I see, so no comment at all on the fact that caring about products and customers requires making money?

I have read the thread, thank you, and you certainly have been talking about startups and founders as if these issues are unique to them. It’s not just ‘yeah yeah big companies too’… if you actually care about and study enshittification at all, it is, by and large, entirely coming from big companies, and it isn’t new to software, it has always been happening. The only thing new is a cute term for it that got popular recently. Old business terms that mean the same thing include: loss leader, hook product, bait and switch, and plain old “promotion”. Regardless of what the topic here is, it doesn’t make sense to harp on startups over quality going down. For that to happen, it had to be higher at some point, and that point is: startups. VC funding might lead to some quality decline, but all companies trim and get worse as they grow, and always have. Startup is the phase when companies provide the highest level of product or service.