> As I said in that Berlin speech:
>> Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).
Unfortunately, I just think that Cory is wrong in the sense that ... while it's true the English is a free for all (most languages are, really) ... there's an actual cost to the sloppy usage which diminishes the utility of ever even coming up with the word. It's obviously fine for Cory to be fine with it (along with anyone else being fine with it), but at a point in time where it actually is the theory that matters, I think the cost ought to be considered more seriously.
Somewhere in the not too distant future, the theory/concept that enshittification identifies will be of less importance for a variety of reasons, and loose use of the word won't matter, because the theory/concept will be either irrelevant or widely known or both. But right now, when someone wants to talk about Cory's idea about how internet services are deliberately degraded over time, it's incredibly helpful to have a "unique" term for that.
Maybe the issue is that the word as coined induces a more general vision of 'degradation of services/products' in a layperson than the original narrow definition? People run into this in any specialization where a particular word has a much stricter technical definition than its general english meaning would suggest. Regardless, semantic drift is real, unavoidable, and inevitable.
You act as if it was impossible to talk about "how internet services are deliberately being degraded over time" before the word was coined, but it wasn't, we already had a more precise term for that, platform decay.
But my brother in Christ "enshittification" isn't a unique term. It's a common prefix, a common suffix and the word "shit." It was never that great a term of art to begin with, it was just an excuse to say "shit" in polite company. It's a word invented by a blogger for clicks. This isn't a hill worth dying on.
