Enshittification - Cory Doctorow
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and servicesdecline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers (such as advertisers), and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
Canadian writer Cory Doctorow coined the neologism enshittification in November 2022,[1] though he was not the first to describe and label the concept.[2][3] Doctorow’s term has been widely adopted. The American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year, with Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary following suit for 2024. Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com also list enshittification as a word.[4][5]
AI slop v Kurzgesagt
AI-generated content is flooding the internet, from videos and music to news and books. On top of that, generative AI is making false information look more convincing than ever. We’re entering a new era of information overload, and figuring out what’s real and what’s not is becoming more and more of a challenge. While AI slop is slowly changing the internet as we know it, one thing is certain: kurzgesagt videos will always remain human-made.
Kurzgesagt (/ˌkʊərtsɡəˈzɑːkt/, /ˈkʊərtsɡəˌzɑːkt/; German for “In a nutshell”, “in short”, or literally “shortly said”; German pronunciation: [ˈkʊʁt͡sɡəˌzaːkt]) is a German animation and design studio founded by Philipp Dettmer. The studio is best known for its YouTube channel, which focuses on minimalistic animated educational content using a flat and 3D design style. It discusses scientific, technological, political, philosophical, and psychological subjects.[5][6]