[[Enshittification]] is an extremely good word that is beginning to lose all of its meaning. I see it get bandied about quite a bit, so I figured I’d give my thoughts on how it’s being used incorrectly in the broader scheme of internet conversation. The main issue is that I see people refer to enshittification as simply “when a thing gets worse.” This is not quite right. The actual term is based around a three-stage process in a bi-directional “market,” and generally tech-based[^1]. In this scenario, the buyer / user is on one side, the person / company is on the other side, and the platform they’re selling is in the middle. These three stages are: **User Capture**: The seller lures in users to their platform by keeping prices low, making the terms of usage very generous, and subsidizing any loses that would occur from the first two things I just mentioned. **Supplier Capture**: The users have been lured into the ecosystem that the company has created. Now it must capture its suppliers — usually the people running ads. They do this by shifting the value of the platform to those suppliers and away from the recently ~~kidnapped~~ captured user base. The UI/UX experience gets weakened so that the seller can give low values and favorable terms to the suppliers. **Value Extraction**: Users and suppliers are now both locked into the platform. Time to crank the exploitation up by reducing the benefits of the platform for both users *and* suppliers to drain the last few drops of value out of it. Fees that were once generous are now increased. Visibility on the platform is now predicated on how much you’re willing to pay. And your terms of use as a user drastic go down (think about how NSFW content tends to get cut in this stage). That’s enshittification. What is it not? - Cost-cutting - Shareholder-driven monetization schemes - Outsourcing creative labor - Risk-aversion - Price hikes - Marketing bloat Think of it this way: If your favorite company releases a dogshit game, you’re free to not buy it, because you’re not captured by that company’s ecosystem. It doesn’t exist. Both you and online society experience no consequences if you simply choose not to buy [[Final Fantasy XVI is Exhausting|Final Fantasy XVI]], other than being sad that it was so trash. Enshittification would instead be if, say, Valve suddenly decided that it wanted twice its usual cut from creators uploading their games to Steam, or made it so that a developer needed to pay extra to show up in a user’s discovery queue. Could you abandon your Steam library and go somewhere else? Maybe. It wouldn’t be easy. I think the Epic store just added gifting as a feature last week. That lock-in effect is the difference. Obviously, enshittification is *aligned* with the concept of “when a thing gets worse,” as well as with bog-standard corporate decay. The only way I see that Steam hypothetical I mentioned happening is if it went public, for example. But I do think the distinction is important, because a corporation is likely to bank on you not knowing the difference. In fact, it may hope that you *do* think charging $50 for a character skin is enshittification — because by definition, enshittification isn’t something that’s easy to get out of. There is a sort of defeat to the term, but only because it makes sense within its context. I guess what I’m saying is that recognizing that some battles are easier to fight than others is important to me. I understand why people are hesitant to get off of Discord. But that’s not quite the same as buying the next terrible **Call of Duty** game. Hope some semblance of this rambling makes sense to people. [^1]: though it can certainly happen elsewhere