It might be more accurate to say that a lot of low-trust societies have become connected to the Internet which weren't nearly as online a couple of decades ago.
For example, a huge fraction of the world's spam originates from Russia, India and Bangladesh. And we know that a lot of the romance scams are perpetrated by Chinese gangs operating out of quasi-lawless parts of Myanmar. Not so much from, say, Switzerland.
Russia has been among the top sources of spam since the early 2000s, it's not like anything changed lately. Mail-order bride scams and similar peaked in like 2005. It doesn't take a lot of people to send spam, I don't think it's correlated with the general population's online presence. I'd actually say it's quite the opposite: in 2026, Russia has never been more disconnected from the Western parts of the Internet than it is now (the Russian Internet watchdog blocks like 30% of foreign resources since a few years ago, while Russian IPs are routinely banned on Western sites after 2022, I can barely open anything without a VPN).
For that reason, and because of limited English proficiency, Russian netizens rarely visit foreign resources these days, except for a few platforms without a good Russian replacement like Instagram and YouTube (both banned btw, only via a VPN), where they usually stay mostly within their Russian-speaking communities. I'm not sure why any of them would be the reason the Internet as a whole has supposedly become low-trust. The OP in question is some SEO company using an LLM to churn out sites with "unique content." We already had this stuff 20 years ago, except the "unique content" was generated by scripts that replaced words with synonyms. Nothing really new here.
Yeah blaming Russians and Chinese for the internet turning to shit is ludicrous.
Chinese have their own internet anyway- it was a shock to me at first just how little the average Chinese citizen really cares about Western culture or society. They have their own problems ofcourse but it has nothing to do with us
No it's the tens of billions of mostly American capital going into AI data centers and large bullshit models.
It's not completely unfounded. A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. This is a consequence of these countries not having functioning law enforcement cooperation with the west, as well as chilly bordering on hostile diplomatic relations. It's not (always) sanctioned by the governments of these countries, but it's not entirely unwelcome either.
Though all that stuff is a very different thing from what's being discussed in this thread.
Eh, you don't really need to trust any propaganda to see this. Set up an nginx on a public IP and tail its logs. Vulnerability scans will hit you literally non stop so long as it's a western IP. Block China and Russia IPs and it drops by like 90%.
Don't get me wrong the west isn't doing much to enforce Russian or Chinese complaints either. It's really just a messy diplomatic situation all around.
Right. The change has come from how willing the internet's gatekeepers (primarily, Google) have been willing play ball with SEO. Enshittification is just them becoming more amenable to it over time.
70% of the GDP of Laos comes from scamming people in the first world.
"A report by the Global Initiative on Transnational Organised Crime (based on United States Institute of Peace findings) estimated that revenues from “pig-butchering” cyber scams in Laos were around US $10.9 billion, which would be *equivalent to more than two-thirds (≈67–70 %) of formal Lao GDP in a recent year."
The WWW has never been a high-trust place. Some smaller communities, sure, but anyone has always been able to write basically what they want on the internet, true or false, as long as it is not illegal in the country hosting it, which is close to nothing in the US.
The difference is that there historically weren't much to be gained by annoying or misleading people on the internet, so trolling is mainly motivated by personal satisfaction. Two things changed since then: (1) most people now use the internet as the primary information source, and (2) the cost of creating bullshit has fallen precipitously.
I agree. It's not that the web was high-trust. It was more that if you landed on a niche web page, you knew whoever put it together probably had at least a little expertise (and care) since it wouldn't be worth writing about something that very few people would find and read anyway. Now that it's super cheap to produce niche content, even if very few people find a page, it's "worth it" to produce said garbage as it gives you some easy SEO for very little time investment.
The motivation for content online has changed over the last 20 years from people wanting to share things they're interested in to one where the primary goal is to collect eyeballs to make a profit in some way.
to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse" but describes a specific strategy adopted by corporations using the internet for commercial purposes.
No. The specific strategy is not about using LLMs or polluting the internet. Enshittification is ... ah screw it, let's turn to wikipedia:
> 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 both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
Feels like there is a case to be made here that the decline of The Internet rather precisely fits those definitions, with the exception that it is a collective of those products and services undergoing enshittification, since high-quality internet-based products/services no longer exist in quantity.
There still are some high-quality internet-based products/services, but the most important of them are not exactly commercial, or they are even illegal, e.g. various digital libraries with old publications, archive.org, Wikipedia, Anna’s Archive, etc.
Also there are many online shops that are the best option for purchasing various things.
The greatest decline is in the search engines, which not only are overwhelmed by sites with fake content, but they generate fake content themselves, in the form of stupid answers that are offered instead of the real search results, whether you want them or not.
If you know precisely the Web sites that you want to use, it is still OK, but when you search something unknown, it has become horrible.
> but they generate fake content themselves, in the form of stupid answers that are offered instead of the real search results, whether you want them or not.
Words change meaning as they are used. Especially negative words that may start rather specific tend to get used more generally until the specificity is lost.
how about we put some effort into actually picking the correct words and not just handwaving everything? Especially since the whole topic of discussion here is 'internet research is increasingly less reliable because people just wrote/publish any old BS for clicks.'
