Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.

Too narrow, hidden, minimal feedback…

  • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    364·
    1 year ago

    Yeah, it has a very specific meaning, and people are now using it to mean “things becoming shitty”. Just because “shit” is the base word doesn’t mean that’s what the whole word means.

      • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        162·
        1 year ago

        No, it doesn’t.

        From Wikipedia:

        Enshittification, also known as platform decay,[1] is a way to describe the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets.

        From the guy who coined the term itself:

        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.

        • SwingingTheLampEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Sorry, you’re going to lose this battle. Back in the day, we had Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. It was a specific thing infamously practiced by IBM salespersons, who’d convince you to buy “safe” IBM products by using FUD to make targets worry about choosing alternatives. The saying back then was, “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” The whole thing about FUD is that it wasn’t lies; they were telling the truth from start to finish, but just raising questions in a manipulative way. But that nuance got lost, and if you hear the term today, it’s just a straight-up synonym for “lies and misinformation.”

          That’s literally just one example of how words change/lose meanings, as will happen with enshittification.

        • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
          26·
          1 year ago

          Being a pedant is never a good look. You’re missing the larger point. The same corporate impulse that drives platform decay ripples out to things like UX design. And that impulse is: the customer doesn’t matter anymore, we already got your money, only what we want matters.