this was funny, thank you! but for real, I feel like we are misapplying/overusing the concept of enshitification. there mostly isn't a cabbal of cackling evil businessman working to make every...
this was funny, thank you!
but for real, I feel like we are misapplying/overusing the concept of enshitification.
there mostly isn't a cabbal of cackling evil businessman working to make every product shity, just market pressure not aligned with self-professed consumer interest.
most crappy product are crappy because consumer don't bother comparing before buying, whereas a price difference is immediately apparent, so product are optimized to be the cheapest possible. consumer notice price and most don't really care about quality (if you look at what they buy, so... revealed preference I guess?).
Holes in socks isn't enshitification, most socks always had holes eventually, we just used not to realize because
our feet grew fast enough to need new ones quickly,
we didn't notice our parents buy new ones/repair them
obviously enshitification can be real, especially in web services, but I think we should try I save this word for the appropriate situation, like when the term of the deals are progressively altered after the purchase.
Precise word/concept help us think better about the problem.
It's exaggerated for humorous effect, but I think the video actually does a decent job at illustrating the overall strategy behind enshittification: start with a nice product or service, wait for...
It's exaggerated for humorous effect, but I think the video actually does a decent job at illustrating the overall strategy behind enshittification: start with a nice product or service, wait for people to get dependent on it, and then introduce the shitty features that satisfy their greed.
And that's the big problem with enshittification. Comparing products or services doesn't always work because chances are, it was the best choice when you initially bought it. By the time they start adding the shitty features, it's often become a standard, and it's easier for the consumer to just stick with the existing rather than invest time and money into something brand new. The car comparison is particularly apt in that regard. Once you have a car, a small monthly subscription is much more affordable than a whole new car.
In the worst cases, the product/service may be the industry standard by the time enshittification fully sets in so that even new users are compelled to use it. Competitors may exist, but there's a good chance they lack some specific features that existing users are now dependent on, or that transitioning and learning to use the alternative will take a LOT more time that will impact active, ongoing work (e.g. converting file formats, learning to navigate new interfaces, transferring and reformating data, etc.).
For some products, there also just isn't an alternative. Right now for instance there is no true competitor to Youtube. Other video uploading platforms just don't have the same reach for creators, or focus on different formats such as streaming. This PSA even brings up how companies often buy out the competitors, merging them into their platform and inevitably removing or ruining those options. And in those cases, the consumers' choices come down to "use it or don't use it at all"—and sometimes, not using it really isn't a choice.
It's what makes enshittification so frustrating. It feels like it's inevitable for everything to go that way as greed ultimately wins out over any care for consumers or a quality experience and product.
So overall, I think the video does a good job at conveying the key points of how enshittification works and why it's a major problem.
I find the word to be incredibly overused and I have started to loathe it the way I do the word stochastic. People learn a new word and use it everywhere and often without care for whether it's...
I find the word to be incredibly overused and I have started to loathe it the way I do the word stochastic. People learn a new word and use it everywhere and often without care for whether it's correct or whether it's the best and clearest way to explain the problem.
It had a big spike of people talking about stochastic terorrism a few years ago. And all of a sudden (here on Tildes, in the media, elsewhere) everyone was using it and not always well. It was...
It had a big spike of people talking about stochastic terorrism a few years ago. And all of a sudden (here on Tildes, in the media, elsewhere) everyone was using it and not always well. It was clearly a "I learned a word/term and now I'm using it" thing.
ETA: enshittification isn't used in my day to day either. I hate seeing it on Tildes because I think it's being beat to death and I just hate the word itself now. But it's a very online only thing for me.
Absolutely feel the same way. Pretty much right away I knew this word would be everywhere, and would mean just about anything depending on who was saying it. There is something so titillating and...
Absolutely feel the same way. Pretty much right away I knew this word would be everywhere, and would mean just about anything depending on who was saying it. There is something so titillating and transgressive about sneaking a cuss word into everyday conversation that people can’t resist.
I personally would. While they do have similarities and can overlap at times, they are certainly different. Planned obsolescence is generally where failure is part of the design. Old fluorescent...
