Enshittification

Everything is just a pile of barely working code added on top of previously written barely working code. It keeps growing in size and complexity, diminishing any chance for a change.

To have a healthy ecosystem you need to go back and revisit. You need to occasionally throw stuff away and replace it with better stuff.

...I want to see progress. I want change. I want state-of-the-art in software engineering to improve, not just stand still. I don’t want to reinvent the same stuff over and over, less performant and more bloated each time. I want something to believe in, a worthy end goal, a future better than what we have today, and I want a community of engineers who share that vision.

Imagine for a moment that Google Search is seized by a benevolent government. Under its new management, it has no profit motives. Its only directive is to help people find what they are looking for.

...The resulting product, despite its good intentions, is a search engine that surfaces websites that were written to be optimized for a search engine. You are not the audience; the algorithm is.

We don’t need a better large search engine. Instead, we need to cultivate what I would call “folk search algorithms,” a set of tools and practices that, whether by chance or design, are not influential enough to move markets.

I just want to make some Cheesy Garlic biscuits. Where is the ______ing recipe?

The view of hypertext culture I shared 15 years ago in The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink, which was quite popular at the time, now seems hopelessly idealistic. When I just googled for that link, ironically, I had to strip out some shitty highlighting crud. The war extends even to cozy internal linking within a blog to the extent you rely on external tools, such as by using Google as your internal search tool. Which is why cozy products like Roam and Notion wisely choose to build seamless internal search-and-link-while-writing author experiences (AX) that can’t be “improved” by Google.

The disingenuous philosophy in support of this war is the idea that URLs are somehow dangerous and ugly glimpses of a naked, bare-metal protocol that innocent users must be paternalistically protected from by benevolent and beautiful products. The truth is, when you hide or compromise the naked hyperlink, you expropriate power and agency from a thriving commons.

Despite its very different political-economic DNA, the blogosphere has become enshittified as clearly as Facebook, Google, or Amazon. Not just at the level of aging software, but at the level of the aging people who inhabit it, maintain it, and continue to churn out content on it, though at a rapidly decelerating rate. And it’s hard to blame any particular party in the picture. The technical decisions that lead to the sort of messy problem that afflicted this site can’t be attributed to malice, objectionable politics, or billionaires behaving badly. They’re within the band of ordinary technology management decisions I see all over the place in my consulting work. Humans are just not good at building complex technologies that mature to a graceful immortality. The WordPress-based blogosphere is at the outer limit of complexity we are capable of getting to.

The process of competition ensures a better user experience, and at the same time disincentivizes companies from engaging in too much enshittification. But it would seem like the decline of Myspace or the decline of Research In Motion (the maker of the once popular Blackberry, which was superseded by the iPhone) are more of the exception than the rule. After a certain threshold is crossed in terms of market saturation, competition becomes less of a threat.

...So even if [Doctorow] is right that big tech companies are becoming shittier, I don’t see the final stage in which people leave the platform ever happening either, or that better platforms arrive and introduce competition. We’re stuck in stage three forever.

How could this come to be? Are there good reasons—like it is better to release something initially that is not so good but on the right track and then let a community of inhabitants repair it using piecemeal growth? Or maybe it’s that lower cost, otherwise less effective technologies eventually push out overpriced and over-engineered competitors? Or is it that quality is like Vietnamese poetry and thus rarely appreciated? Is it really the statement of the base nature of human taste?

Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

Among people who write about software development, there’s a growing consensus that our apps are getting larger, slower, and more broken, in an age when hardware should enable us to write apps that are faster, smaller, and more robust than ever.

...Why don’t we?

Prokopov’s answer is “software engineers aren’t taking pride in their work.” There’s some truth to that. But I strongly believe it’s the natural human state to work hard and make excellent things, and we only fail to do so when something repeatedly stops us. So instead of relying on the myth of laziness to explain slow and buggy software, we should be asking “what widespread forces and incentives are creating an environment where it’s hard for software engineers to do their best work?”

I think the right path forward is to stop assuming there will be some amazing site to rule them all, where you’ll suddenly achieve virality and become rich and an infinitely large following. The future is returning to an artisanal web, where you cultivate your niches and small communities, where maybe you don’t become a millionaire and a star, but you do feel a sense of belonging, and maybe make enough to get by.

It's actually a problem that software is too efficient and has this nasty tendency of being completed. Software offers us a glimpse into a post-scarcity society, but it is being actively sabotaged by those who seek to turn a profit.

...The problem with the requirement for each year to be more profitable than the last is that once you reach the peak, once it's not possible to actually improve your product any more, you still have to change something. Since you can't change it to make it better, you therefore will change it to make it worse.

Billions of dollars have shifted toward an entirely new category of technology without any real consideration of whether they'll be good products that users will like — or whether said products might actually harm users — because these companies are not interested in useful innovation or what will actually make their products better at the things they're meant to do. Instead, they are interested in pumping stocks and showing the ability to grow their revenues every single quarter, even if doing so doesn't make the actual purpose of the company stronger.

