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What if enshittification doesn't happen just because of greed?
1698 sats \ 17 comments \ @SimpleStacker 26 May econ
What if it also happens because of the customers?
Hi Stackers, I had a disturbing thought pop into my head. The standard explanation for enshittification is that after a platform achieves customer lock-in, they degrade the product in different ways to monetize that product better.
Now, I'm sure that dynamic is real and it happens. But what if equally to blame is the customers a platform attracts after it gets popular?
This is related to the idea of subculture evolution (#961397) wherein a subculture initially arises with high quality users and producers, but as it becomes popular the culture degrades due to the presence of less committed users, and exploitative producers who come in to exploit those less committed users.
I had this thought while pondering the enshittification of Airbnb. At first, Airbnb only attracted a certain type of person, probably with a certain philosophical bent and willingness to explore while traveling. It wasn't as popular, but it was enough to build a profitable business model off of, and enough so that both hosts and guests were able to have a good experience. But now that Airbnb has become mainstream and commercialized, it's full of exploitative hosts and subpar guests, leading to fewer and fewer people considering Airbnb as a superior option to hotels. The enshittification of Airbnb probably can't just be blamed on Airbnb's own practices... blame probably also lies with the type of customers it started to attract after becoming mainstream.
Sometimes it feels to me that to ensure you're always consuming high quality products and participating in high quality communities, you have to be constantly on the lookout for when something gets too popular and starts to attract the masses. When it does, that might signal the start of a decline in quality and you might want to start looking elsewhere. Is this the first step to becoming a hipster?
And lastly, can Bitcoin be immune to this dynamic? Bitcoin isn't exactly mainstream yet... but in some ways you can interpret the shitcoin-fest of 2021 a result of the mainstreaming of "crypto" and thus the enshittification of the entire term "cryptocurrency". I also wrote about this more here (#909279)

tldr

I propose that we understand enshittification as not just a process driven by corporate profiteering, but also driven by subcultural evolution based on the types of customers a business attracts.
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144 sats \ 2 replies \ @itsrealfake 27 May
after a platform achieves customer lock-in, they degrade the product in different ways to monetize that product better.
I have never been convinced that this is the way that enshitification happens.
Instead, I believe that enshitification happens because there are teams of engineers and project managers employed by the business, who hired them to create the product quickly, in order to meet investor expectations, who (upon completing the product development) have to keep themselves busy.
They keep themselves busy, not by maintaining the tool, but by trying to meet KPI's established by leadership and the executive team. It's the process of "make-work" by individuals who don't need the product, but have to do something to the product, which results in the degradation of the quality of the functionality.
(( source: me... an engineer working on software teams with project managers for 10+ years))
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker OP 27 May
Yeah, I think the phenomenon you identify is so true. Is there a name for this? Feature creep I guess? But the dynamics as a whole seems a lot more pernicious than simple feature creep.
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30 sats \ 0 replies \ @itsrealfake 27 May
i mean... i prefer the term "make-work".
perhaps "over-employment"?
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169 sats \ 1 reply \ @bounty_hunter 27 May
Yes I agree with your analysis: mass adoption lowers the average quality of offerings on a platform. There's even a name for this: Eternal September. Personally I've seen this happen on AirBNB, Uber, Groupon, and Facebook - yes i was on facebook when it was college emails only.
I'd like to take your thoughts one step on the "blame probably also lies with the type of customers it started to attract after becoming mainstream". I see this as a variant on Goodhart's Law which states when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
For an example: high schoolers doing community service were seen more positively in the selective U.S. college application process. Makes sense if a teenager is willing to help out for free, they are probably pretty mature, ambtiious and organized, which are good things for your student body. But when the benenfits of listing your community service became known to the general population, suddenly every student was "doing" community service, but of course not of their own drive, but for the boost of their application which made it a useless selection metric.
