this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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I'm all for services making a reasonable profit and being able to fund new shows and such endeavors...
But we're rapidly getting into an environment of "soaking viewers for all we can get out of them" simply to feed the fucking shareholders ever larger payouts.
Thank you Milton Friedman. 🖕
🙄 🤡 🖕
There's a word for that: enshittification
the word is actually “capitalism.” it’s baked into its dna.
Capitalism - and I am the last person to defend it - didn't used to be like this, or at least not as bad. shrug I could probably tolerate capitalism if, say, no company was allowed to employ more than say 15 people.
It’s an interesting debate, if what we are seeing now is the natural, inevitable progress of capitalism, or it could have gone a better way, but eg. Reagan fucked it up for all of us in the 70s.
Late stage capitalism, then. 🤷♂️
Capitalism didn't used to be like this because it was still developing, but it was always going to become this. Enshitification is not a bug, it's a feature. Capitalism is supposed to work like this. And when it wasn't, it was just because it wasn't there yet, mainly due to technical limitations.
Enshitification is a consequence of legalized dumping. Companies are allowed to dump loss-making profucts and services on the market until they achieve dominance, then they squeeze the users that now have nowhere else to go. In startup-lingo this is blitzscaling followed by monetization. Our competition laws are 30 years behind the curve on this stuff.
yeah it’s not like Smith predicted this but yeah … it’s certainly not human nature either.
i’d be happy if shareholders, all of them, were held criminally responsible for the criminal things corporations do - all the way down to wage theft and child labor.
That'd be a hell of a thing. I'm with you on that one. Too bad this country is by, for, and about the rich and we don't really.. do consequences for the rich.
We used to. That's why it didn't used to be like this.
Continued expansion or ever-increasing profits is a definitive characteristic of the system though. Enshittification is just the latest feature it found, for software-based companies.
One could also argue that enshittification is independent to software, like diluting juice or other "innovations" that products received...
That it wasn't always like this doesn't mean that it wouldn't always lead there though.
I think that is the point.
Sounds a lot like gig economy for everyone.