I have a feeling that there are a LOT of business school papers being written, or that could be written about this- when does it happen, how does it start, how successful does a company need to be for it to start? When does it kill companies? How do others reach an equilibrium?
I’m not sure customer service is where it’s at; I would bet there are plenty of wholly enshittified companies with great customer service, and I’m also absolutely sure the reverse is true.
The more I think about it, my guess is that it has to do with the presence of alternatives in some way. Like there’s got to be some element of monopolistic or near-monopolistic circumstances. Just trying to squeeze consumers and vendors to maximize profit isn’t unique, but what is unique is the descent into being just shitty all around for everyone but shareholders, and I suspect that only happens when there aren’t alternatives. Think stadium food; I’ll bet those vendors have a lot of the same hallmarks as enshittified companies. Low quality, they probably relentlessly push prices down to their vendors, and the company/shareholders reap the rewards. Why? Because when you’re at the ball game/concert/whatever, you don’t have other options.
Maybe this is a California thing but in my lifetime venue food went from shitty hotdogs to all sorts of fancy options. It’s the exact opposite. Do you recall a time when stadium food was good?
Big venues have indeed gotten better, and I’d bet that there was some kind of change in terms of breaking the old monopolies where Sodexo or whoever ran all the concessions.
That’s my point- old stadium food was ghastly and expensive, and I’ll bet they drove a really hard bargain with their suppliers too. Classic enshittification.
I have a suspicion that in addition to monopolistic situations or near-monopolistic situations, the lack of regulatory oversight has something to do with it as well. I don’t see the DOJ going after Amazon or other online platforms that are virtually monopolies. And not because of the current administration, but because the laws haven’t caught up yet. In the real world, they probably have; you may have a regulated monopoly of some kind (old Bell system, various utilties, and so forth), but that regulated is the key piece there; if you get too shitty, the government steps in to straighten you out and/or they set standards that you have to meet, regardless of your profitability, etc…
Put differently, your local water utility can’t provide water that’s too crappy, or your state government will slap them around. And generally, unregulated monopolies are prevented/broken up in normal business. But online? It’s still the Wild West in a lot of ways.
I can only guess that demographics changed as tickets got much more expensive and they’re serving that market. I don’t think there’s an analogy for online businesses.
I think the internet is still enough of a frontier that regulation is difficult because most of our congress critters and presidents are lawyers clueless about technology — and at the same time heavily invested in the industry and dependent on it for bribes. Techbros are the modern railroad barons, and our government has always preferred serving rich merchants over the common person. Lina Khan (former FTC chair) briefly tried to rein some of them in, but she didn’t last very long.
And if we want to look at venues, Ticketmaster is also quite the story of enshittification, monopolistically buying up smaller venues and being able to now single-handedly negotiate both sides of the deal between artists and listeners so that both lose. Now that’s a value-extracting middleman.
You might enjoy the book, considering this is pretty much exactly where it goes, with lots of colorful details included to piss you off. Well, they pissed me off!
None of it is by accident. It was baked into the business model since day one.
And now they are apparently being hit with so many cancellations of Nitro that their servers are crashing, thanks to their recent announcement that people will worldwide be forced to verify their age and identity with either a photograph or legal identification. This not long after they had a major data breach.
Why the scare quotes? Are you seriously suggesting they faked a break-in in order to sell the data? Or that the “leak” was really them handing the data off to some government agency where they also were required by law to lie about it?
What point are you trying to make? I’m not arguing (yet), just trying to understand what your contention is.
I agree w the rolleyes about the happen again part. Substantially every collection of data connected to the internet gets broken into soon enough. No matter how diligent the IT staff. And yes, some aren’t all that diligent.
Yeah, this. This is coming on the heels of various Roblox and Fortnite predator grooming scandals and states/nations enacting laws about it. The number of people canceling Nitro (though probably not actually leaving the platform) versus the fallout of Discord being pinned as the next big CSAM and abuse site – which its already gotten flak for – falls in a way to let people quit if they want. Honestly, there’s no real great option for a secondary place for those people to go anyway.
Ironically, data collection will probably be the reason why Discord doesn’t want my ID:
“For most adults, age verification won’t be required, as Discord’s age inference model uses account information such as account tenure, device and activity data, and aggregated, high-level patterns across Discord communities. Discord does not use private messages or any message content in this process,” Savannah Badalich, Discord’s global head of product policy, tells The Verge.
I’ve been on Discord for around ten years and they’re probably confident that I’m not a 12 year old by now.
This is the first time I wish I had Nitro!
(so that I could cancel it)
Spouse Weasel and I use Discord multiple times a day to organize our lives and our links. I don’t think they are going to have a hard time figuring out we’re adults, though.
As always, the question isn’t “Can they figure you’re an adult?”.
It’s “Can they comply with the letter of the dozens of overlapping and conflicting laws in various jurisdictions? Each written with varying care as to being even roughly logical and each with varying levels of detail?”.
That’s the actual mission. Compliance, not logic.
Which laws may well collectively demand they retain a copy of a government issued ID on file and invalidate it on its expiration date, or every X months or …
)