I personally would. While they do have similarities and can overlap at times, they are certainly different.
Planned obsolescence is generally where failure is part of the design. Old fluorescent light bulbs are a good and common example. Light bulb life expectancy was reaching 2,500 hours when the Phoebus Cartel was formed and made a plan to decrease bulb life expectancy to 1,000 hours to increase sales. Reducing the expected lifespan from the planned obsolescence or adding planned obsolescence to an item that didn't previously have it would be a case of enshittification, but the act of having it is not.
A different case of planned obsolescence would be fashion. And not just clothes, but having the newest and bestest items, be that phones, cars, or whatever other status symbols you can think of. They change the designs on these items every year so that a certain type of people can say, "I've got the best of the best." I'm not sure anyone would argue that this is a case of enshittification.
Enshittification on the other hand is actively making a functional product worse than they previously were, generally, motivated by profit. Things like forcing updates to use their service, but oh, the new update removes some features or otherwise makes it worse for the user, and "coincidentally", it also increases the advertisements shown. Or how new vehicles don't have any physical buttons, and "coincidentally", these touch screens are a lot cheaper to install in the cars than manufacturing and installing all these proprietary buttons and switches. And, as I said earlier, the act of adding planned obsolescence to an item that didn't previously have it.
So, there is overlap where both are true and even they aren't, the two do share traits. However, I would still call them different concepts. I think the best example I can give is reducing the planned obsolescence; if an item was designed to fail after 6 months of usage, but then newer models were designed to fail after 12 months, could you still call that enshittification?
The thing with light bulbs wasn't planned obsolescence. There's a long hardware connections video about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY), but tl;dw is that incandenscent lightbulbs...
The thing with light bulbs wasn't planned obsolescence. There's a long hardware connections video about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY), but tl;dw is that incandenscent lightbulbs always have a tradeoff between brightness and longevity. The 1,000 hour light bulb was a standard at which that tradeoff was set.
They change the designs on these items every year so that a certain type of people can say, "I've got the best of the best." I'm not sure anyone would argue that this is a case of enshittification.
I wouldn't call this planned obsolescence either. It sounds like just... making good products? Is having new designs a bad thign?
Having new designs purely for the sake of having new designs is mostly neutral, although the fast fashion culture fed by these choices is clearly a blight on society. Artificially hampering...
Is having new designs a bad thign?
Having new designs purely for the sake of having new designs is mostly neutral, although the fast fashion culture fed by these choices is clearly a blight on society.
Artificially hampering designs of practical products so they can be easily changed every year and give sales something useless but different to hype up about the latest generation? Yes, that's also clearly terrible.
The Wikipedia page I linked does mention that. It also says findings showed that was likely an unintended side effect. Besides, reducing the clock speed of your computer or phone's processor draws...
The 1,000 hour light bulb was a standard at which that tradeoff was set.
The Wikipedia page I linked does mention that. It also says findings showed that was likely an unintended side effect.
Regulators in the UK and some independent engineers have noted that there are benefits to shorter bulb lifespans, as shorter-life bulbs can be brighter for the same wattage. Nevertheless, both internal comments from cartel executives and later findings by a US court suggest that the cartel's direct motivation for the change was to increase profits by forcing customers to buy bulbs more frequently.
Besides, reducing the clock speed of your computer or phone's processor draws less power per cycle allowing you to perform more actions for the same amount of power in the long term. But when Apple did so on older phones... Well... Yeah... Still a class action lawsuit.
I wouldn't call this planned obsolescence either. It sounds like just... making good products? Is having new designs a bad thign?
Planned obsolescence means that the item failing after a predetermined amount of time is by design. This is often done by using a metal that can't quite handle the stress of a joint, or putting a heat sensitive system close to a heat generating system. As such, the system will work for a while, but the stress of being used will force it to break faster than it otherwise would. Slightly delaying the time it takes to break doesn't make it not planned obsolescence if it's still not made to last. More likely, it just means the market couldn't handle an item that was so quick to break.
