It’s not that “excellent.” It’s just ‘for the evulz’ mustache-twirling comical villainy, which ends up downplaying what’s actually important to know about enshittification, which is how self-serving and abusive it is. When companies enshittify products and services, they’re not just making them worse; they’re specifically making them more exploitative.
A lot of the examples shown in the video – cutting holes in socks, sawing off a chair leg so it wobbles, drying out a marker, etc. – are not enshittification. Enshittification is stuff like putting spyware in devices so that you double-dip on the purchase price and the value of the data, or turning products (as opposed to services) into a subscription. Stuff that extracts unearned value from the customer.
It touches on it in the latter part of the video, but for the most part misses the mark.
You know, it was funny. Bit long in the tooth. The best thing about the video, it was actually produced by Norway. The government produced the video. That’s pretty freaking cool.
Yeah it was a short PSA for average people, not power users. If it wasn’t funny a lot of people lose interest. It only spends the first 25% on the unrelated comedy bit. And the real point is to get people to the site at the end to learn more.
Yeah excellent might have been a little too much praise, but I haven’t seen any other public PSAs trying to point out to people what’s happening to online services and doing a decent job of it
For those who haven’t seen this excellent video:
https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ
It’s not that “excellent.” It’s just ‘for the evulz’ mustache-twirling comical villainy, which ends up downplaying what’s actually important to know about enshittification, which is how self-serving and abusive it is. When companies enshittify products and services, they’re not just making them worse; they’re specifically making them more exploitative.
A lot of the examples shown in the video – cutting holes in socks, sawing off a chair leg so it wobbles, drying out a marker, etc. – are not enshittification. Enshittification is stuff like putting spyware in devices so that you double-dip on the purchase price and the value of the data, or turning products (as opposed to services) into a subscription. Stuff that extracts unearned value from the customer.
It touches on it in the latter part of the video, but for the most part misses the mark.
To me, this picture is still a meme in the making. Reminds me of Heartbreaking guy
You know, it was funny. Bit long in the tooth. The best thing about the video, it was actually produced by Norway. The government produced the video. That’s pretty freaking cool.
Yeah it was a short PSA for average people, not power users. If it wasn’t funny a lot of people lose interest. It only spends the first 25% on the unrelated comedy bit. And the real point is to get people to the site at the end to learn more.
Upon further reflection, I think my previous comment may have been a little too harsh on it.
But I still think that, to be truly “excellent,” it could’ve made its point without muddying/confusing the definition of enshittification.
Yeah excellent might have been a little too much praise, but I haven’t seen any other public PSAs trying to point out to people what’s happening to online services and doing a decent job of it