Not a day goes by without any of us being reminded of Córy Doctorow's "Enshittification" concept. The long story short, you start using something and it's good. You're captured, as the cost of moving away is deemed too high in some form of the other. That's when the Enshittification starts.
Norway's Consumer Council put together this excellent video to show us how it works:
There's such a colossal amount of Enshittification currently, and the YouTube video accurately points a number of them.
Subscriptions for any software instead of buying it outright is a good example. It invariably leads to users suffering steady price hikes and sometimes being served ads even though you're stumping up with a monthly charge for the privilege. Amazon Prime, I'm looking at you and many others.
Having a single product "segmented" into multiple ones is another, so you get a degraded version of the full one, to make it look like you're saving money. Sometimes this is lauded, like a recent story about paying too much for fibre broadband. It actually costs an internet provider more to slow down fibre broadband from the full native speed, and the slower service is worse quality than the full one. But, enshittified as it is, the slower version is sold for less.
Enshittification is not new, which is why we have words like "adulteration" and "sophistication", but as the Norwegian Consumer Council notes, technology makes it way easier, at an enormous scale too.
Read our review of Enshittification.
(H/T: Patrick Herd.)
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