For example, inkjet printer manufacturers employ smart chips in their ink cartridges to prevent them from being used after a certain threshold (number of pages, time, etc.), even though the cartridge may still contain usable ink or could be refilled (with ink toners, up to 50 percent of the toner cartridge is often still full). This constitutes "programmed obsolescence", in that there is no random component contributing to the decline in function.
The cartridges simply stop functioning after a set amount of uses regardless of ink used. They could increase the the uses, but if they still have an effective self-destruct system after a set amount of uses, it's still planned obsolescence.
Some portable products ... are designed in a way that denies end-users the ability to replace their batteries after those have worn down, therefore leaving an aging battery trapped inside the device, which limits the product lifespan to its shortest-lived component.
... On a device with a sealed back cover, a manual battery replacement might induce permanent damage, including ... risking serious, even irreparable damage to the phone's main board as a result of having to pry the battery free from strong adhesive in proximity to delicate components. Some devices are even built so that the battery terminals are covered by the main board, requiring it to be riskily removed entirely before disconnecting the terminals.
... Earlier mobile phones (including water-resistant ones) had back covers that could be opened by the user in order to replace the battery.
Generally, manufacturing uses the smallest amount of material as they can reasonably get away with to save money. But from personal experience, the amount off glue they sometimes employ on these batteries is nothing short of excessive. I repaired my wireless mouse recently, and I am not exaggerating when I say I was seriously worried I was going to puncture the battery just trying to pry it out of it's little plastic enclosure from the utterly excessive amount of glue they used to hold it down. There was absolutely no reason to use that much glue except to prevent the replacement and force me to buy a new one when the battery would no longer charge.
OK, maybe that one just reminded me of a frustration I had and made me go off on a bit of a tangent. But the point is, these products are made to fail, even as they increase battery life. It's still a good example because it's something that probably anyone can relate to in this day and age, especially as it's a relatively recent and very visible change. You could very easily argue that moving the battery to an internal irreplaceable part is enshittification, but what we had always designed electronics with non-replaceable batteries?
There are thousands of great examples out there of planned obsolescence if you look, many of them completely unrelated to enshittification. But regardless of how they are designed to fail, someone, somewhere is going to come up with some excuse about how it's better for the consumer. Especially as countries like France and the rest of the EU and the world enforce or put into effect their anti-planned obsolescence laws. Worse, it's especially hard to prove planned obsolescence if it's part of the original specs, and not something that is added to later iterations.
That's why I think they're different concepts. Something completely new the world has never seen before can be specifically designed to fail after a set amount of time; how could it be enshittification if there's no precedent for it making something worse?
Edit: My bad, I mistakenly thought you were quoting a different part of my comment.
From the same Wikipedia page, the origin of the phrase "planned obsolescence" is releasing new designs over time to entice buyers to get a newer version before a replacement is needed rather than the general current usage of products being designed to fail.
In 1924, the American automobile market began reaching saturation point. To maintain unit sales, General Motors executive Alfred P. Sloan Jr. suggested annual model-year design changes to convince car owners to buy new replacements each year[.] ... Sloan often used the term dynamic obsolescence, but critics coined the name of his strategy planned obsolescence.
[T]he phrase was first popularized in 1954 by Brooks Stevens, an American industrial designer. Stevens was due to give a talk at an advertising conference in Minneapolis in 1954. ... From that point on, "planned obsolescence" became Stevens' catchphrase. By his definition, planned obsolescence was "Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary."
The meanings of words to change over time, hence why it now encompasses a bit more, but I would argue there's no good word or phrase to replace planned obsolescence in this way. At least, not one that that can be generally agreed upon, which is the important bit in a word or phrase's meaning.
You mentioned a weak piece of metal and it reminded me of another distinction from planned obsolescence - sometimes you make a sacrificial part that breaks before something bigger and more...
You mentioned a weak piece of metal and it reminded me of another distinction from planned obsolescence - sometimes you make a sacrificial part that breaks before something bigger and more expensive can. It shouldn't break in every day use but if something goes wrong and it jams up, that part is the sacrifice. It has to be something the customer can actually get and replace for it to not fall into some of those other PO categories I think.
