They have fallen so far. I have started to order books elsewhere because they can't even do that anymore, the business they started with!

Because their product is mostly fees charged to sellers.

Greed man. It's always greed. Probably more, never less.

Enshittification is a well documented and understood concept

Really good article and worthwhile a read!

Let the implications of most-favoured nation settle in. If Amazon is taxing merchants 45-51 cents on every dollar they make, and if merchants are hiking their prices everywhere their goods are sold, then it follows you’re paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop – even the corner mom-and-pop hardware store.

I haven't shopped at Amazon for well over a decade now, but apparently even I am affected by their business model...

Enshittification.

As soon as a company goes public, they are only concerned about generating money for shareholders.

The path to a better Amazon doesn’t lie through consumer activism, or appeals to the its conscience. Corporations, being artificial, immortal colony-organisms that use humans as their inconvenient gut flora, do not have consciences to appeal to.

A great argument for efficient regulation.

stopped using Amazon when they switched to Bluetooth lockers that can ONLY be opened via their shitty amazon app. Prior to that? was easy and the lockers were great. either enter the code you get emailed or scan the barcode and boom locker opens. NOW you need to have the amazon app which tries to connect to the locker via bluetooth. It's hit or miss. I don't want to use your amazon app, I just want my stuff. The thing doesn't even work most of the time. I remember once I was waiting in line to pick up my package and of the 5 people standing in line with me at the locker 3 of them couldn't get the locker to open. Contact customer service? it's a known issue...

I mean, Amazon makes the majority of it's money from AWS at this point and the store is small potatoes in comparison.

People consume prime so inelastically thinking they can't get by without it.

I cancelled mine when Trump won and don't miss it at all. Most places will ship for free nowadays and charge the same prices as Amazon. Two day shipping is the only perk of Prime and even that doesn't always happen. If I need something that bad, I just go to a store, which again, charged the same prices as Amazon nowadays.

I came here to say obviously it's enshitification, only to find that the article is actually written by the Corey Doctorow. Love that guy.

Greed

Providing good service and quality products used to be primary. That's how economies prospered. Nowadays it's all about subscriptions, trickery and collecting money. Bad service and little value for your buck seems to be the norm. We throw away unrepairable good products and replace them with new products, by design. Sell, sell, sell (not fight, fight, fight).

because they killed all the brick and morter stores

I've always thought Amazon was trash.

Why the hell did The Guardian include comment from an Amazon Spokesperson? ''Nuh uh, that's not true'' no fucking duh that's their response.

It's not the intended effect, but this just made me sad:

That really matters. Not because the internet is the most important issue facing us today. Far from it. Compared with the climate emergency, genocide, inequality, corruption, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism and sustained racist, homophobic, misogynist and transphobic attacks, the internet is just a sideshow. But the internet is the terrain upon which these fights will be waged. It is the communications medium we will use to organise to save our species and planet from their imminent eradication. We can’t win these fights without a free, fair and open internet.

It's become increasingly difficult to imagine the sort of wide-scale change needed to achieve that vision actually happening.

Good article.

Worst part is that the shitty business model Amazon uses is being copied by almost everyone else. So now it's just user and customer abuse everywhere.

My favorite enshittified feature of Amazon is how, when I sort by low prices, most of the results completely disappear.

Now, you may have noticed that Amazon’s prices aren’t any higher than the prices that you pay elsewhere. There’s a good reason for that: when merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct-sales stores.

This alone tells you how much the system has been messed up to favor massive corporations in America. I live in Europe and we don't have laws like that here. Amazon is still a major player (and they're just as evil), but I have the option to buy my goods elsewhere for a lower price. And I regularly do.

Just this month I needed new air filters for a Sony projector. They're 60€ on amazon, so I bought the same filters for 20€ in a dedicated air filter shop in the Netherlands. Even with shipping, it was half the price.

