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Enshittification is a deliberate process: provide a (typically cheap/free) service, dominate the field, lock users into it, and exploit to the maximum possible in the short term, ultimately destroying the service.
Given the quick spread of the term, I suspect there's more nuance to the linguistic story.
We do need a word for reduction in quality for the purpose of increasing profits. For liquids and foodstuffs, the terms are "denatured" or "adulterated", and for solid materials "ersatz". None of those are applicable to services.
"Enshittification" captures the concept of reducing quality to increase profits not by reducing product cost, but by degrading the user experience to make the product more profitable. It's not the same as "quality fade", where the product keeps getting worse and the seller hopes no one will notice for a while.
Yes people spend too much time online and they pickup the current buzzword quickly https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification
I never even seen used it outside HN by normal people.
What gets you upvoted is common knowledge you were already ready to hear.
Are there some xkcd comics that were somewhat fringe or haven't aged as well as one would hope? Sure. But if OP is complaining about grown men in their 30s acting like they're trying to impress college friends, well, Randall was in college when he started writing xkcd.
At any rate, Cory Doctorow is a professional spokesperson and spends his life doing ideological marketing. Coining a more memorable term like "enshittification" that clearly gets more mindspace and traction than something like "regression" is just an example of him doing his job properly.