Poop Status Magazine
I think we need some sort of website that tracks the current enshittification status of popular companies.
Consider this example:
| Status | Example Product | Reasoning | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Growth | Cursor.sh | Everyone agrees product is pretty great. Newly released features actually add value. Occasional big bugs including security issues, but they get fixed quickly. | Enjoy the product while you can :) |
| Bloat | Discord | Product is solid, but company is clearly flailing for a way to monetize. Bad decisions on the horizon. | Deprioritize the product when looking for solutions |
| Enshittified | Dropbox | Used to be good, now is focusing on nagging end users constantly | Consider literally any rival products, there will be better ones! |
| Stratified Shit | Microsoft Excel | Dinosaur offering shitty experience, mostly successful due to network effect | Make using the product somebody else’s problem |
Expanding on: Somebody else’s problem
Let’s take our example of Microsoft Excel.
- If you run your own small business, you can escape it with no problems. Use whatever you like instead.
- If you need to edit MS Excel sheets that people send you, you could try using onlyoffice. Do not tell them about it and see if anything major breaks. Play a bit dumb if needed.
- If you are in a big company and forced to use it, deal with it proactively. Find all the tricks to create a smooth running operation for yourself in the fossilized layers of “poo”. There is no shame in this!
Unshittifiable products
Nextcloud has its flaws, but it syncs my stuff just fine. For almost ten years. Similar to Dropbox, they released a flurry of enterprise features to help sell it to governments agencies and businesses.
But you know what? They did not start nagging their end users. Their incentives are not aligned in this way, because they are not an incredibly overvalued SV company that suddenly feels the need to squeeze their 300M users for all they are worth “because oops I guess we need start making a lot of money right now”.
By the way, I would like to praise any government agency buying services from Nextcloud, because they are following the crucial rule of not buying closed source products as a government agency. Such products will inevitably turn into an enterprise-grade leech that sucks up too much tax money (due to game theory reasons).
And yes, open source to the rescue: If Nextcloud tried to do that, somebody would fork the project and release a guide on how to deploy NextNextCloud, and the bosses of the affected users could hire some consultants to replace their Nextclouds, and everything would be completely fine.
Summary
Microsoft bad, Open Source good