Everything gets worse with size more than time (not strictly time, but activity, updates, manhours, whatever you’d call it).
Steam has a small team, so the degeneration of Steam has been slow, and it’s still mostly a good company. But I’m starting to see some appeal which is not geared towards users (Wokeness¹), and some bloat (my Steam client is constantly using like 1GB of memory).
I think that if you have something good, and you change it, then you tend towards something different which is not necessarily good. There also tends to be various “creeps”, like power-creep, feature-creep, software/code bloat.
I suppose that you can tell enshittification by who benefits from the updates. But even wanted updates can ruin a product, which is a different mechanic. Let me expand on this before I get more downvotes. There’s a cool post online called “Warrens, Plazas and the Edge of Legibility” which compares “Warrens” and “Plazas”. The following is my own, I’m mainly just borrowing their terms: Things currently tend towards Plazas, resulting in more openness of information, this makes things like moderation easier, but it also makes it easier to game the platform and to “expose” things that only a minority of people will like, which leads these things getting negative pressure from the outside. Two additional results of this is that platforms become more artificial, and that they lose the appeal of hidden value usually given by the “fog of war” so to speak. Video games lost part of their soul with the appearence of online guides and meta-strategies. Dating apps suffer from bots and meta-gaming as well. My answer covers all these examples, I’m speaking extremely generally and listing the abstract patterns.
A final way I’ve seen things degenerate is with regulation. Bad actors abuse the product, changes are made to stop the abuse, but at the cost of making the product a little worse. The bad actors find a new thing to exploit, and this repeats until the process generally sucks for everyone (Compare airports now to 25 years ago. Also the internet). This last issue can’t be helped for anything big. Once you have the size of say, Twitter, you’re forced to ruin your product in order to keep the government, public opinion or the media from ruining your image. There’s no real way to fight against this, search engines (and cloudflare, etc.) will blacklist you. The reason this will happen is that a small portion of any big group is extreme in some sense, say mentally ill or aggressive. This minority will sooner or later cause some event which gets a lot of public attention. Smaller companies/websites/communities/services do not run this risk.
Everything grows and dies, be it software, people, trees or nations. The only difference is how many years each generation lasts (and this is more or less proportional to size, perhaps following a powerlaw or something).
Edit: Accidentally double-posted as the servers had a hiccup, my bad. And let me see if I can add links.
The reason steam has avoided rot is because its a private company with a passionate owner who is not bound by the reckless profit seeking inherent in public corporations, and is thus capable of making long term plans even if it will cost the company profits in the short-medium term.
Its frequently the case that companies with strong founders that forge a monopoly manage to keep the company together as they slowly accumulate power and capital until their inevitable passing.
But as you say, everything dies, and once Gabe Newell dies his successor may not be as skilled, or much worse, may simply not care about the vision Gabe had and seek profit above all else.
If the worst comes to pass and Valve becomes a public company I have no doubt that its enshittification will begin in earnest.
Largely tangential to the main comment, but I’m not sure a “lgbtq” sale is a particularly good example of over-the-top wokeness. The only thing I could reasonably see to object to about it is the name, but I fear we are probably stuck with “lgbt######??”, bad as it is. And as examples go, that one is actually quite tame- only 5 letters!
It’s not over-the-top, but it’s a step away from neutrality, and towards pandering to some political issue because it’s profitable.
They’re just superficial traits, they don’t define you as a person, right? So why celebrate them? And have we forgotten why pride is the worst sin one can commit? T is not even a sexuality, and queer is basically the same as gay. And this is basically just a popular club for socially acceptable “minority traits”, meaning that it still does nothing for prosecuted minorities. If the most popular movement in the world is on your side, then you’re not prosecuted nor in the need of protection. Having public opinion against you is terrible, and public opinion cannot be the protector of people who have the public against them, that’s a contradiction.
It’s all in the name of profits anyway. If “ethical” and “profitable” line up, that’s a happy coincidence, but most companies would support child labor if that was profitable. Public opinion has become a commodity, it’s not the positive progress that it looks like. I know that this is the slippery slope fallacy, but at this point I’d call it inductive reasoning.
The loss of neutrality is a sign of decay, for similar reasons that separation of powers is important. I’m afraid I have no formal proof of this, and that I don’t know the words for it since I’ve noticed this independently
Everything gets worse with size more than time (not strictly time, but activity, updates, manhours, whatever you’d call it).
