I recently saw a post from a connection on LinkedIn that said, “I read an article this morning suggesting LinkedIn is on a path to ‘enshittification’ (a new word for me), supposedly because of the increasing amount of non-work content here.”
That’s not what enshittification means at all. (Besides, people should feel free to not have to compartmentalize themselves, and be able to bring their whole selves to work. That’s what DEI and sensitivity training teaches us.)
From Wikipedia:
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
Cory Doctorow coined the term in a blog post about social media in the fall of 2022, when I left Twitter for Mastodon in protest of Musk’s acquisition and reinstatement of felon Trump’s account.
[A]s Facebook and Twitter cemented their dominance, they steadily changed their services to capture more and more of the value that their users generated for them. At first, the companies shifted value from users to advertisers: engaging in more surveillance to enable finer-grained targeting and offering more intrusive forms of advertising that would fetch high prices from advertisers.
This enshittification was made possible by high switching costs. The vast communities who’d been brought in by network effects were so valuable that users couldn’t afford to quit, because that would mean giving up on important personal, professional, commercial and romantic ties.
He continues, “The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left.”
Enshittification is something companies do to abuse their users, not something users can do to alter platforms organically.
Amazon has DRM to prevent users who purchase digital content from ever unsubscribing. Facebook no longer shows you your friends’ content. It just shows “boosted” paid posts and advertisements. Google shows ads instead of search results. Twitter and Reddit started charging exorbitant prices for APIs.
And AI is everywhere. If you are climate-conscious or otherwise just don’t care for the slop produced by LLMs, you still can’t get away from it. I ask Siri something and she says, “Would you like me to use ChatGPT?” No, Siri, I would not. I’ve had to drop Firefox because Mozilla is going all-in on AI. I’m currently searching for a new search engine. Mojeek uses AI. Kagi uses AI in their premium tier. And now I see even Ecosia, the supposedly environment-friendly search engine, is offering it as well.
“If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product.” Even though Kagi has a tier with AI, they have paid tiers without AI. By voting with my pocketbook, as it were, I think this might be the best bet. Maybe the Kagi executives will recognize an increase paying users deliberately not using the AI tier, who knows?
(An admission: I’m supposed to use AI—like GitHub Copilot—at work, for now at least, at the request of my superiors, but I remain wary…)