On 6 January, at the New York Times Square Hotel, the 134-year-old American Dialect Society voted that ‘Enshittification’ should be named as the ‘Digital Word of the Year’ for 2023. The decision came after a vote, presided over by Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee and language columnist for the Wall Stre

Enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author of The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse:

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.”

“Enshittification,” Cory Doctorow’s coinage describing the process by which internet media platforms become increasingly unusable and un-quittable, has been named 2023’s “Digital Word of the Year.” Here, we break down what the term means and Doctorow’s solution to the internet’s relentless enshittification.

  • Hildegarde@lemmy.worldEnglish
    252·
    10 months ago

    2022’s word was the suffix -ussy. We’re in for an linguistically amusing decade.

  • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    10 months ago

    We want a web where users are in control. That means a web where we freely choose our online services from a wide menu and stay with them because we like them, not because we can’t afford to leave. We want a web where you get the things you ask for, not the things that corporate shareholders would prefer that you’d asked for. We want a web where willing listeners and willing speakers, willing sellers and willing buyers, willing makers, and willing audiences are all able to transact and communicate without worrying about their relationships being held hostage or disrupted to cram “sponsored posts” into their eyeballs.

    I feel this deeply, but I worry we’re long past it. A platform has to facilitate these things. which means you have to surrender to the way the platform works to participate. And the truth is, no matter if it’s volunteers or a corporation, there is going to be an interfering element that you have to trust not to fuck with you.

    The fediverse feels like it’s part of the solution, but not all of it. There are still gatekeepers here who are capable of abusing that position to “disrupt”, maybe not for “sponsored posts”, but for other reasons.

  • RememberTheApollo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    72·
    10 months ago

    Closely followed by EEE - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. While not a single word, it dovetails nicely with enshittification.

  • werefreeatlast@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    10 months ago

    Also I invented the term “Couchcuntatoe” to describe a lazy ass who won’t get up from their couch. This was fairly common during the height of the pandemic. But a true couchcuntatoe can still be assumed to be laying around somewhere 😝.