Comment by gherkinnn

Yes, nasty salesmen are as old as time and possibly predate humans, but that is not what enshittification means.

From Wikipedia[0]:

> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.

Basically a middleman fucking over both sides of the deal, typically in the context of online services. The term was popularised in 2022 [1].

Remove "online services" (anchoring the term firmly in the present) and I still can't think of wide ranging examples in the past. I will admit that this might be because I haven't been around for very long.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

1 - https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/