I’m thinking even for cases of like shrinkflation.
I saw an article about potentially cheaper RAM here, so it got me curious if things ever really get better on occasion.
American beer. Used to be just be the macro brews with corn, rice and other adjuncts.
nursing, bad example. but a while ago it was getting so bad with the shortages, there still is and still bad. but they can go the travelling nursing route which is more lucrative and payout is more massive than a standard hospital. they make way more if not as much as some MDs. Hosptials/networks thought they can enshittfy by staffing less, but they realized more patients were getting maimed, died due to neglect. and they are apparently paying out the ass in underserved areas just to attract nurses back.
not so for MDs, apparently many insurance, or hospitals are forcing them go through more patients per hour/day then before.
Physicians have a lot of problems preventing us from demanding our worth because we can’t collectively bargain like nurses can. I wish I’d gone the other route but I think if I had I would have regretted it too.
Yes! Nursing really is having a resurgence. Pay is keeping up with cost of living in my area and travel contracts show promising wages in the areas I’m going next. Much better than it was 2019-2023. Those were some PTSD inducing years.
I can think of two cases that might qualify: The American meat industry and the Austrian wine industry.
In the former case, public outrage over Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle caused legislation and regulation. In the latter case, the wine industry got so cheap that they started back-sweetening rotgut with antifreeze and poisoned a bunch of people, and they had a choice: Rebrand to impeccable quality or die as a national industry.
The Austrian Green Veltliner is one of the few wines I always have to have at home.
You really should read Cory Doctorows original analysis where he coined the term “enshittification”. He has written a book about this and it really is great. The point is that for companies to be able to enshittify their products, they need to be in a specific position. Esp. in regards of competition - if there is a market and other companies are able to offer non-enshittified products, you can’t. If you are a monopoly, you totally can fuck over your users. So for an industry to un-enshittify, you need to break the monopoly structures there, kill regulatory capture, try to kill network effects and bring real competition into the industry.
If you are a monopoly
You also can do it if you’re syndicate
I feel like I’m dense and stupid to ask this, but:
What about streaming services? there are a quite a few of them, and I don’t think any one of them is in a monopoly position. Despite that, all streaming services keep enshittifying. What am I missing?
When all of the services are moving towards the same enshittification, it seems to almost become cartel-like
They have a monopoly on content. If you want to watch Star Trek, you need Paramount+ for example. If you just want to watch Sci-Fi in general any streaming service would work but if you want to watch a specific show, then you still only have 1, maybe 2 options.
The services have become so segmented that you are forced into one to watch particular types of content. Want the Disney catalogue, well only one place to get that. Latest anime? Yup, generally the same thing. I wouldn’t consider them monopolies in that right but walled gardens I think is the proper term. They exist but are closed off from each other so can do as they want in their own garden.
This and also there’s no real competition because the entry barrier to create a streaming service is really high infrastructure wise.
Think: why is there only one YouTube? How many streaming services are popping up on your TV every year?
Yeah I guess that makes sense, actually. Thanks for explaining.
Not a problem. Have a nice day! :)
<3
Cartels serve the function of monopoly. Streaming services, and tech industries in general, are cartels.
that’s a really good explanation
Doctorows concept is talking about platforms and social media sites and not Netflix:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456
There might be a lot of Netflix clones, but YouTube is the only video platform that is relevant. And you can see how they screwed over their users and the content creators then screwed over the advertisers.
Netflix has the vast share of users. By a large margin so well they might technically not be a monopoly they are.
strictly in the context of the title alone, video games.
Video games are at an all time enshitified state. What are you going on about?! You must not be following the whole market.
i was referring to atari in the 80s
anway…
Yeah, video games went through an early enshitification cycle. Atari came out and was all the rage as people made games exploring what could be done, which attracted money, which attracted grifters as well as impatient executives. Between them, a lot of garbage got released to the point where the video games industry pretty much died. Nintendo revived it with the NES and their licensing program that meant someone there had to agree a game was at a certain level before they could even publish it.