Steam has a small team, so the degeneration of Steam has been slow, and it’s still mostly a good company. But I’m starting to see some appeal which is not geared towards users (Wokeness¹), and some bloat (my Steam client is constantly using like 1GB of memory).
I think that if you have something good, and you change it, then you tend towards something different which is not necessarily good. There also tends to be various “creeps”, like power-creep, feature-creep, software/code bloat.
I suppose that you can tell enshittification by who benefits from the updates. But even wanted updates can ruin a product, which is a different mechanic. Let me expand on this before I get more downvotes. There’s a cool post online called “Warrens, Plazas and the Edge of Legibility” which compares “Warrens” and “Plazas”. The following is my own, I’m mainly just borrowing their terms: Things currently tend towards Plazas, resulting in more openness of information, this makes things like moderation easier, but it also makes it easier to game the platform and to “expose” things that only a minority of people will like, which leads these things getting negative pressure from the outside. Two additional results of this is that platforms become more artificial, and that they lose the appeal of hidden value usually given by the “fog of war” so to speak. Video games lost part of their soul with the appearence of online guides and meta-strategies. Dating apps suffer from bots and meta-gaming as well. My answer covers all these examples, I’m speaking extremely generally and listing the abstract patterns.
A final way I’ve seen things degenerate is with regulation. Bad actors abuse the product, changes are made to stop the abuse, but at the cost of making the product a little worse. The bad actors find a new thing to exploit, and this repeats until the process generally sucks for everyone (Compare airports now to 25 years ago. Also the internet).
This last issue can’t be helped for anything big. Once you have the size of say, Twitter, you’re forced to ruin your product in order to keep the government, public opinion or the media from ruining your image. There’s no real way to fight against this, search engines (and cloudflare, etc.) will blacklist you. The reason this will happen is that a small portion of any big group is extreme in some sense, say mentally ill or aggressive. This minority will sooner or later cause some event which gets a lot of public attention. Smaller companies/websites/communities/services do not run this risk.
Everything grows and dies, be it software, people, trees or nations. The only difference is how many years each generation lasts (and this is more or less proportional to size, perhaps following a powerlaw or something).
Edit: Accidentally double-posted as the servers had a hiccup, my bad. And let me see if I can add links.
1: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/lgbtq-sale (Admittedly I can’t seem to find more examples now. I might have confused Steams official position and the poor moderation of the Steam forums)
The reason steam has avoided rot is because its a private company with a passionate owner who is not bound by the reckless profit seeking inherent in public corporations, and is thus capable of making long term plans even if it will cost the company profits in the short-medium term.
Its frequently the case that companies with strong founders that forge a monopoly manage to keep the company together as they slowly accumulate power and capital until their inevitable passing.
But as you say, everything dies, and once Gabe Newell dies his successor may not be as skilled, or much worse, may simply not care about the vision Gabe had and seek profit above all else.
If the worst comes to pass and Valve becomes a public company I have no doubt that its enshittification will begin in earnest.
Largely tangential to the main comment, but I’m not sure a “lgbtq” sale is a particularly good example of over-the-top wokeness. The only thing I could reasonably see to object to about it is the name, but I fear we are probably stuck with “lgbt######??”, bad as it is. And as examples go, that one is actually quite tame- only 5 letters!
It’s not over-the-top, but it’s a step away from neutrality, and towards pandering to some political issue because it’s profitable.
They’re just superficial traits, they don’t define you as a person, right? So why celebrate them? And have we forgotten why pride is the worst sin one can commit? T is not even a sexuality, and queer is basically the same as gay. And this is basically just a popular club for socially acceptable “minority traits”, meaning that it still does nothing for prosecuted minorities. If the most popular movement in the world is on your side, then you’re not prosecuted nor in the need of protection.
Having public opinion against you is terrible, and public opinion cannot be the protector of people who have the public against them, that’s a contradiction.
It’s all in the name of profits anyway. If “ethical” and “profitable” line up, that’s a happy coincidence, but most companies would support child labor if that was profitable. Public opinion has become a commodity, it’s not the positive progress that it looks like. I know that this is the slippery slope fallacy, but at this point I’d call it inductive reasoning.
The loss of neutrality is a sign of decay, for similar reasons that separation of powers is important. I’m afraid I have no formal proof of this, and that I don’t know the words for it since I’ve noticed this independently