@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).

@airspeedswift @Migueldeicaza I mean, I really want to believe that

a) a company like Microsoft can make more money by focussing on creating new innovative products than by extracting ever increasing rent from their existing back catalog, and

b) once they find a way to make a fair profit they'll stop trying to extract more and more revenue at the expense of the user experience.

However, this belief kind of runs contrary to the reality I've witnessed. ("Responsibility to shareholders", etc).

@nicklockwood @airspeedswift @Migueldeicaza imo market competition is really the only thing that can check a for-profit corporation’s thirst for profits in the the long run.

That’s why for services that have natural network effects the only way to avoid a degraded UX in the long run is to have them be stewarded by organizations that are not for-profit (e.g. Wikipedia), or to build on federated protocols that prevent any one company from controlling the entire network.

@jjoelson @airspeedswift @Migueldeicaza or legal regulations, antitrust, etc.

It remains to be seen how well federation works as barrier. Being built on top of IRC didn't stop Slack from enshittifying, nor is Gmail or Chrome's dominance significantly limited by being built on open standards.

@jjoelson @airspeedswift @Migueldeicaza Chrome can affect the entire web with a single UX decision - for example they broke basically all web games a few years back by disabling auto-play audio.

They can also break the web for other browser users by implementing bleeding edge standards, or implementing things in a nonstandard way because devs only test on Chrome.

Gmail's dominance means they can break email for non-gmail users by blocking an entire ISP domain because of one spammy user, etc.