Over time, the video games industry grew to the point where it is large enough to survive a wave of shitty games, even if those games are released by the ones normally expected to know what they are doing but don’t because MBAs come in with “optimizations” that ruin things, plus sometimes brag (or are otherwise obvious enough) about what thet are doing to the point where people turn against them.
So even though the video games industry has come up with new ways of enshitification that the 80s grifters would have creamed their pants over, there’s enough competition that understands that enough people don’t really want or like that to thrive without doing it.
Everyone and their dog is making games these days, so it’s very easy, if you’re choosy, to never have firsthand experience of a bad game anymore. The only thing holding us back is listening to adverts that over-promise and ever pre-ordering anything. We don’t need them anymore.
What are you talking about? There are hundreds of great games being released, the gaming industry is a lot more than a couple of big corps.
The indie game scene is thriving and while there’s a lot of crap out there, it’s not really what I’d consider enshitified.
On the other hand, AAA games and anything mobile is absolutely enshitified.
they turned into slop for most of them.
No Man’s sky and cyberpunk definitely fall into this
No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk offered a great service to entice users, then got advertisers on board as clients, then sucked the value out of what the users and clients received in order to extract maximum value?
Promoted something amazing, fell way short on launch, but instead of disappearing with the money, fixed the game, offered free dlc/updates and redeemed themselves.
Maybe not the definition of enshittification, but at least the games are well worth playing now. My kid and I have paid licenses for each game.
Maybe the porn industry? It was rife with abuse and financially yoked its porn stars. Then things like OnlyFans came along and now adult entertainers have full control of their content and careers.
They’re still getting pimped by influencers, they take a percentage, prob most of them arent tho
They also don’t need to make the same insane amount of content to make way more money.
I encourage you to look into the agencies that prey on young women, essentially owning their content and taking most of their earnings.
He didn’t say it didn’t still happen. Just that there is now an option where it doesn’t. Essentially it’s an improvement instead of a continued enshitification.
Somewhat tangential but you should read the story of how WaWa did an end run around a corporate takeover.
T-Mobile had the worst customer service of any company I have dealt with, then had a turnaround to the best customer service of any company, but now, sadly, not so great. Though not nearly as bad as it was to start.
You misunderstood the term. An individual company gets shitty and dies a slow death. Meanwhile another company rises and picks up the users of the dying company. And then the cycle starts anew.
Or maybe you just meant to say “Which industry went bad, and then went not bad again”.
I thought enshitification was the specific process of “platforms” gaining a large market share, then exploiting both the buyers and sellers that use the platform to jack up profits/extract more rent.
Yes, while Mr. Doctorow isn’t interested in policing any language, including the term “enshittification”, it was originally a process of how platforms are first good, to attract users, then bad, betraying their users for advertisers and/or suppliers, then worse, betraying their advertisers/suppliers for their investors, and ultimately they provide the cheapest/worst service possible to just barely keep users and advertisers/suppliers using the platform, advertisers/suppliers locked in to the user base, and users locked in due to a lack of interoperability or effective monopoly.
It’s related to “chokepoint capitalism” and to a lesser extent “technofuedalism”.
no, it’s about companies creating dependent users, then cutting costs and quality, and jacking up the price
Yeah, companies. But OP used the term to describe an entire industry.
Very briefly, after the CEO of United Health was killed, insurance companies were accepting claims they otherwise would have rejected.
Welp, gotta kill another then.
Don’t do that. Don’t give me hope.
And some of those were literally life-saving claims.
Luigi saved more lives than he (allegedly) ended.
I went to pick up a prescription the next morning. It was mysteriously free.
Fuckin awesome
Is that verifiable? Claims are all PHI and kind of a black box. To be fair, there has been a shift in prior auth rules which could be influenced by the killing.
I’ve seen a few anecdotal claims that people with severe conditions got okayed after the killing.
Unfortunately, the ultimate fallout is less accountability, as they’re now unwilling to release any information about the “doctors” supposedly reviewing cases.
Shouldn’t that be prosecutable as practicing medicine without a license? They have to prove they have licensed practicing doctors making these calls.
Sure, lawyers are cheap
Book stores come to mind. Barnes and Noble killed local book stores and then Amazon killed Barnes and Noble which left an opening for local independent book stores to come back
And now the ones in my area are shutting down because B&N somehow is able to open new branches.
