alt Hacker NewsAnother word whose usefulness has been degraded to just mean “bad behavior by an organization”.
With “enshittification”, Doctorow meant something specific, where a platform rises to popularity by serving its users, then betrays those users to its business partners to make more money, then finally betrays even those business partners to keep most of the value for themselves.
Anyway I guess Doctorow brought this on himself by choosing a word that’s fun to say but isn’t clear about what it refers to.
Doctorow approved the generic use. He said he never meant for "enshittification" to only ever refer to the platform lock-in pattern. It refers to any way that things get worse on purpose.