Recent topics on Microsoft, AI, Airbnb, Amazon, Uber/Lyft, Doordash, etc. all seem to have enshittification as a common thread running through them. It’s a common pattern for these startup ventures… go through a “too good to be true” period first to acquire as many users as possible, then slowly turn up the heat on them until exploitation and user loss reach an acceptable equilibrium.
My question is: Are there any dotcom companies that have NOT gone down this route and have stayed mostly the same as their original offering without sliding down the slope of adding excessive advertising, AI spam, hidden surcharges, etc.?
I can only think of a tiny handful:
Craigslist is still mostly the same (and I still use them often). I’m not exactly sure how they make any revenue at all, but it’s remarkable how simple and consistent the service has stayed. It’s a lot less active now compared to FB Marketplace, but I still prefer it
eBay still seems mostly the same, but customer service has gotten worse over time
Spotify might be slightly more expensive these days, but not by much, and it’s still an excellent service that just mostly stays out of your way
What other minimally-enshittified companies can you think of?
Well, that’s an open-source crowdsourced nonprofit, so not exactly a dotcom company. (Sure, it has expenses, but it doesn’t have the same investor pressures, annual donation begging notwithstanding…)
Wait, can you still even buy them without a subscription? Or do you just have an older copy from before?
Steam is still the gold standard in PC gaming platforms. It’s changed since the early days but mostly for the better or lateral moves. There’s a reason no one else has been able to threaten its dominance.
I’d also argue that Discord has mostly stayed away from this. Yes, they very much want you to buy cosmetic bling and channel boosts but the core experience still “just works” without feeling cut short.
Yes, I have a subscription. What I meant is what I get for that money is still just as good as when I first started subscribing. They haven’t removed any of the features that make those products good, or added any features that make them suck or harder to use.
It’s amazing how Microsoft and Epic have had decades to study Steam and still came out with substantially worse offerings. I can’t think of a single thing Epic Game Store does better except for the occasional free game, and Microsoft… heh. Not even gonna go there.
Tim Sweeney is of the same old-school gamer era as Gabe Newell. It’s a mystery how nobody at Epic asked of themselves, “What would I want to see in a PC game store?”. It’s amazing how it still doesn’t have user reviews.
I see. That’s fair, I suppose. Some people would consider going from a perpetual license to a mandatory subscription is itself enshittification, but that aside, I’d agree that the product itself hasn’t gotten much worse. Some of the new features (like the various AI-assisted infills and background masking etc.) are genuinely helpful and a huge timesaver over using GIMP or similar.
I do wish they had a more affordable personal-use license, though. Every few years I take a community college class for fun, and use that to get a new Adobe student subscription, but then when that expires, I stop my sub until the next class.
I resisted the urge to use Discord for the first decade or so. When I finally caved (due to some game or another), I found it incredibly noisy, full of nonstop animations and advertising for something called “Nitro” and a bunch of stickers and such. Out of the box, it was a much worse experience than early Slack. Was Discord always like that, then?
But, granted, Slack’s free plan has gotten quite a bit worse over time too. These days, Discord might actually have it beat aside from the noise.
Nitro is how they make money. I’m happy that they have a transparent way to make money and advertise it directly. I hope they make enough money off nitro that they don’t need to enshittify the rest of the experience. Nothing can be provided forever that’s really free. Well, not anything that large, anyway.
That’s like how Wikipedia begs for money from time to time. Wikipedia is great despite their fund raising, which is also open and transparent.
It has some nags for paid features but I find them manageable to click off and they’re gone for long enough to not be an issue. I can imagine getting hit with all at once upon starting is a bit much. Once you click them off, the basic function is impressive for free and had remained so for a long time now.
I subscribe to the lowest tier (which I call Hobo Nitro) just for larger image uploads and sharing emojis between channels and find it well worth the nominal cost.
I have one more example to add, but it’s a niche product for computer programmers: Jetbrains IDEs (IntelliJ, WebStorm, RubyMine, etc.)
When they first tried to move to a subscription model like Adobe, there was a major outcry from customers. But they actually listened to the feedback and changed their model. Now I think they have the fairest subscription model out there:
If you pay for at least one year of a subscription, you get a perpetual license for whatever version you ended the subscription with (you can keep using that version forever, you just don’t get any more updates)
There is a significant discount for personal users (as opposed to company-paid seats)
And THEN there is a significant continuity discount for maintaining a subscription for 2+, then 3+ years — up to 40% off, I think
All of this creates a kind of de-facto sliding scale. For a product like Webstorm, a company might pay $240/year for a subscription. For me as an individual long-term subscriber, it only costs $47/year — for a product I use five days a week, hours a day. Well worth the money, even in the era of free alternatives like VScode. It still does some things better, especially refactorings, but it’s also a lot worse at some things like the AI stuff.
Is there a way to pay for a server (channel) instead of a user? My family uses Discord to communicate with one another (to my dismay). Can I somehow buy our shared server itself a subscription so that we can all upload bigger images, etc., instead of getting each and every user to do so on their own?
Edit: Found it. It requires something called “Boosts”. To get 50 MB uploads for a server, it costs 7 boosts or something like $30+/mo… that’s pretty ridiculous.
Well the idea is that multiple members chip in a boost and they accumulate. There’s little benefit for the average channel to boost past the first tier.
I could see how that would make sense for bigger severs, like the ones for big video games with thousands of members.
That pricing model isn’t great for smaller groups, though. But I guess that’s not their market anyway. My family is just afraid of Slack because it reminds them too much of work
And no worries there; it’s a good example of how a business tries to survive financially without ruining the user experience (past the new user experience, at least). At least they’re not trying to cram Copilot down your throat at every turn.
I still use Uber a lot and haven’t found any problems. I still love it. I don’t love their efforts to get me to use all their other services (food delivery, rental cars, etc), but I’m as happy with the “rideshare” aspects of the company as ever.
Really? Between crazy surge pricing, the removal of shared-ride carpools, Uber fees, etc., it’s gotten a lot more expensive than in the beginning. I’d say it’s definitely enshittified, but at least they continue to offer their core service.
It’s more expensive, yes. But when the alternative is a taxi, it’s an easy choice. I hope never to get in a traditional cab again. I still get firm quotes on the cost, clean cars, quick pick-ups, decent drivers, and very good estimates of arrival times.
Even relatively small servers I’m on manage to get a first boost. I think Nitro gives you two monthly boosts so you only need a few people with subs to get there. I boost my primary server for a couple bucks which is fine for me since I’m on there all the time.
Some large channels have thousands of boosts which … why? You’re way past the maximum tier and Midjourney doesn’t need you simping for them.
I consider Steam at least partly enshittified because they did that whole, “you own nothing you actually bought, you just pay us for the privilege of using it” bullshit.
I dunno if this is what you mean, but LL Bean still makes quality clothing that lasts for years.
For tech platforms, I got nothing. Discord is fine, I guess. My husband and I use it as our primary means of communication during the day. We have a bunch of different channels so we can organize our thoughts on different subjects. For example, we have a channel for anything schedule related and another for our upcoming Chicago trip. It works well for our purposes.