Barnes and Noble is profitable again
B&N did this huge push to Nook which has now been pretty much abandoned.
Coffee perhaps. I think previous generations were more apt to just get a tub of Folgers or Maxwell House and not care too much about what they were drinking. Then third wave coffee shops started emphasizing quality, process, and flavor nuances. These days, you can find specialty coffee in most areas or get high-quality beans delivered and brew it yourself.
i think starbucks started the trend, and then better coffe chains became available. and then maybe coffee shops, that arnt in gentrified areas(the ones in these areas often go under very quickly).
plus french presses, and makers are cheap now.
starbucks didnt invent cappuccinos. that was established italian coffee which made coffee decent again. that started happening well before starbucks. they just made an american specific chain based off it
Beer, too
I got a nice local shop which was part of a chain but the manager bought out the location and has been doing pretty well.
I used to not understand why people liked coffee until I had a real espresso.
Video games
Had a huge crash around the Atari era due to an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published. Games were also extremely expensive then
Nintendo famously reversed this crisis with the introduction of the NES and their “Nintendo seal of quality”. Consumers were able to access a curated collection of quality games, and it really turned things around and basically launched the modern gaming industry
they got lucky with pokemon IP, at least in the early 2000s pokemon wasnt really making much bank as it is now.
an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published
Who will save us now?
Indie games
The shovelware filling the stores by indie developers will save us? Ps Store always had some cheap mid, but they had effort put in, like ssarpbc (supersonic acrobatic rocket powered battle cars) for 1$ on sale always later became rocket league.
If anybody wants to know just how bad the crash was, Atari buried about 700,000 game cartridges and consoles in a landfill in New Mexico after the release of the infamously bad ET game for the Atari. A game that supposedly had more cartridges manufactured than there were existing consoles for them to be played on at the time.
It was so bad that the home console effectively disappeared from the US market as investors and customers believed that the fad had run its course and companies went back to focusing exclusively on arcade cabinets until Nintendo came in about 3 years later and proved that there was still a market for home consoles. It was so bad that Nintendo changed the name of the NES for the Japanese market to the Famicom - advertising it as a “family computer” system, not a game console.
I have a copy of ET my dad got for my older brother when he was a kid. Dunno if it or the Atari even still work.
You should hang onto it. They dug up some of the ones that were buried a few years back as part of a documentary and sold some of them at auction while the rest were donated to museums for preservation.
I used to have an old shareware floppy of wolf3d as well.
Steam, too. It was originally unpopular DRM for Half-Life 2. It had a broken offline mode that could only be selected when already online. It had no meaningful customer service and people permanently lost their accounts with no avenue for appeal (and probably no human even involved).
It was originally unpopular DRM and a launcher for Counterstrike. I think Valve was trying to take a page out of Battle.net’s book. The Half Life 2 thing came afterwards, and if it weren’t for that Steam probably would have just been yet another failed footnote in gaming history.
I remember the seal as a kid, I had no idea why they were doing that though. Thats a cool piece of history.
Can someone make this happen with mobile games please?
Apple did make an effort with Apple Arcade. The idea is it’s a curated list of decent indie games, none of which have monetization. But, you pay a monthly fee for them.
Not all of them Indie tbh, there are plenty of Arcade versions of popular games that normally have MTX or ads.
But yes, you also get some indie gems that normally are a one time purchase, and I believe some games specially developed for the Arcade.
Hilariously, Civ 7 is on there, but my phone has an A16 and it requires A17. And I stopped my sub a while ago
We’re at the point where you can play all sorts of emulated games on mobile. There are near infinite bangers to play right now.
And best of all, even iOS has emulators now! For a while they were banned on the app store IIRC. Now there are pretty good emulators there.
I did not get very far with my first ever playthrough of Ocarina of Time personally. But I’ve played plenty of Pokemon Emerald over the years.
And I THINK there was a company out there trying to revive old mobile games that were actually good (think original Angry Birds) so they’d work on modern phones. I dunno if that took off sadly, though…
NES also introduced verification so you couldn’t just manufacture random games and take them to market without approval.
