This brings to mind the Tony Hsieh quote, "You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down."
All successful startups are fighting a battle against entropy. And entropy is becoming indistinguishable from all the other companies out there. Which means losing what made them succeed in the first place.
This is why company culture is important. You need to know what your values are. And then you need to maintain them. Even at the cost of the wrong short-term profitable opportunities.
It is actually true. If you have an option to defraud people and dont take it, then you actually have "not defrauding" as a value.
If you take bigger salary in exchange of defrauding people, say by denying insurance payment to people who should have it, you dont have "not defrauding" as a value.
While it’s true it also seems kinda worthless through broad applicability and ties moral values to power or money, which I don’t think many people would agree with.
Every US president since FDR would have “not killing everyone” as a value by not hitting the big red button. Almost nobody else will get to be tested in that way. Is that actually a value?
There is also a private information problem. If it never occurred to me to defraud investors, but it was retroactively discovered I could have (and gotten away with it?), do I get the “doesn’t defraud” value? Does the more evil version of me get the value, as long as they thought of it but didn’t act on it?
> Every US president since FDR would have “not killing everyone” as a value by not hitting the big red button.
This doesn't apply, your morals are only tested once you have to sacrifice something that you find valuable in order to uphold your morals, whether that is money, power, or something else.
The point that he was explaining when I saw the quote was why the hiring process at Zappos had a "culture fit" part of the interview process. Because you can't maintain a culture, if you have employees who aren't aligned on values. Maintaining this requires passing up on opportunities to hire people who will be productive, because you think that they will undermine the culture.
The importance of culture as a value to the organization is demonstrated by passing up on opportunities that would undermine it. Even if those opportunities are otherwise good.
The semantics are fine, putting aside the bullshit about corporate culture. It just sounds like a press release rather than natural language. The key signal here is “opportunities”.
The human in question was a CEO for around 20 years. People who spend that long in the C-suite absorb a certain amount of corporate language.
And while you may consider corporate culture to be bullshit, others don't. Where others includes every entrepreneur who built a large company that I've ever seen speak on the subject.
I've been lucky enough to see good versus bad corporate cultures first hand. So I also fit into that other bucket. Though admittedly more looking at the issue from somewhere near the bottom, rather than the view from the top.
Moisey Uretsky who effectively came up with the idea for and made most of the foundational "cannot touch" choices at DigitalOcean basically said for a long time we were not allowed to add anything to the control panel, period. He really didn't even want us moving stuff around too much. I seem to recall, although I could be misremembering, when we hired Jesse Chase (amazing hire) who was our first everything visual guy, it was somewhat contentious, he was bought in, but man, Moisey was adamant it stayed extremely simple. We had a lot of heated debate, but I always appreciated this, I thought it was a good rule of thumb - if it ain't br0ked don't fix it basically. I've not used DigitalOcean in a very long time, fingers crossed it's still simple and easy to use! :)
Point of order: "enshittification" does not mean what the author's using it to mean. It does not just mean "the product got worse". It means "the product was purposefully made worse in order to capture additional value from the customer," i.e. a rug pull.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd hate to see such a useful term for corporate malfeasance diluted.
Well, Cory recently said in a podcast we can use it to mean "product got worse", so I've become less pedantic on this point fwiw. (I think it was in the episode of Adam Conover from about a month ago)
Hmm. I am tentatively holding to my position, because I think it's useful to have a separate word, but I'll go track down the episode and see if he elaborates on that further. Thanks!
> The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
I suppose if I want to use the word to mean the original sense, I need to include clarification that that's what I'm doing. I'll have to think of how best to do that without coming across as judgy or condescending, since that's sort of police-y (and also just unpleasant).
I get the impression I hit a sensitive spot with my use of "enshittification" :)
Sorry about that. I realize this term has a very strict meaning in English, but it's a bit less true in my language (French).
I responded to this in another comment above, but basically I was using the term to encompass everything that contributes to degrading a product. Everything that makes it more complex, often tied to company growth (I started a company in 2012 that's now 700 people).
