>that's literally meaningless. also ahistorical, both in that this is not what happened hours after it was first posted to HN (which was months after it was originated)

Maybe it wasn't literally hours, but it was really fast. I remember noting how quickly people began to complain about it being used "improperly." The earliest instance I could find was this thread[0] from 2023 where user Gunax complained about it. I couldn't find an earlier reference in Algolia, it probably exists but I honestly don't care enough to put in the effort.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36297336

>and also in that "things become shittier" was and is still a perfectly common expression

...perfectly encapsulated and described by the term "enshittification." Which is why people use it for that now. It's more descriptive in the general sense than it is as a specific term of art. You're complaining that a word that means "the process of turning to shit" is being used to describe "the process of turning to shit." What did people expect to happen? If you want to keep it as a precise and technical term of art, keep calling it "platform decay." A shit joke is not a technical, precise term of art.

You can be as much of a prescriptivist crank about this as you want, it doesn't matter. "Enshittification" now refers to any process by which things "turn to shit."