It's definitely more of a mechanical thing IME but it's not that different from a circuit breaker.
I think the generic term is « mechanical fuse » A good example is kitchenaid stand mixers. The old ones that are otherwise all metal drivetrains have a single plastic gear in them. If you overload...
I think the generic term is « mechanical fuse »
A good example is kitchenaid stand mixers. The old ones that are otherwise all metal drivetrains have a single plastic gear in them. If you overload it, that gear shreds, protecting the motor and the rest of the drivetrain. I’ve heard that people often aren’t aware of this, and sell them as used and broken. You can apparently get really good deals on them if you find one and replace the single fuse gear.
That makes sense too. I was struggling for the word and Sacrificial Part was what wiki gave me. KitchenAid was the specific example I was thinking of actually!
That makes sense too. I was struggling for the word and Sacrificial Part was what wiki gave me.
KitchenAid was the specific example I was thinking of actually!
This is precisely what derailleur hangers do for bicycles! In the unlikely event that your bottom bracket or rear wheel bearing seizes, or something gums up the chain, the hanger is actually...
This is precisely what derailleur hangers do for bicycles! In the unlikely event that your bottom bracket or rear wheel bearing seizes, or something gums up the chain, the hanger is actually designed to break off so that your frame doesn't break.
Having snapped a derailleur hanger, I'm awfully glad it broke before my frame did. Much nicer to replace a $20 part than a thousand+ dollar frame!
Much like the KitchenAid sacrificial plastic gears mentioned in this thread, derailleur hangers are often misunderstood. Many in the bike industry hate them because they break so much. SRAM even created the UDH (universal derailleur hanger) standard recently, a confusing name which ditches the hanger in favor of a direct mount between the frame and wheel. It's hard to say its impact on bike longevity, but I have personally bought up older bikes with broken derailleur hangers on the cheap, and I can definitely say that won't be happening any more with UDH!
Related topic from yesterday:
Breaking Free - The Norwegian Consumers Council report on enshittification and what to do about it
this was funny, thank you!
but for real, I feel like we are misapplying/overusing the concept of enshitification.
there mostly isn't a cabbal of cackling evil businessman working to make every product shity, just market pressure not aligned with self-professed consumer interest.
most crappy product are crappy because consumer don't bother comparing before buying, whereas a price difference is immediately apparent, so product are optimized to be the cheapest possible. consumer notice price and most don't really care about quality (if you look at what they buy, so... revealed preference I guess?).
Holes in socks isn't enshitification, most socks always had holes eventually, we just used not to realize because
obviously enshitification can be real, especially in web services, but I think we should try I save this word for the appropriate situation, like when the term of the deals are progressively altered after the purchase.
Precise word/concept help us think better about the problem.
It's exaggerated for humorous effect, but I think the video actually does a decent job at illustrating the overall strategy behind enshittification: start with a nice product or service, wait for people to get dependent on it, and then introduce the shitty features that satisfy their greed.
And that's the big problem with enshittification. Comparing products or services doesn't always work because chances are, it was the best choice when you initially bought it. By the time they start adding the shitty features, it's often become a standard, and it's easier for the consumer to just stick with the existing rather than invest time and money into something brand new. The car comparison is particularly apt in that regard. Once you have a car, a small monthly subscription is much more affordable than a whole new car.
In the worst cases, the product/service may be the industry standard by the time enshittification fully sets in so that even new users are compelled to use it. Competitors may exist, but there's a good chance they lack some specific features that existing users are now dependent on, or that transitioning and learning to use the alternative will take a LOT more time that will impact active, ongoing work (e.g. converting file formats, learning to navigate new interfaces, transferring and reformating data, etc.).
For some products, there also just isn't an alternative. Right now for instance there is no true competitor to Youtube. Other video uploading platforms just don't have the same reach for creators, or focus on different formats such as streaming. This PSA even brings up how companies often buy out the competitors, merging them into their platform and inevitably removing or ruining those options. And in those cases, the consumers' choices come down to "use it or don't use it at all"—and sometimes, not using it really isn't a choice.