Walled gardens - sucky but sometimes genuinely useful to clean up messes and keep them from happening (aka Grandma on her iPhone)
AFAIK internet access was very siloed in the 90s - AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and the like, which weren’t quite ISPs, since they allowed access only to their own services and networks. Then, in 2000s, these companies evolved and ISPs started providing access to the WWW, whick you could call “deshittifying” internet access.
Probably before my time… What I remeber from using AOL was that their browser and keyword structure was like an idiot-proof version of the Internet that was accessible for the entire family. I guess they thought that typing www.something.com was for techies… But that ultimately they were still providing you an internet connection and you could use other software to access the actual internet.
Yeah, unless it was different in the very early days, we used AOL and it was basically a glorified homepage. Opening the browser and choosing your own sites to visit felt very advanced, but worked just the same.
I got curious and did a bit of searching since I couldn’t really think of anything. Apparently Fender (guitars) was originally amazing, was sold to another company and really degraded in overall quality, and then was purchased back by some of its engineers and returned to a better quality. Pretty nice to see that people who were actually passionate about something regaining control and saving something they loved.
https://www.soundunlimited.co.uk/blogs/articles/fender_timeline
Ironically, they are now sending cease-and-desist letters to guitar manufacturers that build guitars with the s-style that their stratocasters have, and they are public enemy number one in the guitar community right now.
https://www.guitarworld.com/gear/electric-guitars/fender-cease-and-desist-lsl-instruments
Sadly though with the recent cease and desist stuff they’ve been involved with it seems like they’ve turned scummy.
Disappointing :( It seemed like their overall production quality is what made them popular and revered, so going after someone who won’t be able to source the same materials and match the same production scale does seem super low.
Could be that they don’t want people selling knock off shit as real and tanking their reputation. Or it could be assholery.
Their Stratocaster shape is public domain in the US. They won a court case in Germany for copyright of it and immediately went after any builder selling to Germany.
It was a total asshole scumbag move. No silver lining, just finance bros destroying a brand.
I could so understand that! I’m not super familiar with their products beyond looking into things for this post, but I feel like their branding would be on their official products 🤔 If another company is making something similar and using their branding, that would be pretty disastrous.
They then proceeded to not innovate at all for a couple decades and now they’re serving cease and desists to any builders making guitars remotely similar to the Stratocaster with demands to recall and destroy sold guitars.
Fender is dogshit ass like Gibson. Both companies have behaved like entitled nepo-babies for decades. These companies deserve to die as punishment for their hubris.
This is similar to how many of the big names in the video game industry were built. Disgruntled designers leaving companies like Atari to start their own company. It’s how Blizzard got their start, and I believe Ubisoft, EA, and at least a couple of the other big names were founded the same way.
Then, of course, the bean counters started taking over and it all went downhill from there once they went from keeping the designers on task with realistic goals to maximizing profits.
Newman’s own seemed on track to go through the same thing, but the original family bought it back before things got too far.
That was a nice read, thanks for sharing
Beer?
In the beginning was European beer, and it was good. They created the American brewing industry and it was ok. Then they said “let there be swill” and that’s all we knew. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep.
Then Jimmy Carter said, "Let us make breweries in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the drinkers in the sea and the imbibers in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild party animals, and over all the pedestrians that move along the ground. And there was beer
Jimmy Carter saw all that he had made, and it was very good.
Edit: Jimmy Carter was the US President who signed into law deregulating beer. Since then we were legally able to start brewing our own, and it jumped-started the rise of craft brews here
it always amazes me how many people buy into the neocon garbage that Carter was a bad president. Dude was a nuclear submariner, helped cleanup a nuclear disaster, built houses with his hands, and his biggest crime to them? he cancelled the B-1 bomber when it became painfully obvious the stealth programs were going to eclipse it’s usefulness.
Reagan got elected on treason with iran, and lies about the B-1.
4 years later he was talking about the amount of money the pentagon was spending on ‘costumes’ as he slid into dementia.
Carter didn’t piss and moan, just went on building houses with his hands for 30+ more years.
