Enshittification

IGN reporting Sony added advertising to the PlayStation 5 Home Screen. For those unaware Enshittification is the process of making your user experience worse usually by monetizing previously free features, adding advertising, and adding user tracking.

Sony’s case is on the worse side because it adds advertising to a product that you OWN. There is an argument that free services such as instagram adding more advertisements is reasonable due to the product being free to the end user. However, many hardware products have had shrinking margins because of increasing competition and silicon die shrinks becoming increasingly expensive. Televisions are a specific example of enshittification. I understand companies have to make a profit especially publicly owned companies, but there needs to be a better trade off. Maybe similar to the old Kindle model where showing advertising resulted in a cheaper upfront price.

I’ll cover more examples as they come up. As a heads up, I would eventually like to modestly monetize my commentary/work here.

Credit to Ars Technica and IGN for the stories. Image by ChatGPT.