It's what makes enshittification so frustrating. It feels like it's inevitable for everything to go that way as greed ultimately wins out over any care for consumers or a quality experience and product.
So overall, I think the video does a good job at conveying the key points of how enshittification works and why it's a major problem.
I find the word to be incredibly overused and I have started to loathe it the way I do the word stochastic. People learn a new word and use it everywhere and often without care for whether it's correct or whether it's the best and clearest way to explain the problem.
This isn't a word a hear very often, how is it misused in your own day-to-day?
It had a big spike of people talking about stochastic terorrism a few years ago. And all of a sudden (here on Tildes, in the media, elsewhere) everyone was using it and not always well. It was clearly a "I learned a word/term and now I'm using it" thing.
ETA: enshittification isn't used in my day to day either. I hate seeing it on Tildes because I think it's being beat to death and I just hate the word itself now. But it's a very online only thing for me.
It’s probably is a little bit different every day!
Absolutely feel the same way. Pretty much right away I knew this word would be everywhere, and would mean just about anything depending on who was saying it. There is something so titillating and transgressive about sneaking a cuss word into everyday conversation that people can’t resist.
Would you consider "enshittification" and "planned obsolescence" to be different subjects?
I personally would. While they do have similarities and can overlap at times, they are certainly different.
Planned obsolescence is generally where failure is part of the design. Old fluorescent light bulbs are a good and common example. Light bulb life expectancy was reaching 2,500 hours when the Phoebus Cartel was formed and made a plan to decrease bulb life expectancy to 1,000 hours to increase sales. Reducing the expected lifespan from the planned obsolescence or adding planned obsolescence to an item that didn't previously have it would be a case of enshittification, but the act of having it is not.
A different case of planned obsolescence would be fashion. And not just clothes, but having the newest and bestest items, be that phones, cars, or whatever other status symbols you can think of. They change the designs on these items every year so that a certain type of people can say, "I've got the best of the best." I'm not sure anyone would argue that this is a case of enshittification.
Enshittification on the other hand is actively making a functional product worse than they previously were, generally, motivated by profit. Things like forcing updates to use their service, but oh, the new update removes some features or otherwise makes it worse for the user, and "coincidentally", it also increases the advertisements shown. Or how new vehicles don't have any physical buttons, and "coincidentally", these touch screens are a lot cheaper to install in the cars than manufacturing and installing all these proprietary buttons and switches. And, as I said earlier, the act of adding planned obsolescence to an item that didn't previously have it.
So, there is overlap where both are true and even they aren't, the two do share traits. However, I would still call them different concepts. I think the best example I can give is reducing the planned obsolescence; if an item was designed to fail after 6 months of usage, but then newer models were designed to fail after 12 months, could you still call that enshittification?
The thing with light bulbs wasn't planned obsolescence. There's a long hardware connections video about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY), but tl;dw is that incandenscent lightbulbs always have a tradeoff between brightness and longevity. The 1,000 hour light bulb was a standard at which that tradeoff was set.
I wouldn't call this planned obsolescence either. It sounds like just... making good products? Is having new designs a bad thign?
Having new designs purely for the sake of having new designs is mostly neutral, although the fast fashion culture fed by these choices is clearly a blight on society.
Artificially hampering designs of practical products so they can be easily changed every year and give sales something useless but different to hype up about the latest generation? Yes, that's also clearly terrible.
The Wikipedia page I linked does mention that. It also says findings showed that was likely an unintended side effect.
Besides, reducing the clock speed of your computer or phone's processor draws less power per cycle allowing you to perform more actions for the same amount of power in the long term. But when Apple did so on older phones... Well... Yeah... Still a class action lawsuit.
Planned obsolescence means that the item failing after a predetermined amount of time is by design. This is often done by using a metal that can't quite handle the stress of a joint, or putting a heat sensitive system close to a heat generating system. As such, the system will work for a while, but the stress of being used will force it to break faster than it otherwise would. Slightly delaying the time it takes to break doesn't make it not planned obsolescence if it's still not made to last. More likely, it just means the market couldn't handle an item that was so quick to break.
