I have mixed feelings about the word "enshitification".
Like a politician shutting down thought and debate by simply labeling something "socialism", half the people using the word don't really know what it means, or at least, they don't know the original meaning. The word comes to be fake form of intellectual sophistication. A politician says the word and people think "oh, he knows the fancy word, he must be right", and thought ends, further discussion is difficult because nobody would dare speak in defense of something after it has been labeled. Just hearing the word raises certain peoples blood pressure 10 points and causes them to raise their voice.
And yet, I'm happy to see the good guys play psyops for a change. Like the world "socialism", "enshitification" will originally mean a specific social phenomenon, but most people will come to use it as a catch-all word for all bad corporate behavior and it will shut down thought and just hearing the world will rile people up to fight against the evil corporations. And I'm okay with that; words have power and, again, I'm glad to see words being invented to help the common people organize.
"Enshittification" is not a hard word. It's describes itself: "En-" to make, "shit" bad, "-ification" the process of; in sum the process of making something bad. I think everyone understands that the products and services they use daily are getting worse and now they have a word to describe that experience. I think that by basing itself on the mild swear "shit" it actually distances itself from academic jargon or other fancy words to try to be something that is closer to the common person.
I think it is a more specific thing that just “things get bad.” Lots of tech services start by giving things away, or providing services for cheap/free unsustainably, and then start making unpopular moves when the free money dries up and they have to become profitable.
It is sort of like a subset of anticompetitive behavior (dumping) but done by a small player using investor funds instead of a large company throwing weight around. Or in a field where the “cost” is something nebulous like ads, so it is harder to actually spot.
A weakness of the name is that it invites the broader definition, I think.
Enshittification not just making a product bad, and it's not just rent seeking. It's more than any of those things.
It's about making a product worse than it needs to be, by terrible pricing and ad infestation, in order to recoup the investment of years of underpricing to capture the market and kill competitors.
Sounds lazy and crass to me. Instead of a word meant to accurately convey a concept it's meant to broadly convey a concept and ones feelings on it in the same breath; much like the term "woke". I'd rather use something around a historical event that can also be used to help understand a concept through allegory, like "Dutch disease", or "cargo cult". Those are fun.
It's supposed to refer to a company's priorities shifting away from the customer's, "rent seeking" is instead about profiting from owning limited resources. They are different things.
Like a politician shutting down thought and debate by simply labeling something "socialism", half the people using the word don't really know what it means, or at least, they don't know the original meaning. The word comes to be fake form of intellectual sophistication. A politician says the word and people think "oh, he knows the fancy word, he must be right", and thought ends, further discussion is difficult because nobody would dare speak in defense of something after it has been labeled. Just hearing the word raises certain peoples blood pressure 10 points and causes them to raise their voice.
And yet, I'm happy to see the good guys play psyops for a change. Like the world "socialism", "enshitification" will originally mean a specific social phenomenon, but most people will come to use it as a catch-all word for all bad corporate behavior and it will shut down thought and just hearing the world will rile people up to fight against the evil corporations. And I'm okay with that; words have power and, again, I'm glad to see words being invented to help the common people organize.