But I get the point. I see this touches on another topic around corporate malpractice. I honestly wasn't even aware of that.
Yep. The irony being that "enshittification," properly deployed, can actually lead a company to even more success. Product people always think "having the best product" wins the day, but there are billions of dollars made through a perfectly baked enshittified pie.
"The Market for Lemons" has always been a thing. If the user can't immediately distinguish between "Looks good at first and is good all the way through" and "Looks good and gets crappier as you go along", then both will be forced by the market to charge the same amount; but the latter one can afford to do it at a price the former can't afford.
Defending focus is way harder than adding features.
When you're building, adding yet another feature can sometimes shave off all the edges that made you successful in the first place.
Same with messaging. The more you try to sound universal, the less anyone hears you.
Strong opinions that are honestly held and communicated are such great signs of respect. It's refreshing to see: "This is who we are. If it's not for you, that's okay."
> They get worse because they need to keep pleasing new users, new needs, address every edge case.
No, they get shitty because businesses need to move the needle. Product people and engineers want to put things that "show" they did that on their resume.
Want to get to market rate? Then do a project that will get you your next job. That isnt going to be exclusively for the company, thats going to be as much for you as it is for them.
The fundamental problem is that if you aren't upping your staff's salary to market rates, you're forcing them to do the above. Without the money, your interests DO NOT ALIGN.
This results in some people having very strange opinions about work (clock punching) and doing the minimum to get by. It results in strange corporate polices where incompetence starts to blend in with the furniture and no one knows how to get them "unstuck".
Depends on what you want to build. You can build a simple screw driver without any attachments, to keep it simple and have very specific usecase. You can also build a swiss army knife with 20 tools packed in it. Both have their own market.
A better example: What is a smart phone? It does hundred things for which there were special tools for each those usecases. But the phone killed all those super-simple, opinionated, single-purpose tools.
Growth of enterprise is exclusively a "pleasing new customers" thing. That is growth in today's economy, they are inextricable. This is and always be an impediment to your "opinions" as long as you lead a company whose primary goal is "grow". The post sets up the premise at the beginning and then proceeds in complete ignorance of this fact.
It was a let down to be bought into the "hook" that saying no, taking focus, is the key to continued long term success as a scaled company, only for it to devolve into how courageous it is to have a simple homepage.
I wanted to read a new story; one about an internal debate where the easy answer was to "just do it," but a hard no is what actually saved everything.
You're right. I wrote this quickly after talking with Thomas, and the homepage example reminded me of these scalability issues I faced with my previous company (Malt).
I connected it to simplicity and focus. In my head the link was clear, but I get that it's not as obvious when written :)
I'm using this blog as a kind of journal—short posts, quick thoughts. So I totally understand if it leaves you wanting more.
Honestly didn't expect this much traffic, my other posts have just been read by friends ^^
Fair point. I realize that "enshittification" has a more specific meaning in English (I'm french). My bad
I was using it in a broader sense, connecting it to my previous company (700 people, I co-founded it in 2012).
I was thinking more about all the factors that increase product complexity, and it's far from being just about shareholders:
* The more people you add to a company, the more complexity you add because inherently, everyone wants to leave their mark. In the end, some people see themselves grow because they contributed to this or that new feature. Doesn't matter if it's redundant. Doesn't matter if 10 months later you realize it adds nothing. I've unfortunately seen this pattern repeat itself over and over.
* The bigger a company gets, the more it needs to respond to increasingly specific use cases. A salesperson tells you their client needs this. Customer support tells you a portion of your users are asking for that. Either you have enough perspective to say it doesn't fit your vision, or you don't, and you try to please everyone. But it's a huge source of complexity. And I could cite tons of examples from my old company.
