Macquarie Dictionary, Australia’s national dictionary, has recognized the importance of the term enshittification in today’s tech by crowning it the word of the year – it also won the people’s vote.
Enshittification is defined as the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
It’s a helpful term for describing many of today’s tech products, from Google search being a slush of ads, link farms, forum posts, and useless AI content, to social media platforms becoming a hate-filled nightmare. Don’t forget those products that move from being one-off purchases to subscriptions before their quality starts becoming diluted, or once-great video game franchises that become little more than a way for publishers to push more microtransactions and season passes onto people. Companies are putting yearly increases in profits and share prices above absolutely everything else, including making sure the products they offer aren’t, well, shit.
How long before some big tech corpo appropriates it and advertises one of their products as “not enshittified” or whatever
Although by a different organization in a different continent, enshittification was also selected as word of the year for 2023 by the American Dialect Society.
