How the hell can healthy competition breed enshittification? That makes absolutely no sense to me.

Take an industry with healthy competition like restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format, service and probably a lot more.

Now tell me how that competition enshittified eating at restaurants?

For me, nothing stands out. If a restaurant charges nonsense fees, under-staffs to increase profits, reduce portions with the same value, etc. I can simply go to another one. Restaurants that enshittify will almost inevitably close.

But if we look at a closely related industry like the food delivery apps, we see the same exact signs of enshittification we see on the tech world due to monopolies (or oligopolies to be more exact) like: - Increased/hidden fees

- Increased delivery times

- Crappy apps with ads everywhere

- Ineffective review systems

- Pay-to-win search

- Dynamic pricing

They can get away with it because realistically, you don't have any other options. The cost to entry might not be that high but the network effect all but prohibits competition.

> Take an industry with healthy competition like restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format, service and probably a lot more.

Yes, and you correctly point out: On the average restaurant visit, nothing stands out. A good restaurant only needs to provide not-terrible food and not-terrible service to be almost indistinguishable from all others. Quality of a restaurant visit is hard to measure and compare. Price is easy to measure. Thus, the rational consumer will prefer the cheaper option (and even at the same price, a restaurant with lower costs will be more profitable, thus expand more easily).

The same thing happens on Amazon and other market places: When it is difficult to compare quality, price always wins out. Some products are interchangeable with well defined specs, like a 16GB RAM stick is obviously twice as good as 8GB RAM and so it can be twice as expensive and still sell. But when I'm looking for a new light for my bicycle there are no standardized specs to compare. All the product descriptions and pictures are exaggerated. I have no reliable information to tell if the lamp that is twice as expensive is really twice as good (and from personal experience: they never are), so I'm buying the cheapest one cause I expect all of the products to be equally crappy no matter the price.

It's not Amazon's fault. This happens everywhere.