And just to be transparent, I am using my blog as a journal, with short posts. I was not expecting that much traffic and I totally understand that it's maybe not as deep as you would expect ^^
If you're interested in the specific thing that other people mean by that word, the original Cory Doctorow essay that coined it is well worth a read:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
Of course he followed it up with a book, so there's that as well if you want a deeper dive, but the essay is fairly comprehensive at least in laying out what he intends by the term.
While I think I understand your point, there’s probably a few ways to look at this.
One is many products start out pleasing most users, but pivots to enterprise customers because of revenue. Thus, the product shifts heavily towards the enterprise use-case of a few customers at the loss of most small-medium users. Getting more users in this enterprise world means making changes to accommodate special needs and that leads to entropy.
Another new need is to hit next quarters revenue targets, so companies find more juice to squeeze somewhere.
Those things can happen, sure, but GP is saying that the term "enshittification" was coined to describe a very specific kind of phenomenon about monopoly internet platforms and their pattern of first building dependency and market power before becoming maximally extractive. It's not supposed to be about just any generic way that software might get worse for its users.
Arguably it was a poor choice of word, but some of us would still like to be able to refer to that specific phenomenon.
At one point the user to please becomes a stakeholder, the need is a metric that needs to go up, the edge case is legislation or a specific need. From a user's point of view, services like Spotify or Slack have been stagnant for a decade, but I'm sure that in the background they've been doing work costing hundreds of millions in investments and developer time.
This brings to mind the Tony Hsieh quote, "You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down."
All successful startups are fighting a battle against entropy. And entropy is becoming indistinguishable from all the other companies out there. Which means losing what made them succeed in the first place.
This is why company culture is important. You need to know what your values are. And then you need to maintain them. Even at the cost of the wrong short-term profitable opportunities.
> "You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down."
That aged well...
True, the pressure on him to be some sort of guru of happiness lead to an experiment that turned out tragically.
But that doesn't invalidate the importance of the principles on which Zappos succeeded under his leadership.
It is a mistake to dismiss key insights merely because they come from someone who had human flaws. We all have human flaws, and we all make mistakes.
> You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down.
This reads more like some corporate-aimed PR than earnest words that left the mouth of a human
It is actually true. If you have an option to defraud people and dont take it, then you actually have "not defrauding" as a value.
If you take bigger salary in exchange of defrauding people, say by denying insurance payment to people who should have it, you dont have "not defrauding" as a value.
While it’s true it also seems kinda worthless through broad applicability and ties moral values to power or money, which I don’t think many people would agree with.
Every US president since FDR would have “not killing everyone” as a value by not hitting the big red button. Almost nobody else will get to be tested in that way. Is that actually a value?
There is also a private information problem. If it never occurred to me to defraud investors, but it was retroactively discovered I could have (and gotten away with it?), do I get the “doesn’t defraud” value? Does the more evil version of me get the value, as long as they thought of it but didn’t act on it?
> Every US president since FDR would have “not killing everyone” as a value by not hitting the big red button.
This doesn't apply, your morals are only tested once you have to sacrifice something that you find valuable in order to uphold your morals, whether that is money, power, or something else.
[dead]
Are there there any good studies on this topic? I find that most people's morals are far too flexible when put to the test.
And yet, they left the mouth of a human.
The point that he was explaining when I saw the quote was why the hiring process at Zappos had a "culture fit" part of the interview process. Because you can't maintain a culture, if you have employees who aren't aligned on values. Maintaining this requires passing up on opportunities to hire people who will be productive, because you think that they will undermine the culture.
The importance of culture as a value to the organization is demonstrated by passing up on opportunities that would undermine it. Even if those opportunities are otherwise good.
The semantics are fine, putting aside the bullshit about corporate culture. It just sounds like a press release rather than natural language. The key signal here is “opportunities”.
The human in question was a CEO for around 20 years. People who spend that long in the C-suite absorb a certain amount of corporate language.
And while you may consider corporate culture to be bullshit, others don't. Where others includes every entrepreneur who built a large company that I've ever seen speak on the subject.
