their pattern of first building dependency and market power before becoming maximally extractive. It's not supposed to be about just any generic way that software might get worse for its users.

Arguably it was a poor choice of word, but some of us would still like to be able to refer to that specific phenomenon.

[Cthulhu_]

At one point the user to please becomes a stakeholder, the need is a metric that needs to go up, the edge case is legislation or a specific need. From a user's point of view, services like Spotify or Slack have been stagnant for a decade, but I'm sure that in the background they've been doing work costing hundreds of millions in investments and developer time.