Cant imagine making 30 k a year and having to pay even 1600 in taxes. This is saying it will increase that much.
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Well, I mean, I remember when Cory Doctorow first created the word, and it's always meant to me what the sidebar says. It captured specifically why online platforms start out very consumer-friendly to attract users, until the users and businesses are trapped by network effects, and they become the product being sold.
Maybe language changes, maybe it now means just "things getting worse" to some people. But I honestly think that's a tragedy, because if "enshittification" loses its specific meaning, it loses the power to specifically call attention to this phenomenon.
He might have invented the word but he didn't invent the phenomenon. People have been aware of capitalism's eroding effect on the quality of goods and services for a while now. While he may have specifically been talking about online products and services it's not like it even originated there. The decline of products due to capitalism's entropy is well established and preceded the decline of online services. I think it's rather safe to say it's taken on a meaning for more than just the internet. Certainly that's what most people use it for I've noticed.
That's also in no way a tragedy. Kind of ironic to be bemoaning a word losing its original specific meaning and then using the word tragedy to describe that.
The specific meaning in the sidebar is explicitly about differentiating it from other generic capitalist decay. It's specific to online platforms, and in that specificity, is narrowly tailored and more relevant to what we experience in the 2020s.
That's the beauty of words - you don't need to reuse the same word for vastly different phenomenon, and by allowing words to have specific meanings, you increase the deftness with which we articulate and discuss the world.
Vastly different? How are they vastly different? It's the exact same phenomenon with the exact same cause.