I've been lucky enough to see good versus bad corporate cultures first hand. So I also fit into that other bucket. Though admittedly more looking at the issue from somewhere near the bottom, rather than the view from the top.
Moisey Uretsky who effectively came up with the idea for and made most of the foundational "cannot touch" choices at DigitalOcean basically said for a long time we were not allowed to add anything to the control panel, period. He really didn't even want us moving stuff around too much. I seem to recall, although I could be misremembering, when we hired Jesse Chase (amazing hire) who was our first everything visual guy, it was somewhat contentious, he was bought in, but man, Moisey was adamant it stayed extremely simple. We had a lot of heated debate, but I always appreciated this, I thought it was a good rule of thumb - if it ain't br0ked don't fix it basically. I've not used DigitalOcean in a very long time, fingers crossed it's still simple and easy to use! :)
Point of order: "enshittification" does not mean what the author's using it to mean. It does not just mean "the product got worse". It means "the product was purposefully made worse in order to capture additional value from the customer," i.e. a rug pull.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd hate to see such a useful term for corporate malfeasance diluted.
Well, Cory recently said in a podcast we can use it to mean "product got worse", so I've become less pedantic on this point fwiw. (I think it was in the episode of Adam Conover from about a month ago)
Hmm. I am tentatively holding to my position, because I think it's useful to have a separate word, but I'll go track down the episode and see if he elaborates on that further. Thanks!
This is specifically what I've written on the subject (I quote this in the book):
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi...
> The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
... argument withdrawn.
I suppose if I want to use the word to mean the original sense, I need to include clarification that that's what I'm doing. I'll have to think of how best to do that without coming across as judgy or condescending, since that's sort of police-y (and also just unpleasant).
Invent a new word ;)
Entropy in action, eh?!
> Cory recently said in a podcast we can use it to mean "product got worse"
Of course we can. We can also use it mean "product became wonderful".
The question, as always, is if we should.
I get the impression I hit a sensitive spot with my use of "enshittification" :)
Sorry about that. I realize this term has a very strict meaning in English, but it's a bit less true in my language (French).
I responded to this in another comment above, but basically I was using the term to encompass everything that contributes to degrading a product. Everything that makes it more complex, often tied to company growth (I started a company in 2012 that's now 700 people).
But I get the point. I see this touches on another topic around corporate malpractice. I honestly wasn't even aware of that.
Now I know :)
Yep. The irony being that "enshittification," properly deployed, can actually lead a company to even more success. Product people always think "having the best product" wins the day, but there are billions of dollars made through a perfectly baked enshittified pie.
"The Market for Lemons" has always been a thing. If the user can't immediately distinguish between "Looks good at first and is good all the way through" and "Looks good and gets crappier as you go along", then both will be forced by the market to charge the same amount; but the latter one can afford to do it at a price the former can't afford.
That's also not what "enshittification" was coined to describe.
Success for the shareholders, or for the paying customers?
Yes, pedantry is justified in this case.
Froggies doing wrong cultural appropriation again... maybe the "Emilia Perez syndrome" is becoming a thing.
There's another flavor of enshittification where no one benefits, but the product manager got a promotion.
Defending focus is way harder than adding features.
When you're building, adding yet another feature can sometimes shave off all the edges that made you successful in the first place.
Same with messaging. The more you try to sound universal, the less anyone hears you.
Strong opinions that are honestly held and communicated are such great signs of respect. It's refreshing to see: "This is who we are. If it's not for you, that's okay."
Good piece.
> They get worse because they need to keep pleasing new users, new needs, address every edge case.
No, they get shitty because businesses need to move the needle. Product people and engineers want to put things that "show" they did that on their resume.
Want to get to market rate? Then do a project that will get you your next job. That isnt going to be exclusively for the company, thats going to be as much for you as it is for them.
The fundamental problem is that if you aren't upping your staff's salary to market rates, you're forcing them to do the above. Without the money, your interests DO NOT ALIGN.
