Sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t complain about the directions the fluid is flowing. In this case a specialized term for something that didn’t previously have a popular term describing it has been rapidly diluted to mean “bad change I don’t like.” So that thing doesn’t have a specialized term any more, which hampers discourse.
The perils of language in the modern age, most people are not smart, and once a new word gets popular enough the majority of people using it will resemble the majority of society, ie, not smart people.
The thing is, “enshitification” was never defined as “abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves”. That’s merely one of the stages that Doctorow outlined as part of the enshitification process.
Enshitification, as a whole, is the process of stripping value from a product or service from everyone except for shareholders.
It’s a specific process, though. It’s the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t have that sort of structure, and that’s not the sort of quality decrease that the people who are using “enshittification” are talking about.
That word with a very specific meaning is popping up everywhere and used as “made worse” and it’s grating.
Language is fluid. Nothing new.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t complain about the directions the fluid is flowing. In this case a specialized term for something that didn’t previously have a popular term describing it has been rapidly diluted to mean “bad change I don’t like.” So that thing doesn’t have a specialized term any more, which hampers discourse.
The perils of language in the modern age, most people are not smart, and once a new word gets popular enough the majority of people using it will resemble the majority of society, ie, not smart people.
The thing is, “enshitification” was never defined as “abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves”. That’s merely one of the stages that Doctorow outlined as part of the enshitification process.
Enshitification, as a whole, is the process of stripping value from a product or service from everyone except for shareholders.
It’s a specific process, though. It’s the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t have that sort of structure, and that’s not the sort of quality decrease that the people who are using “enshittification” are talking about.
We’ll just say ‘shitted up’ from now on.