No enshittification predates the current ai bubble.
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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Here's an example of a sentence where a missing comma completely changes the meaning.
Does it matter that I hely my uncle Jack off a horse?
🚁
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I don’t know, maybe I asked the wrong question. I feel tech always degrades but the current wave of accelerated degradation is being driven by predictive algorithms and more and more recently by AI code too.
So if there is a bubble, wouldn’t it pop when the majority of people stop using this technology because they are convinced makes things too “shit”?
Enshitification is a method, greed is the motive, AI is an accelerator.
I think that’s reversing cause and effect: the AI bubble is the result of the preexisting corporate practice of enshittification getting a new toy to play with.
Enshittification is more a symptom of "corporate raider" culture that started in the 80's reaching its peak. The already rich pool their money to take over a company that's doing well (bonus points if it's a leveraged buyout), replace the leadership with loyalists, cut staffing to bare bones, and then bring the price of service as high as they can get away with while gutting any portions of the service that have a cost. Once they have juiced the company dry, they declare bankruptcy, liquidate all remaining assets, give themselves golden parachutes, and move on to the next company. AI is just the newest thing for them to apply the tried and true process to.
No. Not really. They're different things. Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe how previously good tech companies break their own platforms to maximize short-term profits. The AI bubble is just a regular investment bubble where people are throwing too much money at a product that can't deliver on its own hype.
A good example of enshittification is why Google search sucks now. A while back they noticed that the number of search queries was hitting a plateau. It hit a plateau because Google controlled over 90% of the search market, there are a finite number of humans on Earth, and there's a limit to how many things a person needs to google in a day. But Google is a publicly traded corporation and line needs to go up. So what Google did was to make their search engine worse at searching so that people would have to perform multiple searches to find what they're looking for. More searches = more ads delivered. More ads delivered = line go up. Their flagship product doesn't do the only thing it's supposed to do now, but the shareholders got a bigger return on their investment that quarter.
The AI bubble is the tech industry promising a fantastic blowjob machine, and selling investors on the vision of a future of unlimited bespoke orgasms where you'll never have to foot the bill for taking a woman on a date, or pay a prostitute, ever again. Everybody started throwing money at that because, duh, it's a magic blowjob machine. But now that people are using it they're finding out that, yeah, sometimes it sucks your dick, but a lot of the time it just punches you in the balls, or it hallucinates that the definition of "blowjob" is anal penetration with a leaf blower. And sometimes it randomly turns into a nine-legged spidergoat that vomits acid on your crotch, and nobody really knows why. Also, it seems to be burning through a crazy amount of energy and water just to punch me in the balls. So now people are getting less and less enthusiastic about throwing money at it. And when the market can no longer buy into the hype because of all the testicle punching, the big investors will dump their holdings while they can still do so at a profit, and the bubble will pop.
This is a stunningly beautiful extended metaphor.
it started way before ai although a lot of it is algorithm related along with data collection. Is that what you mean?
enshittification is the physical manifestation
Sorry, but I have always liked to believe that the term is not meant in any physical way!
Holy fuck the AI hate is getting super pathetic
It's the witch hunt around here that drives me nuts. "This pic looks like AI slop!" Dude, that pic is from 2015.
Waiting for it to evolve into picking on comments. "This looks like it was written by AI."
Enshittification is a theory of what Cory Doctrow (the guy who coined the term) calls "Platform Decay". It has three steps.
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Make a good platform for users by offering a service and usually aggressive interoperability with other similar services to reduce switching costs.
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Once users are locked in by network effects, make their experience worse to the benefit of Advertisers
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Once the advertisers are locked in due to network effects make their experience worse to the benefit of investors or other equity holders.
Ok now your platform sucks but everyone ia trapped there.
Id argue most LLM services are still in stage 1.
Definitely a symptom, not the cause or the singular cause. It's very telling that everyone could see that AI, like robotics, was instead of being a boon for workers having to work less hard, obviously a harbinger of mass layoffs. People understand this system and know the ones in charge of its effects hate us and want us to die.
Enshittification has been going on for longer than AI stuff though?