>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.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36297336

>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."

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PaulDavisThe1st 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	krapp 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.