Some other good examples from the Wikipedia page on Planned Obsolescence:
The cartridges simply stop functioning after a set amount of uses regardless of ink used. They could increase the the uses, but if they still have an effective self-destruct system after a set amount of uses, it's still planned obsolescence.
Generally, manufacturing uses the smallest amount of material as they can reasonably get away with to save money. But from personal experience, the amount off glue they sometimes employ on these batteries is nothing short of excessive. I repaired my wireless mouse recently, and I am not exaggerating when I say I was seriously worried I was going to puncture the battery just trying to pry it out of it's little plastic enclosure from the utterly excessive amount of glue they used to hold it down. There was absolutely no reason to use that much glue except to prevent the replacement and force me to buy a new one when the battery would no longer charge.
OK, maybe that one just reminded me of a frustration I had and made me go off on a bit of a tangent. But the point is, these products are made to fail, even as they increase battery life. It's still a good example because it's something that probably anyone can relate to in this day and age, especially as it's a relatively recent and very visible change. You could very easily argue that moving the battery to an internal irreplaceable part is enshittification, but what we had always designed electronics with non-replaceable batteries?
There are thousands of great examples out there of planned obsolescence if you look, many of them completely unrelated to enshittification. But regardless of how they are designed to fail, someone, somewhere is going to come up with some excuse about how it's better for the consumer. Especially as countries like France and the rest of the EU and the world enforce or put into effect their anti-planned obsolescence laws. Worse, it's especially hard to prove planned obsolescence if it's part of the original specs, and not something that is added to later iterations.
That's why I think they're different concepts. Something completely new the world has never seen before can be specifically designed to fail after a set amount of time; how could it be enshittification if there's no precedent for it making something worse?
Edit: My bad, I mistakenly thought you were quoting a different part of my comment.
From the same Wikipedia page, the origin of the phrase "planned obsolescence" is releasing new designs over time to entice buyers to get a newer version before a replacement is needed rather than the general current usage of products being designed to fail.
The meanings of words to change over time, hence why it now encompasses a bit more, but I would argue there's no good word or phrase to replace planned obsolescence in this way. At least, not one that that can be generally agreed upon, which is the important bit in a word or phrase's meaning.
You mentioned a weak piece of metal and it reminded me of another distinction from planned obsolescence - sometimes you make a sacrificial part that breaks before something bigger and more expensive can. It shouldn't break in every day use but if something goes wrong and it jams up, that part is the sacrifice. It has to be something the customer can actually get and replace for it to not fall into some of those other PO categories I think.
It's definitely more of a mechanical thing IME but it's not that different from a circuit breaker.
I think the generic term is « mechanical fuse »
A good example is kitchenaid stand mixers. The old ones that are otherwise all metal drivetrains have a single plastic gear in them. If you overload it, that gear shreds, protecting the motor and the rest of the drivetrain. I’ve heard that people often aren’t aware of this, and sell them as used and broken. You can apparently get really good deals on them if you find one and replace the single fuse gear.
Very useful idea.
That makes sense too. I was struggling for the word and Sacrificial Part was what wiki gave me.
KitchenAid was the specific example I was thinking of actually!
This is precisely what derailleur hangers do for bicycles! In the unlikely event that your bottom bracket or rear wheel bearing seizes, or something gums up the chain, the hanger is actually designed to break off so that your frame doesn't break.
Having snapped a derailleur hanger, I'm awfully glad it broke before my frame did. Much nicer to replace a $20 part than a thousand+ dollar frame!
Much like the KitchenAid sacrificial plastic gears mentioned in this thread, derailleur hangers are often misunderstood. Many in the bike industry hate them because they break so much. SRAM even created the UDH (universal derailleur hanger) standard recently, a confusing name which ditches the hanger in favor of a direct mount between the frame and wheel. It's hard to say its impact on bike longevity, but I have personally bought up older bikes with broken derailleur hangers on the cheap, and I can definitely say that won't be happening any more with UDH!
This was so much better than I expected!