There are ways to integrate new technology into a core product that doesn't end in disaster.

The experience we have using the web deserves our attention; when the web loses, we lose too.

The front web is systematically undermined, and the main targets are precisely the aspects that make the web a powerful medium.

While these attacks are systematic, I'm not sure how conscious and intentional they are: are we never satisfied with what we have and we keep trying to improve it, or are we just “breaking things”?

Whether we are breaking things around or trying to improve the front web, what is clear to me is that instead of getting the most of it, we just keep making it heavy, inaccessible, unmanageable, and offering a very bad UX. It is hard to say who is benefiting from these attempts.

[Cory Doctorow] is a longtime blogger who has been on the front lines against what he calls the internet’s “enshittification,” a term so popular that last year it was Word of the Year. You may have already heard of it. The word nicely captures the idea that internet platforms are in decline, largely due to investors clawing back value for themselves at the expense of the user experience. No platform is spared this insidious process—Google searches are full of SEO spam; Amazon listings are increasingly suspect and stuffed with keywords; Facebook is no place for socializing; Reddit forced an increase of its API pricing despite protest; and dating apps use dubious methods to keep users paying and looking for as long as possible. And this is just a short list of platforms that have been given the privilege of being “enshittified.”

Doctorow correctly points out that the internet is being reordered. Initially, the dream was that it would “disintermediate everything.”26 To speak in Alexander’s language, the internet would have been a virtually endless semilattice of dynamic and overlapping parts. Instead, a few large platforms re-intermediated the internet and introduced ways to be the sole arbitrator between people online. And so, the richness of what could have been a complex, global semilattice atrophied into a circle-like shape made up of a few central nodes. Information in this arrangement resembles a closed loop, and the user is often just carried by the stream. And it goes without saying that you can only go around a loop a few times before things get stale.

Too often, a popular consumer app unexpectedly gets worse: Some combination of harder to use, missing features, and slower. At a time in history where software is significantly eating the world, this is nonsensical. It’s also damaging to the lives of the people who depend on these products.

...Maybe we ought to start promoting PMs who are willing to stand pat for an occasional release or three. Maybe we ought to fire all the consumer-product PMs. Maybe we ought to start including realistic customer-retraining-cost estimates in our product planning process.

We need to stop breaking the software people use. Everyone deserves better.

I think I’m going to get shouted at on the internet for this suggestion, but I think MDN core documentation content needs forking and an alternative platform needs to develop from that forked, attributed content that has a sustainable funding and leadership model. Mozilla ain’t providing that.

...The way I see it, if you mix a group of extremely technical writers and people that actually build stuff on the web together, the outcome will surely be great. I’m also likely slightly projecting here because I am not smart enough to read a spec, or even dry technical docs and understand them. My brain isn’t wired up that way. But, if there’s an interactive, inspiring demo, you bet I’m gonna soak up that knowledge like a sponge and I know I speak for many others who are similar to me.

The point I’m making is we as a collective can do so much better and importantly, look after an extremely valuable resource better. Something that’s focused on what it is, rather than something that’s good, but frequently gets enshittified by terrible leadership decisions.

It’s not the trucks. If Americans feel poorer, it’s because an increasing share of income is spent on various recurring services or upkeeps…in the form of insurance, healthcare, tuition, car payments, credit card bills, etc.–all or most of which have outpaced CPI-based inflation. Services such as Uber Eats and Door Dash can get very expensive. The nickeled-and-dimed metaphor really does ring true here.

We're bombarded by more information than ever before. With the rise of all this information comes a rise of the amount of bullshit we're exposed to. Death to Bullshit is a rallying cry to rid the world of bullshit and demand experiences that respect people and their time.

...As the landslide of bullshit surges down the mountain, people will increasingly gravitate toward genuinely useful, well-crafted products, services, and experiences that respect them and their time. So we as creators have a decision to make: do we want to be part of the 90% of noise out there, or do we want to be part of the 10% of signal? It's quite simple really:

• Respect people and their time.
• Respect your craft.
• Be sincere.
• Create genuinely useful things.

We are working to correct the course of the software industry. We are a community of low-level programmers with high-level goals. Originally inspired by Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, we dig deep into our systems and learn how to do things from scratch. We're not satisfied by the latest popular language or the framework of the month. Instead we care about how computers actually work. Software quality is declining, and modern development practices are making it worse. We need to change course.

If the web is now a metaphorical barren wasteland, pillaged by commercial interests and growth-at-all-costs management consultants, then I’m all the more motivated to keep my little patch of land lush, and green, and filled with rainbow flowers.

So, feel free to stop by any time and stay as long as you like. I won’t track you, make you look at ads, ask you to download my app, harass you with popups, suggest you sign up for my newsletter or push you through a sales funnel. Enjoy the garden, and the peace 💐.

This is what I would like to do. I would like to see if, in the belly of the dying internet, it’s possible to create something that is not like the internet. I want to see if I can poke at the outlines of whatever is coming next.