Can we talk about the enshittifation of Lemmy. Where everyone seems to be calling everything enshittified?

While I think shareholders can be a driving factor, I see it way more often with VC-funded companies. The “2.5x year over year” growth mantra that places like YCombinator stipulate have disastrous effects on small tech companies. Often, these startups have an incentive to keep taking additional funding rounds, which appears to tighten the grip the VC has over them.

Try growing the next Microsoft or Google or Amazon out of that model. I’m not convinced that it’s possible. At least if you bootstrap your own company, you don’t have the same binding obligations…even if it takes way longer to get to a place that’s self-sustaining.

Nope! My company is private after getting bought last year and they are definitely fucking it up with “ai all the things” and “ai makes us more human” and strip mining out our actual work culture and replacing it with an even more soulless grind

The ones that are successful at enshitification have captive markets. They’re a monopoly, monopsony, or in another kind of inelastic market. https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/

Enshittification happens due to greed and power; It’s just the process of removing the false mask of mutually-beneficient business that Capitalism uses to hide its true self.

First you make users think you’re beneficial to them, so they get locked in,

then you make businesses think you are beneficial to them, and get them locked in,

then you give up that facade and admit you don’t care about benefitting anyone but yourself.

You can enshittify something even as an individual; it’s not being publicly traded that makes it easier or more likely, it’s that being a large enough business to be able to successfully enshittify without losing all your customers probably means you’re publicly-traded.

Any organization that’s forced to pursue endless growth is going to end up enshittifying eventually, because there’s only so much innovation and wow factor that you can do to make a product appealing before you hit a talent/demographic/creativity limit. Not to mention that infrastructure and operating costs are massive when you hit that level of scaling and that needs to be funded somehow. Eventually they’ll be forced to start extracting more value out of their existing userbase to keep the revenue growth going. Going IPO is mostly just a telegraph for how things are going behind the scenes.

Yes, that is the root of many problems facing the general population. Environmental, monopolistic, and enshitification.

One of the worst companies in recent years has been Purdue Pharma, which worked with the also shitty McKinsey to get as many Americans addicted to opioids as possible, and make billions on the epidemic.

Both Purdue and McKinsey were privately held.

Koch industries is also a terrible privately held corporation.

Being public versus private doesn’t make a difference, in my opinion.

Short answer: No

Long answer: Look into the phrase “rot economy.” Basically, enshitification starts MUCH earlier in the process than an IPO or a major buy out. It happens because our financial markets value growth, not financial gain. We always here about how companies only worry about the bottom line, but they don’t, actually. They care about demonstrating growth. How do you make growth happen while not worrying about the bottom line? Easy! Operate at a loss on purpose! That way you can capture more of the market in a fiscal year, and then the next year adjust your prices a little bit and operate at slightly less loss and show investors you’ve grown. Those adjustments? That’s enshitification. It all happens from the very first moment when you decide, “We have to capture the market.” That’s not the IPO. That’s the very founding of a business.

We need to instead value sustainable businesses. Ones that have higher revenues than losses. And you’ll notice something VERY interesting about sustainable businesses: They don’t do MASSIVE 3rd quarter layoffs literally every year. Why? Because they don’t have to show the investors that they’ve made a profit, they just need to show they captured more market and then reduced costs