@airspeedswift was just discussing with a friend how good the word itself is. And me telling him “I don’t even remember the case Cory wrote about it”; and then re-reading it and realizing I was using it differently.

I am afraid the word will take on a life of its own. All I can do is enjoy the debates over it now :-)

@Migueldeicaza @airspeedswift my understanding of enshittification is that it describes the three-phase process by which a middleman establishes a monopoly before ramping prices and cutting quality.

The canonical example is Amazon, who first provided a cheap deal to buyers so they'd only want to get their books from Amazon, then provided a compelling deal to suppliers so they'd only want to sell through Amazon, and finally, once they'd sown up the market, they were free to swindle everyone.

@Migueldeicaza @airspeedswift it seems like that could potentially apply to both Reddit and github.

They're both effectively middlemen between content providers and content consumers, who make that connection available for free (while running at a loss) with a presumable long term goal of monetizing it once they've made it sufficiently hard for users to jump ship if they don't like the changes that monetization effort brings.

@Migueldeicaza @airspeedswift of course I'd expect Microsoft to do it less hamfistedly than Reddit has done because they value their reputation more highly and they have other revenue streams to allow them to ramp up more slowly before needing to reach profitability.

I can't imagine that their strategy with github is just to keep running it as a loss leader forever so it can act as a halo effect for their other products and services though (although I suppose it's possible).

@NeoNacho @airspeedswift @nicklockwood I am confused at the particular case study here. When I tweeted this, it was regarding the cash-cow dynamics around .net developers (it’s a long story).

Not sure where GitHub got here, and generally, I think copilot being a paid service is ok, you don’t have to buy it.

The management of GitHub is the same for the shenanigans above, and there might come a day that it switches to cash cow mode - and we get to experience the consequences.