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kadushka 4 days ago

[flagged]

Analemma_ 4 days ago | parent [-]

I'm going to fling that response right back at you. "Enshittification" is not a generic term for "update I don't like", it describes a specific dynamic that happens when a company inserts itself as a middleman into a two-sided market. arXiv could get worse in other ways, but enshittification in particular can't happen to it, that's a category error.

I think you should offer better thoughts instead of mad-libbing in buzzwords where they don't apply. Enshittification is actually a useful concept, and I don't want it to go the way of "FUD", which had a similar trajectory in the later years of Slashdot where people just reduced it to a useless catch-all phrase whenever Microsoft said anything about anything.

kadushka 4 days ago | parent [-]

I'm using "enshittification" as defined here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/enshittification

I believe there's a real chance of it happening here as a result of this transition. I personally experienced results of several of similar transitions over the course of my career. What I haven't experienced are problems with Arxiv that would motivate such a change. There might be actual problems they are trying to solve - but I still believe things will probably get worse as a result.