If you haven’t heard it look it up. I will give you an example of it.
My mom got an email from Sky telling her she should get a new sky box for free. Unbeknownst to me she replies and in a few days she get a new sky box in the mail.
She calls me up and I set it up for her. It requires a login to the wifi so it can update itself so I do that. Then it wants a google login because who knows why so I skip that part. After about a half hour to 45 minutes it’s done. I package up the old box and drop it off for mailing.
My mom tries to use it and it’s a disaster. The TV listing is really small and she can’t read it. I look around in the settings and there is no way to make the fonts bigger so she basically had to stand up, walk closer to the TV to be able to change channels. Then she is having with the tiny remote and the stupid wheel thingie.
I write a support email asking how to make the fonts bigger but hear nothing back. After a couple of days of hearing my mom complain constantly I try the chat support. After waiting a long while I get connected to a person whose name is spelled weird but the chat disconnects before the issue is resolved. I try again and keep getting connected to weird name spellings and keep getting disconnected.
I then call support to find out that there are 21 people waiting in front of me so I hunker down and after about half an hour I finally get connected to somebody. After going back and forth for a while sky agrees to send another old box to my mom so she can get back to being able to watch TV and use the remote.
Enshittification.
I know most people - I included - use enshittification to describe something that becomes worse, but that’s not what Cory Doctorow meant.
Enshittification means something very specific: it means a service that degraded because it started out being good to its users, then favored its business partners at the expense of its users, then favored itself as the expense of both its users and its business partners, then disappeared.
Agreed, OP’s example is not enshittification. OPs example is just a shitty product release that didn’t maintain feature parity with the old product.
How are you gonna make a whole-ass post about a dated buzzword and then use the word wrong? I’m dead.
I won’t attend your funeral.
Honestly this just sounds like they sent her the Android TV version.
I get weird looks when I tell people I don’t want a smart TV and just strap a laptop to the back of our decade+ old dumb TV. But I have a PC-connected remote and run Kodi, it’s so much nicer than the stuff other people have.
She can’t manage any of that. She just wants her sky TV.
Oh god no, unless you live very close then it’s not really suitable for someone else. I was just making a comment about how I don’t want Android TV or off the shelf smart TV crap either.
Yes, we have seen this word a million times by now.
This is awful service and bad luck. Not enshittifacation.
The device has been enshittified.
Enshittification is a phenomenon that relies on the human’s laziness to change: thanks to this flaw, the parasitic buisness man is capable of squeezing more profits out it’s clients by slashing quality, labor costs (and service thus) or by raising prices and adding ads. It is the mark of a shit buisness that does not mind dissapearing while clawing any money behind; it is the mark of an organisation that has likely never provided any value or never intended to to their customers.
If you spot a buisness doing this, make sure to boycott it, or the practice becomes the norm: eg see US government.
Know it? I’m living it