Carter was the last good president NOT “made for TV”.
Trump is the first “made for internet” president
never thought about it that way but valid. yep.
Carter was also the last president to treat the American people like adults.
that’s insightful; so much of reaganism was ‘let daddy take care of things and don’t worry your pretty little head about ww3’.
I remember reading his malais speech and thinking that the American people were a bunch of babies for trashing him over it.
malais speech
I’d heard this mentioned but it was before my time, upon reading it… holy shit, america, this guy described problems like an adult and you freaked the fuck out and went reagan.
jfc
Yep, the idea that Americans thought Carter was a terrible president bad had me embarrassed since I was in high school.
Carter brought the Iran situation on himself by himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter's_engagement_with_Ruhollah_Khomeini
That article repeatedly points out the shit-sandwich geopolitical and local political situation with Iran has been going back to Kennedy.
Is it bullshit petroleum company induced meddling and related crimes? For sure. Does it mean landing in Carter’s lap means he eats the whole sandwich? I don’t agree. YMMV.
The whole sandwich is not for Carter, but the part about handing over the country to Islamists.
and yet, instead of holding the responsible parties - war hawks, petroleum companies, the bomb-bomb-bomb-iran (barbara ann) caucus, who you know are directly connected to it, you say shit like "carter for handling over the country to islamists’
fascinating.
keep grinding your anti-carter ax, I’m sure it makes you very popular with the youts
In that sense, no president is responsible because they always are just figureheads.
In any case, if the US hadn’t mingled in Iran there would have been no hostage crisis, and no islamistic regime.
sure thing bud
I used to think I didn’t like beer, until I tried it in Germany. Now I just seek that style out.
I’ve also had an anger inducing moment when a forum debater claimed Government regulation always harms industries. I pointed to German beer, which in part remains fantastic because it has regulations to avoid devolving it into American slop. The damn liar pivoted directly into claiming their beer is terrible.
Have you tried Belgian stuff yet? Also highly regarded.
I think so, yeah; not as though the quality stops right at Germany’s borders, several other European countries can follow the same style very well.
Can’t stand Belgian beer. Coriander is disgusting and they use SO MUCH of it. Tastes like a god damn headache.
You’ve been drinking the wrong beligian beers friend. There’s a lot more to Belgian beer than a coriandered hoegaarden.
Try a trippel next time you get a chance. Or if you’re into hops Duvel is divine.
Tripels also contain coriander, but Duvels do not.
Some Tripels do, most don’t though. Most are without coriander.
But all you fucking export is over hopped swill and fucking Brooklyn Amber lager!
Yeah, the over-hopped thing is a trend that should’ve been dragged out back and shot before it ever had a chance to become popular. I want to go to a beer garden and find a variety. Instead, I get a dozen IPAs, Guinness (not complaining about that one), seven different ciders that are flavored like sickly sweet tropical fruits, and a weird peanut butter flavored bock from a local brewery.
Thank you. Christ I hate IPAs. I always feel like people are lying when they say they like them lol. I know everyone is different but fuck IPAs are SO bitter and awful.
I like a session IPA, genuinely. It’s just when all you taste is stupidly bitter hops that I can’t be arsed.
There’s a beer at a locally brewery here called Hop Shock. The name tells you everything you need to know lol.
Ha ha, every country keeps the good stuff for themselves.
Over-hopped is a major style here, and I find it baffling. Give me the toasty, malty, barley, coffee, bitter, chocolate notes of a good porter or stout any day of the week. But no, the menu is 6 IPAs, 2 ciders, a bock, and a weiss.
Too true. I mean, I like over-hopped swill, but I like most distinctive tastes
Currently drinking a “Maine sour”: blueberry and cinnamon. My local brewery is influenced by the cuisine of the Indian owners and really leans into sour ales and tropical fruits!
But yeah, even though I like an IPA most of the time, what about everything else? I’ve actually had good luck finding dark/black ales this year but it seems like no one makes Marzens anymore. October is disappointing without Marzens. What’s up with that?
Edit: Mango Lassi Sour is back in season!!!
Amen, brother.
