Enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author of The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse:
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.”
“Enshittification,” Cory Doctorow’s coinage describing the process by which internet media platforms become increasingly unusable and un-quittable, has been named 2023’s “Digital Word of the Year.” Here, we break down what the term means and Doctorow’s solution to the internet’s relentless enshittification.
While I agree with Doctorow that said practice/phenomenon deserves a word, I still think “enshittification” is a bad choice, selected more for its shock-value and popular appeal than anything linguisticly relevant about it.
As I recall, that tends to be Doctorow’s shtick.
Yeah I agree. I suspect he didn’t know the article would blow up as much as it did
Its a good and direct word. I could guess what it meant before I even heard his definition of the word: Things that are willingly made shittier.
“Un-userfriendli-fication” would never catch on.
Right, and that’s not what it means. Hence my statement that it’s a bad word.
Platforms that over time is made shittier to serve the business before the user. What definition are you using?
That definition, not “Things that are willingly made shittier.” Things get shittier for an endless amount of reasons. The reason for the shittiness is very important to the meaning of the word here. That reason is also entirely unclear when just hearing the word on it’s own. Ipso flipso, bad word.
Reminds me about that post about wishing humans had a dedicated sound for warning each other about bees.
Theres no single word that can clearly communicate the entire reason, context, and meaning. If we want to tell the reason for the shittyness, then we say that in a full sentence.
Though most people would understand from context if I just said “Bees!” instead of spending an entire sentence telling them where the bees are and why they should run.
So your point is that…people know what you mean when you shout the name of a very particular animal? That…doesn’t really have any bearing on what I’m saying.
With “enshittification”, what people mean is obvious - in the vast majority of uses I’ve seen, they just want to say “shit” but don’t because it’s not cool or something, idk. What the word means is not clear. That’s my point. It’s so rare that I see it used to mean what it’s intended to that Doctorow might as well not even be credited, and he shares most of the blame for that.
Doctorow wrote a overwrought, psuedo-intillectual blog post to describe in detail what this word means, and then gave us…that. The end result didn’t lead to a better understanding of how and why companies are abusing and draining their customer bases for every penny they can wring from them, or a way to call them out on it as they’re ramping it up faster than ever before. No. He just gave the world another way to say “shit”. Clearly that’s worthy of “Word of the Year”. 🙄
No, im saying that if you want to say what exactly is shittified, you say whats shittified. Theres no way to make a single word contain a full definition without relying on some common knowledge. In this case saying enshittification, then both you and I have both read that blogpost and knows what the full meaning is. While someone who hasn’t can at least know its about stuff getting shittier, and guess the rest from context. You can’t really find a better single word than that.
Also I’ve rarely heard “shit” used for its actual meaning. It is common knowledge that shitty doesn’t literally mean “covered in poo”. Its pretty clear what it means. And it has never been a shocking word in the 40 years I’ve lived. Probably back in the 50s or something they could use it for shock value.
Which, as I’ve said (repeatedly), they don’t. Nobody does. That’s the problem with it.
My guy, this is literally the problem I was describing in the root comment - they don’t guess the rest from context, they just continue using it incorrectly and subvert the point of having the word entirely. if you want to call something shit you can say something like this: “this product is getting shittier”.