I’m thinking even for cases of like shrinkflation.

I saw an article about potentially cheaper RAM here, so it got me curious if things ever really get better on occasion.

  • KatherinaReichelt@feddit.org
    61·
    1 day ago

    You really should read Cory Doctorows original analysis where he coined the term “enshittification”. He has written a book about this and it really is great. The point is that for companies to be able to enshittify their products, they need to be in a specific position. Esp. in regards of competition - if there is a market and other companies are able to offer non-enshittified products, you can’t. If you are a monopoly, you totally can fuck over your users. So for an industry to un-enshittify, you need to break the monopoly structures there, kill regulatory capture, try to kill network effects and bring real competition into the industry.

    • kadotux@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      10·
      1 day ago

      I feel like I’m dense and stupid to ask this, but:

      What about streaming services? there are a quite a few of them, and I don’t think any one of them is in a monopoly position. Despite that, all streaming services keep enshittifying. What am I missing?

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        1·
        5 hours ago

        When all of the services are moving towards the same enshittification, it seems to almost become cartel-like

      • krakenx@lemmy.worldEnglish
        151·
        1 day ago

        They have a monopoly on content. If you want to watch Star Trek, you need Paramount+ for example. If you just want to watch Sci-Fi in general any streaming service would work but if you want to watch a specific show, then you still only have 1, maybe 2 options.

      • BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        13·
        1 day ago

        The services have become so segmented that you are forced into one to watch particular types of content. Want the Disney catalogue, well only one place to get that. Latest anime? Yup, generally the same thing. I wouldn’t consider them monopolies in that right but walled gardens I think is the proper term. They exist but are closed off from each other so can do as they want in their own garden.

      • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
        6·
        1 day ago

        In my opinion the issue there is with the content monopolies.

        If shows and movies were licensed by many platforms the platforms would have to compete on technical ability and price. Instead most content is licensed exclusively and the platforms compete on their exclusive libraries.

      • KatherinaReichelt@feddit.org
        3·
        1 day ago

        Doctorows concept is talking about platforms and social media sites and not Netflix:

        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.

        https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456

        There might be a lot of Netflix clones, but YouTube is the only video platform that is relevant. And you can see how they screwed over their users and the content creators then screwed over the advertisers.

      • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        Netflix has the vast share of users. By a large margin so well they might technically not be a monopoly they are.