Ask Lemmy

Very briefly, after the CEO of United Health was killed, insurance companies were accepting claims they otherwise would have rejected.

Video games

Had a huge crash around the Atari era due to an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published. Games were also extremely expensive then

Nintendo famously reversed this crisis with the introduction of the NES and their “Nintendo seal of quality”. Consumers were able to access a curated collection of quality games, and it really turned things around and basically launched the modern gaming industry

I got curious and did a bit of searching since I couldn't really think of anything. Apparently Fender (guitars) was originally amazing, was sold to another company and really degraded in overall quality, and then was purchased back by some of its engineers and returned to a better quality. Pretty nice to see that people who were actually passionate about something regaining control and saving something they loved.

https://www.soundunlimited.co.uk/blogs/articles/fender_timeline

Book stores come to mind. Barnes and Noble killed local book stores and then Amazon killed Barnes and Noble which left an opening for local independent book stores to come back

Coffee perhaps. I think previous generations were more apt to just get a tub of Folgers or Maxwell House and not care too much about what they were drinking. Then third wave coffee shops started emphasizing quality, process, and flavor nuances. These days, you can find specialty coffee in most areas or get high-quality beans delivered and brew it yourself.

Beer?

In the beginning was European beer, and it was good. They created the American brewing industry and it was ok. Then they said “let there be swill” and that’s all we knew. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep.

Then Jimmy Carter said, "Let us make breweries in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the drinkers in the sea and the imbibers in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild party animals, and over all the pedestrians that move along the ground. And there was beer

Jimmy Carter saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

Edit: Jimmy Carter was the US President who signed into law deregulating beer. Since then we were legally able to start brewing our own, and it jumped-started the rise of craft brews here

You really should read Cory Doctorows original analysis where he coined the term "enshittification". He has written a book about this and it really is great. The point is that for companies to be able to enshittify their products, they need to be in a specific position. Esp. in regards of competition - if there is a market and other companies are able to offer non-enshittified products, you can't. If you are a monopoly, you totally can fuck over your users. So for an industry to un-enshittify, you need to break the monopoly structures there, kill regulatory capture, try to kill network effects and bring real competition into the industry.

Apple products. They were considered junk until Jobs came back and revived their style. They are currently in the round 2 of the enshitification process.

academic publishing. It used to be monopolized by a couple publishing company with unreasonably high fee for access on both the side of researcher and reader.

Now, through hard works of the academics and funding from the public, now many publishing company are non-profit governed by working academics. And in many fields, open access has become the default.

Bowling Alleys, at least some of the ones I've seen lately. There was a period in the late 00s where bowling alleys thought they were the shit and started charging upwards of $20/player/lane, plus $30+ dollar pizzas. Not to mention the arcade jumping from quarters to dollar-credits.

The last couple I've found have all but dropped that, basically back down to the $15/lane/2 hour model with however many players and complimentary shoe rental. One even had $5 personal pizzas (that yes were just Totinos or similar heated up, but hey it's better than $30 for a red baron).

I guess the ones that survived covid realized no one was willing to spend a nice dinner's worth of cash on a night at what should be the second cheapest type of third space available to people.

I'd say American car companies. Due to market consolidation and car brands being a symbol of national pride, they were able to enshitify in the 1970's and 80's, producing low-quality expensive cars. Competition from Japan in the late 80's and 90's forced them to improve. American cars still trail behind Japanese cars in quality, but they've gotten much better.

Free and fair competition is essential to any economy. The gutting of antitrust laws in the USA is partly to blame for whatever you call this system we have now (I can't confidently say it's capitalism anymore).

Cash. Currency exchange. Used to be a tourist trap, intransparent and bad rates, commission on top; take only mint banknotes. Now often we see: No commission, rates with low spread (same as the best bank rates available to consumers). Takes bank notes and coins at no surcharge, no discussion.

This is for countries where cash is still king and practically required. It's competition at work; there are multiple local shops and they advertise their rates publicly. With internet in everyone's pocket, there's little room for cheating. Just enough spread for this to be a profitable business without robbing the customer.

Compare to ATM operators, which are usually a oligopoly charging growing fees to foreigners. Because they can.

AFAIK internet access was very siloed in the 90s - AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and the like, which weren't quite ISPs, since they allowed access only to their own services and networks. Then, in 2000s, these companies evolved and ISPs started providing access to the WWW, whick you could call "deshittifying" internet access.

American beer. Used to be just be the macro brews with corn, rice and other adjuncts.

In some ways shrinkflation is "cyclical" in that inflation rises costs, companies try to cheat consumers by shrinking products, but wages go up and "premium" products launch that are a decent quantity again. Those do well, but then inflation hits again, they shittify and shrinkflation happens again.

The long standing "big" brands never recover, but new stuff does come along. Good example is the "premium" chocolate bars that come along, their selling point being they had more cocoa in them. The established mass market brands used to have cocoa in them, but reduced the proportion to save costs. Now some of those "premium" brands have reduced the cocoa content and new even more expensive chocolate brands are available.

Cable TV was replaced by early streaming, although that is now well on its way to enshitification too

Maybe the porn industry? It was rife with abuse and financially yoked its porn stars. Then things like OnlyFans came along and now adult entertainers have full control of their content and careers.

Yeah, they do sometimes and in some situations, usually when you have some major disruption, but the problem is that the disruptor often ends up becoming the enshittifier eventually.

Case in point, look at Google. On a technical level Google genuinely cracked search in a way that no other company did, and made it so good that it became the dominant way to find information online.

They then ambitiously decided to use those resources to try and break into / disrupt several other markets like web browsers, email, office software, mapping software, operating systems, video broadcasting, etc.

During those early years we got a bunch of genuine improvements. Chrome was way better then Internet Explorer, and substantially cleaner and faster then Firefox, and still open source and not developed by ad-focused people.

Maps was way better then MapQuest, Google docs at least gave you an easy and accessible alternative to Word, Gmail was way better then Hotmail with way more storage, the original Chromecast and Chromecast audios were amazing value.

But then companies get entrenched, they start tying every product together, building walls around the garden, and start pulling up the ladder behind them. Then when everyone is thoroughly walled in they start extracting every possible opportunity for money and we're back to enshittification.

Waterstones was on the brink of collapse, until a Russian billionaire bought the chain and put James Daunt in charge.

Daunt reversed years of enshittification. Publishers couldn't buy shelf space for their books anymore, local managers were given autonomy on what books they wanted to stock and each branch was run like its own individual book shop.

And to the surprise of the business world, his plan worked.

I can think of two cases that might qualify: The American meat industry and the Austrian wine industry.

In the former case, public outrage over Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle caused legislation and regulation. In the latter case, the wine industry got so cheap that they started back-sweetening rotgut with antifreeze and poisoned a bunch of people, and they had a choice: Rebrand to impeccable quality or die as a national industry.

The USB mess and proprietary cables.

Domino's pizza turned itself around.

strictly in the context of the title alone, video games.

The need to constantly show growth makes me wonder if it's worth doing crazy stuff that tanks the business just to show growth by getting it out of the ditch back to where it was before.

Not as long as the owner or anything is an investment fund. And they tend to be.