Ask Lemmy

The term that Doctrow coined, "enshittification", doesn't mean "something I don't like". It's not a synonym for "bad". It specifically referred to online service companies transitioning from a growth phase to a monetization phase.

Many of these companies have relatively high fixed costs, like paying engineers, and relatively low variable costs, like server time. It doesn't matter how many customers using your online service there are -- you still have to pay the engineers to go write the software behind the thing. But each additional customer likely uses only a tiny amount of server resources. The result is that it's really, really bad for one of these companies to have a small customer count. They want to grow as quickly as possible, to get out of the period where they don't have many customers. So the norm is for them to offer as favorable terms as possible, accept losing money, to try to grow their customer base as quickly as possible. When they get it to be fairly large, then they worry about being profitable; that'll normally be doing something that makes them less-desirable to users than they had been, since they're less-worried about attracting users at that point. That transition, when they become less-desirable, is what Doctrow was talking about.

So, for example, when interest rates went up a while back and capital became more expensive for many companies at the same time, losing money for extended periods of time became a problem, and many had to shift to a monetization phase at about the same time.

But the term doesn't refer to just anything being undesirable.

Most companies don't do the kind of degree of growth-phase-to-monetization-phase shift that online companies do, because they don't have as much weight on fixed costs. There are some economies of scale to restaurants -- McDonalds can more-easily afford to do R&D relative to a mom-and-pop -- but a lot of their costs are tied to the amount of product they're selling. Ingredients, labor of people at the restaurant, buildings.