alt Hacker NewsEnshittification didn't start recently. It was always there. You just didn't notice it because of your age. Your youth and childhood days always have good memories, doesn't matter how shitty those days were.
Selling is just as old as money. Every business that tried sell you soaps and cosmetics had to scare you about bacteria, making you forget that bacteria was always there with you for millennia. What you call enshittfication is the change accumulation that you witnessed over decades. Ask children who hasn't seen all that change. They see everything is just fine.
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avhception • today at 8:34 AM
No company in the days of yore could pop up stuff on a screen that was always in my pocket.
Yes, nasty salesmen are as old as time and possibly predate humans, but that is not what enshittification means.
From Wikipedia[0]:
> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided 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 short-term profits for shareholders.
Basically a middleman fucking over both sides of the deal, typically in the context of online services. The term was popularised in 2022 [1].
Remove "online services" (anchoring the term firmly in the present) and I still can't think of wide ranging examples in the past. I will admit that this might be because I haven't been around for very long.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
1 - https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/