If lookalike products was the only issue. I often buy electronic parts on Amazon. Enter ones part manufacturers ID code, and behold the range of things Amazon presents. I've been offered female hygiene products (despite being male, so much about all-knowing databases), earrings, knee protectors, and a hammer, just to name a few recent examples. Sometimes I search for my search string on such a product page, but usually come up empty, so I have no idea how they get such ideas.

But this is wrong. There are meaningful differences between the internet as it stands today – the enshitternet – and the old, good internet we once had. The enshitternet is a source of pain, precarity and immiseration for the people we love. The indignities of harassment, scams, disinformation, surveillance, wage theft, extraction and rent-seeking have always been with us, but they were a minor sideshow on the old, good internet and they are the everything and all of the enshitternet.

I'm a big fan of Doctorow, but I have to disagree with his view of the "old, good internet", for a reason he recognizes with Amazon but doesn't take to its logical conclusion (at least not in this excerpt).

In step 1 of enshittification, a website is good to its users. Granted. But as the excerpt points out, Amazon was "good to its users" thanks to a massive pile of investor cash, which let them do consumer friendly (but anti-competitive) stuff like sell goods below cost, have a fair search system instead of making money off search placement fees, and not squeeze its suppliers.

But that couldn't last. The money ran out. And Amazon transitioned to stage 2, and stage 3, squeezing its suppliers and customers, in order to pay back its investors and make a ton of money.

And this has been the life cycle for most of the internet. Google, Facebook, Twitter, pretty much every big web company started by using investor cash to give unsustainable benefits to consumers, and then either started squeezing them for profit when the cash ran out or transitioned to some other role (like becoming a propaganda outlet for the world's richest man) because they couldn't continue providing the customer-friendly internet we all enjoyed without going bankrupt.

What I'm getting at is, the old, good internet was inherently unsustainable, because most of the things we enjoyed about it were subsidized by investors. The Facebook that just showed you what your friends were doing? Made no money. The Twitter that the Occupy movement and Arab Spring ran on? Never made a profit. That good, effective Google search engine? Cost a lot more than ad revenue brought in. The entire modern Internet was built on the concept of locking users in with unsustainably cheap services and then squeezing them to repay investors. Enshittification was the plan from Day 1.

We can't go back to the old, good internet. We don't have angel investors willing to subsidize all the good stuff we enjoyed.

But we can go forward to the fediverse 😆

The only way to win, is not to play. Cancel your prime, shop elsewhere and you 'WILL' get better deals, for those of you in the UK and EU, ALWAYS use a credit card for online purchases, as that gives you even better protections.

Shop locally, support businesses in your community, because the money you spend there, gets spent there over and over again. When you spend it in chain stores and online, that money is sucked out of your community.

I get it though... some people only care about the convenience of the deal, and that's the real cause of enshitification... the peoples failure to care about the effort they put into things... In effect it's a form of laziness and conditioning, people value their convenience above and beyond anything else. We see it in everything, social media is amongst the very worst of it, with friends complaining that they can't keep in touch because 'you're not on (insert SM name here)'... because the effort of stepping outside the bubble they've been sucked into is far too inconvenient for them, and you get to find out that these people are not really your friends... they never were, because they're convenience was always more important than your existence to them.

As for amazon, brands have woken up... do a search for something and you'll rarely find anything from those branded manufacturers... only 3rd party sellers and cheap crappy chinese knock-offs. Items that don;t even meant safety standards in the country they being sold in. Electrical goods that are a fire hazard and have caused loss of life... and amazon keeps getting away with it because '3rd party sellers' not them.

The only way to win is not to play... cancel your subscriptions, stop using their services, stop buying digital goods that can be taken away from you. Return to physical media that actually ends up being cheaper in the long run. You are the consumer, you have the power... hell... try going without a few times, you don't actually need that cheap piece of plastic crap you just ordered to save yourself a few minutes of 'prep' time in the kitchen that will break after a couple of weeks or be consigned the back of a cupboard after a few uses and forgotten about.

You have the power... use it better.

Ebay has been my alternative.