Cory Doctorow, on coining the term:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
The term was about online platforms degrading. This term described things like going to a subscription model, creating tiered subscription models, injecting more ads, and other practices to min-max short term profit on an online platform once enough customers were locked into it.
Since then a few examples I have seen referred to as “enshittification”:
A movie sequel not being as good as the first movie.
A game sequel not being as good as the first game.
An unintentional quality defect on a one-time purchase of a consumable product.
A UI change to software (that didn’t lock out previous features or change functionality) that the person personally didn’t like.
The price of a new (luxury) product being higher than the complaining person would like.
A restaurant changing their menu.
A specific product being discontinued.
A TV show’s writing getting worse.
The term has been so diluted it just means “a thing I don’t like happened with any product or service.”
People using a term incorrectly doesn’t rob the term of meaning. Enshittification is an ongoing process across hundreds of web services and other industries. It remains a set definition, regardless of colloquial use. It remains a useful and insightful concept, regardless of mass appeal or adoption.
You’re mad at people diluting the definition, but they can’t do that; They can only demonstrate their own ignorance.
If you’re the type of person who wants to punch a wall when someone says “irregardless”, then you learn to judge words by their utility, not their use case.
I’m sort of half with you and half with OP.
Languages are fluid, and the meanings of words shift over time. I think it’s indeed possible for the original, specific meaning of “enshittify” to become diluted and warped with more and more people latching on to it and using it for their own ends. And that that quite possibly leads to people in the future repeating and using the new word, not the old one.
Sort of like the word “nerd” from around the time when I was a teenager. I understood it to mean specifically quite a bright person, often very talented at STEM-type subjects, and often on the shy, unsocial side. In only a couple decades it seems to have greatly shifted in meaning towards someone who tends to be sort of an otaku-level fan or hobbyist of stuff like video games, manga, etc. It’s pretty wild to me, considering where I remember the word starting.
It’s an important subject that deserves attention, but when the single word meant to refer to it just means “shitty” to most of the people listening, the word is useless. The presumed intent of the word was to make that discussion easier, but it’s just made it more difficult.