tl;dr: lots of suggestions, but none which I feel work for me.

The term “enshittification” - popularised (and, perhaps, originated?) by Cory Doctorow - is getting a lot of usage at the moment.

As a way of describing, in a single word, an approach of making products and services incrementally worse for the user, it is effective.

But I don’t swear, and so it is not a term I will use.

I asked on the fediverse for other terms which people have seen / use, to get across the same message.

I got a lot of results - thank you so much!

Variations of the original

Some were mostly using alternative words for “faeces”:

• encrappification
• endoodoofication
• endreckification
• kakistification
• rubbishification / enrubbishification

Other approaches

• 10% too much
• a dose of peeality
• anti-consumer malaise
• bait and switch
• capitalist exploitation
• capitalistic endstate decay
• chasing the line
• chokepoint capitalism (“Doctorow’s own term”)
• commercial devolution
• crapitalism
• digital scrapie (“for the concept where AI output is degraded due it being trained on too much AI output”)
• digital strip mining
• extractivism
• forced devolution
• greedflation
• hypercorporate directed entropy
• landlordism
• maximizing shareholder value
• moviepass economy
• omniploitation
• one generation too far
• planned obsolescence
• platform capitalism
• platform decay / platform rot
• seeking the myth of infinite growth
• service senescence
• shrinkflation
• tendency of the rate of profit to fall
• the business case for worsening products
• user exploitation
• value added decay
• venture capitalism
• vulture capitalism
• weaponised cruft

(I’ve omitted a couple of suggestions, one of which was accompanied with concerns about ablist language. I share those concerns, and have the same concerns about a couple of others, so I’m not including them.)

Do any of these quite cut it?

I’m not sure.

But I don’t think so, for me.

Some, I feel, are too specific, focussing on particular aspects of the problem.

Some, I feel, are too broad, covering themes beyond what I think the original term encompasses.

Some I just don’t understand.

I will probably keep thinking, and seeing what others come up with…