I’m thinking even for cases of like shrinkflation.
I saw an article about potentially cheaper RAM here, so it got me curious if things ever really get better on occasion.
I’d say American car companies. Due to market consolidation and car brands being a symbol of national pride, they were able to enshitify in the 1970’s and 80’s, producing low-quality expensive cars. Competition from Japan in the late 80’s and 90’s forced them to improve. American cars still trail behind Japanese cars in quality, but they’ve gotten much better.
Free and fair competition is essential to any economy. The gutting of antitrust laws in the USA is partly to blame for whatever you call this system we have now (I can’t confidently say it’s capitalism anymore).
Not sure about your definition of “enshittified” if it includes memory prices going up and down.
Never. Once you poop, you have to wipe clean.
Video games
Had a huge crash around the Atari era due to an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published. Games were also extremely expensive then
Nintendo famously reversed this crisis with the introduction of the NES and their “Nintendo seal of quality”. Consumers were able to access a curated collection of quality games, and it really turned things around and basically launched the modern gaming industry
Can someone make this happen with mobile games please?
We’re at the point where you can play all sorts of emulated games on mobile. There are near infinite bangers to play right now.
I got curious and did a bit of searching since I couldn’t really think of anything. Apparently Fender (guitars) was originally amazing, was sold to another company and really degraded in overall quality, and then was purchased back by some of its engineers and returned to a better quality. Pretty nice to see that people who were actually passionate about something regaining control and saving something they loved.
https://www.soundunlimited.co.uk/blogs/articles/fender_timeline
Sadly though with the recent cease and desist stuff they’ve been involved with it seems like they’ve turned scummy.
Disappointing :( It seemed like their overall production quality is what made them popular and revered, so going after someone who won’t be able to source the same materials and match the same production scale does seem super low.
Bowling Alleys, at least some of the ones I’ve seen lately. There was a period in the late 00s where bowling alleys thought they were the shit and started charging upwards of $20/player/lane, plus $30+ dollar pizzas. Not to mention the arcade jumping from quarters to dollar-credits.
The last couple I’ve found have all but dropped that, basically back down to the $15/lane/2 hour model with however many players and complimentary shoe rental. One even had $5 personal pizzas (that yes were just Totinos or similar heated up, but hey it’s better than $30 for a red baron).
I guess the ones that survived covid realized no one was willing to spend a nice dinner’s worth of cash on a night at what should be the second cheapest type of third space available to people.
There was an article on here about some sort of antitrust suit against Bowlero just a few days ago, with a bunch of people in the comments complaining that bowlibg is more enshittified now than ever before.
Apple products. They were considered junk until Jobs came back and revived their style. They are currently in the round 2 of the enshitification process.
It was that interval after they’d merged with NeXT but before iOS became a thing.
Jobs and the ipod started the entire enshittification paradigm.
Don’t @ me.
Yeah, you’re right, we’re in round 3.
Domino’s pizza turned itself around.
I am pleasantly surprised by the quality shift. Managed to unseat my local pizza joint
Waterstones was on the brink of collapse, until a Russian billionaire bought the chain and put James Daunt in charge.
Daunt reversed years of enshittification. Publishers couldn’t buy shelf space for their books anymore, local managers were given autonomy on what books they wanted to stock and each branch was run like its own individual book shop.
And to the surprise of the business world, his plan worked.
My local waterstones is a wonderful place.
Yeah, they do sometimes and in some situations, usually when you have some major disruption, but the problem is that the disruptor often ends up becoming the enshittifier eventually.
Case in point, look at Google. On a technical level Google genuinely cracked search in a way that no other company did, and made it so good that it became the dominant way to find information online.
They then ambitiously decided to use those resources to try and break into / disrupt several other markets like web browsers, email, office software, mapping software, operating systems, video broadcasting, etc.
During those early years we got a bunch of genuine improvements. Chrome was way better then Internet Explorer, and substantially cleaner and faster then Firefox, and still open source and not developed by ad-focused people.
Maps was way better then MapQuest, Google docs at least gave you an easy and accessible alternative to Word, Gmail was way better then Hotmail with way more storage, the original Chromecast and Chromecast audios were amazing value.
But then companies get entrenched, they start tying every product together, building walls around the garden, and start pulling up the ladder behind them. Then when everyone is thoroughly walled in they start extracting every possible opportunity for money and we’re back to enshittification.
Cable TV was replaced by early streaming, although that is now well on its way to enshitification too
Not as long as the owner or anything is an investment fund. And they tend to be.
monopoly capital == “enshittified” … so crapitalism is functioning as intended… liberalism is a twisted bandaid and at this point it should be obvious what we should do but the transinternational security elite and the media operators who work on behalf of the crapitalist class interfere in proletarian revolution via divide and rule pacification methods (better them than me). I think liberals (ivy league grads aka sophist turds) do more damage than the right wing hogs. It is up to the kids honestly because the elders are so brain broken and useless. No one reads anymore or criticaly thinks. I just avoid “the enshittified” by staring down the barrel of reality and celebrate the crumbling and colapse of the consumer spectacle that brainwashed entire generations that we some how were a shinning city on a hill or a land of opertunity. If you are not completely questioning everything by now … you are the problem. I enjoy the suck… I enjoy the fact that your toys are getting taken away. Now it is time for a tanturm… but lets make the next one productive and not woke. I hope I get downvoted… that was my intention. NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR… boom bust boom bust boom bust boom bust boom bust but the overview is alway down down down on a planet that can no longer handle our nonsense. Justice will be served either way… thank god all men die. Change is coming just like the plates shift. *we might go through a period of fascism though and we just gotten a taste but what was once fear will become rage. I think what comes after trump cause that ODB will die one day will be so much worse. Both parties are imperialist. See the USA is a brutal imperialist empire. Fascist are the useful idiots of empire. Fascism is crapitalism in man made crisis and imperialism is its highest form. Russia won WW2 The usa played both sides and absorbed the nazis into our rocket program and NATO. We didn’t need to Nuke JAPAN and we just did it for the LOLs and to intimidate the USSR *sticks out tounge…
