I’ve been reading a discussion on social media and internet forums lately, about the problems and issues many applications and software have encountered. There are some nuanced perspectives in the discussion, but generally speaking, the majority of people voicing their opinions on social media say that nobody cares if software works anymore, and that all companies are now competing to sell features. Fixing, removing or improving existing features, as they are considered to no longer provide a value proposition
Additionally, many people also say that many companies misperceive the ‘acceleration’ of AI, which is considered more productive but has significant trade-offs that are gradually being abandoned: selling reliability and quality. To be fair, I don’t really know which perspective I’m on, since at some point I also understand a little why the current era is moving so fast and why this can happen especially in companies with so many disruptions and digital transformations, on the one hand I also feel somehow some of the software / apps I use also gradually feel very bloated, sluggish and I found some obvious bugs that I rarely found in previous versions (or older versions)
taken for example, yesterday when I tried DMs on X, it’s totally broken I couldn’t type anything, then applications lke KAI access last Saturday also couldn’t be used for 1 hour, the financial tracking application I use also couldn’t record and displayed dates in a different format, Gojek also experienced a similar thing, there was a part of their menu tab that was not visible because of the background color used (at first I thought this was part of their design system, it turns out I was wrong)
i wonder how Gojek handles this issue like this, do they also have a USI system like our company proposed?
I think, what I felt turned out to be a global problem and gave rise to a trend called enshittification. In short, the terminology refers to how a platform will gradually continue to decline in quality and performance with the presence of increasing profits. When I feel all this, honestly, I’m quite sad and kinda ironic since the Maukerja platform (especially the mobile app) is experiencing the same thing. I’ve been noticing since several releases throughout 2025, the Maukerja mobile app has experienced hotfix releases more than 5 times, something that is very rare throughout 2023-2024. In comparison, in 2024 the mobile app only had 1 hotfix release and in 2023 it was 3 times. At the end of this reflection, I realized something that I am just a ‘cog in this machinery called world’
Some of the references that I found about enshittification:
https://www.vox.com/technology/465922/enshittification-cory-doctorow-amazon-google-facebook