Discussion about resisting enshittification through legislation or features of product or service
So we know how enshittification has spread across many sectors. like services or products get worse after a certain time. but there are ways to fight or reverse them too.
Few of them which is universal and applies to mainly all.
- Antitrust laws : if there is healthy competition then someone can switch to something different and it applies for every sector.
- Govt regulations : EU has good consumer protection laws so it helps too
- community pushback: if people started boycotting it or make themselves more loud and clear at consistent level then it also helps too
There maybe others but for now i know this much
Now moving to tech sector
- Interoperability : This is very crucial and if there is no vendor locking then it means people can use it before it gets enshittified and then move on to other products. Example: Obsidian
- Open source software: This is also a great way to resist enshittification. anyone can create a fork so if original ones become bad or bloated then a new fork can fixed those problems too. I know that chromium and android is open source but they still have some problems that dont make them too much resistant as it supposed to be. Chromium is open source but is also very popular too. Something like WEI which could have killed the open web and android even if its open source , it is impossible to be used for majority of people without the closed source layer of google.
- Right to repair: Companies can send updates to firmware and potentially brick devices too so if schematics, driver code and other things important to understand somethings are available too then it can be fixed too
- Decentralization: If a service is not controlled by one entity then it is enshittification resistant. example : fediverse
- Community maintained : If a product/service is maintained by community/individual it has higher friction for enshitiffication. Example: Ubuntu and linux mint both are open source but we have problems with ubuntu like being forced to use snap. linux mint is maintained by community and it is what ubuntu should have been.
- Works offline: If some software can work offline then it can resist the bad updates.
Services/product that dont have these 4 things so ofc they have a higher chance of enshittification but they still can be fixed too ie reverse engineering and breaking their digital locks and also scrappers too for exporting stuff. Though there is one thing which i mentioned ie breaking digital locks have consequences and can land someone in federal prison for 3-5 yrs all thanks to the section 1201 of dmca. while it cant punish someone if he keeps to themselves but this required a constant distributed effort in most cases. If this section dont exist then anyone can break digital locks and fix things too
anyway that's it from me, there are other things that involve in other sectors too so please share it or add more to tech sectors