There’s a phrase that encompasses when products and services start out great, but through decisions to make them better, actually end up making them worse. Or, when monetisation is required, perhaps the hidden intention from the beginning, something gets changed beyond recognition, gets featured axed, or just plain ends up a shell of it’s former self.
That phrase is called enshittification.
Some examples include:
- YouTube: Before algorithms and premium upselling.
- Facebook: Before advertisements and engagement bait.
- Twitter: Before it became X and Elon Musk’s personal playground.
- Google: Before it became all about the overview.
- Netflix: When the price justified the quality.
- Microsoft Windows: When CoPilot and Cortana didn’t exist.
- Mobile Games: Before skipping this action saves you 10 minutes for 10 gems
- Printers: Before cartridges became subscriptions.
For me, it would have to be Reddit, when it’s page used to be a basic compact list of posts rather than a full-blown dynamic feed.
Fortunately, with reddit, they’ve actually kept the old version of the site alive at https://old.reddit.com, and I have a Chrome Extension literally called “Old Reddit Redirect” that sends all links to that version, which also lets me use Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES), which when i last checked wasn’t compatible with the new version.
What’s yours?
This is part of my little Hello, Question series. The previous one was: [Hello, Question: What Game Soundtrack Lives Rent-Free In Your Head?]
What do you think?