This results in some people having very strange opinions about work (clock punching) and doing the minimum to get by. It results in strange corporate polices where incompetence starts to blend in with the furniture and no one knows how to get them "unstuck".
Depends on what you want to build. You can build a simple screw driver without any attachments, to keep it simple and have very specific usecase. You can also build a swiss army knife with 20 tools packed in it. Both have their own market.
A better example: What is a smart phone? It does hundred things for which there were special tools for each those usecases. But the phone killed all those super-simple, opinionated, single-purpose tools.
Growth of enterprise is exclusively a "pleasing new customers" thing. That is growth in today's economy, they are inextricable. This is and always be an impediment to your "opinions" as long as you lead a company whose primary goal is "grow". The post sets up the premise at the beginning and then proceeds in complete ignorance of this fact.
It was a let down to be bought into the "hook" that saying no, taking focus, is the key to continued long term success as a scaled company, only for it to devolve into how courageous it is to have a simple homepage.
I wanted to read a new story; one about an internal debate where the easy answer was to "just do it," but a hard no is what actually saved everything.
Surely that story exists.
You're right. I wrote this quickly after talking with Thomas, and the homepage example reminded me of these scalability issues I faced with my previous company (Malt).
I connected it to simplicity and focus. In my head the link was clear, but I get that it's not as obvious when written :)
I'm using this blog as a kind of journal—short posts, quick thoughts. So I totally understand if it leaves you wanting more.
Honestly didn't expect this much traffic, my other posts have just been read by friends ^^
"They get worse because they need to keep pleasing new users, new needs, address every edge case."
That is not what enshittification is about, and not who it is about. You don't enshittify to please users, you do it to please shareholders.
Fair point. I realize that "enshittification" has a more specific meaning in English (I'm french). My bad I was using it in a broader sense, connecting it to my previous company (700 people, I co-founded it in 2012).
I was thinking more about all the factors that increase product complexity, and it's far from being just about shareholders:
* The more people you add to a company, the more complexity you add because inherently, everyone wants to leave their mark. In the end, some people see themselves grow because they contributed to this or that new feature. Doesn't matter if it's redundant. Doesn't matter if 10 months later you realize it adds nothing. I've unfortunately seen this pattern repeat itself over and over.
* The bigger a company gets, the more it needs to respond to increasingly specific use cases. A salesperson tells you their client needs this. Customer support tells you a portion of your users are asking for that. Either you have enough perspective to say it doesn't fit your vision, or you don't, and you try to please everyone. But it's a huge source of complexity. And I could cite tons of examples from my old company.
And just to be transparent, I am using my blog as a journal, with short posts. I was not expecting that much traffic and I totally understand that it's maybe not as deep as you would expect ^^
If you're interested in the specific thing that other people mean by that word, the original Cory Doctorow essay that coined it is well worth a read: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
Of course he followed it up with a book, so there's that as well if you want a deeper dive, but the essay is fairly comprehensive at least in laying out what he intends by the term.
While I think I understand your point, there’s probably a few ways to look at this.
One is many products start out pleasing most users, but pivots to enterprise customers because of revenue. Thus, the product shifts heavily towards the enterprise use-case of a few customers at the loss of most small-medium users. Getting more users in this enterprise world means making changes to accommodate special needs and that leads to entropy.
Another new need is to hit next quarters revenue targets, so companies find more juice to squeeze somewhere.
Those things can happen, sure, but GP is saying that the term "enshittification" was coined to describe a very specific kind of phenomenon about monopoly internet platforms and their pattern of first building dependency and market power before becoming maximally extractive. It's not supposed to be about just any generic way that software might get worse for its users.
Arguably it was a poor choice of word, but some of us would still like to be able to refer to that specific phenomenon.
At one point the user to please becomes a stakeholder, the need is a metric that needs to go up, the edge case is legislation or a specific need. From a user's point of view, services like Spotify or Slack have been stagnant for a decade, but I'm sure that in the background they've been doing work costing hundreds of millions in investments and developer time.