I don’t think it’s necessarily handwaving. I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on the way language is used and broadening terms is a very natural thing that happens as language evolves
I think the fact that it’s primarily an Internet related term that gets used a lot on the Internet, has something to do with the acceleration in the broadening of its meaning
>to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse"
It literally started meaning that hours after it was first posted to HN and being used. Sorry, that's just how language works. Enshittification got enshittified. Deal with it and move on.
that's literally meaningless. also ahistorical, both in that this is not what happened hours after it was first posted to HN (which was months after it was originated), and also in that "things become shittier" was and is still a perfectly common expression, the source of Doctorow's neologism and much closer to what the loose use of it is trying to get at.
>that's literally meaningless. also ahistorical, both in that this is not what happened hours after it was first posted to HN (which was months after it was originated)
Maybe it wasn't literally hours, but it was really fast. I remember noting how quickly people began to complain about it being used "improperly." The earliest instance I could find was this thread[0] from 2023 where user Gunax complained about it. I couldn't find an earlier reference in Algolia, it probably exists but I honestly don't care enough to put in the effort.
>and also in that "things become shittier" was and is still a perfectly common expression
...perfectly encapsulated and described by the term "enshittification." Which is why people use it for that now. It's more descriptive in the general sense than it is as a specific term of art. You're complaining that a word that means "the process of turning to shit" is being used to describe "the process of turning to shit." What did people expect to happen? If you want to keep it as a precise and technical term of art, keep calling it "platform decay." A shit joke is not a technical, precise term of art.
You can be as much of a prescriptivist crank about this as you want, it doesn't matter. "Enshittification" now refers to any process by which things "turn to shit."
I'm not a prescriptivist over any sane time scale (say, 5-10 years and upwards).
But here's what you're basically implying:
A writer was thinking about the ways things get shittier, decided that there was an actual pattern (at least when it came to online services) that came up again and again, such that "shittified" or "shittier" didn't really describe the most insidious part of it, and coined "enshittification" as a neologism that captured both the "shittier/shittified" aspects and also the academic overtones of "enXXXXication" ...
... and within less than 3 years, sloppy use of the neologism rendered it undifferentiatable from its roots, and the language without a simple term to describe the specific, capitalistic, corporatist process that the writer had noticed.
I can be anti-prescriptivist in general without losing my opposition to that specific process.
It's already happened to "vibe coding," which no longer refers to the specific process described by Andrej Karpathy but any use of AI assisted development.
The process of language drift is accelerated exponentially by the internet. 5-10 years and upwards is an obsolete timescale, these changes can happen in months now, sometimes faster depending on the community.
>> Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).
Unfortunately, I just think that Cory is wrong in the sense that ... while it's true the English is a free for all (most languages are, really) ... there's an actual cost to the sloppy usage which diminishes the utility of ever even coming up with the word. It's obviously fine for Cory to be fine with it (along with anyone else being fine with it), but at a point in time where it actually is the theory that matters, I think the cost ought to be considered more seriously.
Somewhere in the not too distant future, the theory/concept that enshittification identifies will be of less importance for a variety of reasons, and loose use of the word won't matter, because the theory/concept will be either irrelevant or widely known or both. But right now, when someone wants to talk about Cory's idea about how internet services are deliberately degraded over time, it's incredibly helpful to have a "unique" term for that.
> while it's true the English is a free for all (most languages are, really) ... there's an actual cost to the sloppy usage which diminishes the utility of ever even coming up with the word.
Maybe the issue is that the word as coined induces a more general vision of 'degradation of services/products' in a layperson than the original narrow definition? People run into this in any specialization where a particular word has a much stricter technical definition than its general english meaning would suggest. Regardless, semantic drift is real, unavoidable, and inevitable.
I agree with you. Words still mean things. "Open source" wrt AI model files being available is another term I fight the losing battle of policing, as is the word "Nazi", and even "scam". People are way to quick to use words that don't actually apply because they're in the right direction of good/bad. On the flip side I got accused of using the phrase Stockholm syndrome just to sound edgy and not because it was an appropriate description of the situation. I was also trying to define the phrase "serious program" wrt vibe coding, in order to have a conversation, and got made fun of for trying to do so. People sometimes are just trying to get one over on you and prove they're smarter than you, or that I'm an idiot. Which like, okay, not super cool, but I'm just trying to find common ground, or how you came to your beliefs.
The thing is, "enshittification" doesn't name the problem. No part of the word "enshittification" describes " how internet services are deliberately degraded over time". Nor does it propose a solution. It is just a way to say "things are getting worse."
You act as if it was impossible to talk about "how internet services are deliberately being degraded over time" before the word was coined, but it wasn't, we already had a more precise term for that, platform decay.
But my brother in Christ "enshittification" isn't a unique term. It's a common prefix, a common suffix and the word "shit." It was never that great a term of art to begin with, it was just an excuse to say "shit" in polite company. It's a word invented by a blogger for clicks. This isn't a hill worth dying on.
Having thought about your note some more, perhaps this would be a better encapsulation of what I was trying to say:
The consumer internet has become platformized, and the dominant platforms are going through enshittification: early user subsidy, then advertiser/seller favoritism, now rent extraction that is degrading outcomes for everyone.
Enshittification strikes again.
And it doesn't have appear to have any means to rid itself of the bad apples. A sad situation all around.