Macquarie Dictionary, Australia’s national dictionary, has recognized the importance of the term enshittification in today’s tech by crowning it the word of the year – it also won the people’s vote.
Enshittification is defined as the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
It’s a helpful term for describing many of today’s tech products, from Google search being a slush of ads, link farms, forum posts, and useless AI content, to social media platforms becoming a hate-filled nightmare. Don’t forget those products that move from being one-off purchases to subscriptions before their quality starts becoming diluted, or once-great video game franchises that become little more than a way for publishers to push more microtransactions and season passes onto people. Companies are putting yearly increases in profits and share prices above absolutely everything else, including making sure the products they offer aren’t, well, shit.
How long before some big tech corpo appropriates it and advertises one of their products as “not enshittified” or whatever
Here at bingus & bongus Co we use an anti-shitification model that ensures our clients that our products will stay the same or get better at all time.
“Our nascent AI technology…”
“…Monthly fee to ensure no enshittification…”
“…our mobile app does require GPS permissions to maximize…”
>sees website complaining about ads
>disable ad blocker to test
Although by a different organization in a different continent, enshittification was also selected as word of the year for 2023 by the American Dialect Society.
Glad to hear it. I’ve been using it here and there in daily conversation and so far no one knew about it and I had to explain it everytime.
I find it to be a pretty useful term given daily life.
I kind of like explaining it to newcomers. Feels good to enlighten the masses. It’s the basically “lucky 10000” xkcd.