Back to enshittification of platforms: I think the early adopters are usually selling slack that appears by happenstance. AirBNB is a great example because many people had built a guest house for visiting relatives and friends without knowing they could make extra money by renting it out online, so they built it for quality and for character, not profit maximization. But now that concept of airbnb is known, many real estate investments and remodelling plans occur with the rental opportunity in mind. In which case the incentive is to produce the minimal viable unit which can get booked at the highest price.
So in the early days you sell slack on boutique offerings: AirBNB's rented slack guest houses, Uber was renting slack for a designated driver who had no plans that night, Groupon was putting butts in seats during the off season. But then at mass adoption the platforms create a baseline of demand which exceeds the available slack and becomes fulfilled by a commodity service built for profit maximization.
To wrap up, yes this is where the profit motive drives the enshittifcation but it's not at the platform level (as you correctly identified) but at the participant level once the exploit becomes well known.
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 27 May
So true, so true. I had known about Goodhart's Law but had forgotten that it had a name. I was just having a conversation with a friend yesterday about this, about how once the universities begin preparing their students for the job market in a certain way, that method starts to be devalued by companies over time, since everyone does it just coz they're told to.
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131 sats \ 7 replies \ @Undisciplined 26 May
Of course consumer sovereignty is the ultimate answer. Producers reduce quality in ways that save money and that aren't heavily missed by consumers. Then, niche producers serve the alienated customers, at much higher prices, with reduced scale economies.
People are constantly decrying the low quality of goods and services they consume, while eschewing the opportunity to buy quality at a higher price point.
I was arguing with someone about this the other day, but those of us who will pay for quality are weird.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 26 May
There's a weird local minimum where high quality becomes uneconomical bc low quality is so ubiquitous that scale precludes it. I would pay $100 for a toaster that would last 20 years but I can't, it cannot be had.
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30 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 26 May
I'm holding out for a toaster that mines bitcoin.
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41 sats \ 4 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 26 May
I think it's more than an unwillingness to pay for quality, it's also a lack of information. You don't just have to pay a higher price, but you have to pay the cost of finding the higher quality products, which usually aren't as well advertised.
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30 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 26 May
People know they're buying the cheapest options. Implicitly, that means they don't care enough about higher quality to pay the search cost for it.
The other element to this is that people aren't really consuming the lowest possible quality products. Presumably, there are possible products of even lower quality that most people won't consume either.
There are just a bunch of quality traits that most people don't care as strongly about as some do.
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30 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 26 May
I do often find that there are "hidden gems" of products that have a great quality-to-price ratio, that many savvy consumers swear by, but aren't that well known to the public. Good restaurants are like that, as are good podcasts/educational materials for personal finance as we recently discussed. I'm sure there are more examples too, like for clothing brands, but I don't know as much about that.
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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 26 May
I imagine those products tend to expand in their market share, unless they're catering to an unusual preference.
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36 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 26 May
True, and I suppose that's when enshittification starts happening unless the owner is really committed to maintaining its previous price/quality ratio.
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30 sats \ 0 replies \ @rblb 27 May
I think enshittification is mostly due to companies not accepting their products as complete. There is the belief that you need to keep changing things over and over to stay relevant, and at some point, it all turns to shit.
Airbnb mostly reflects the culture of specific locations, and it’s still great in some places.
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30 sats \ 0 replies \ @zapsammy 27 May
an even more sinister agenda is giving people an illusion of choice and in the process making them dumber, weaker, sicker, easier to control and further indoctrinate; enshittification of the people thru mind control; some of these campaigns take generations - such as the idea of uploading the brain into the cloud and giving up the body;
note how the narrative is structured in a Hegelian dialectic: here are the pros and cons, u decide! then droves of influencers will pop up, exploring each option... not realizing that half of them are already dead;
and here's Ed Bernay's Propaganda for full measure if anyone is interested: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.275553
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Riberet 26 May
This happens everywhere really, we can see it in the video game industry to my liking these days as well just to give and example, I believe that the problem lies in fiduciary thinking, which ruins everything.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 26 May
Yep, it's definitely felt in the video game industry. I mostly stick to indie games or more niche genres these days because of this.
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