Point of order: "enshittification" does not mean what the author's using it to mean. It does not just mean "the product got worse". It means "the product was purposefully made worse in order to capture additional value from the customer," i.e. a rug pull.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd hate to see such a useful term for corporate malfeasance diluted.

Defending focus is way harder than adding features.

When you're building, adding yet another feature can sometimes shave off all the edges that made you successful in the first place.

Same with messaging. The more you try to sound universal, the less anyone hears you.

Strong opinions that are honestly held and communicated are such great signs of respect. It's refreshing to see: "This is who we are. If it's not for you, that's okay."

Good piece.

It was a let down to be bought into the "hook" that saying no, taking focus, is the key to continued long term success as a scaled company, only for it to devolve into how courageous it is to have a simple homepage.

I wanted to read a new story; one about an internal debate where the easy answer was to "just do it," but a hard no is what actually saved everything.

Surely that story exists.

"They get worse because they need to keep pleasing new users, new needs, address every edge case."

That is not what enshittification is about, and not who it is about. You don't enshittify to please users, you do it to please shareholders.

This brings to mind the Tony Hsieh quote, "You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down."

All successful startups are fighting a battle against entropy. And entropy is becoming indistinguishable from all the other companies out there. Which means losing what made them succeed in the first place.

This is why company culture is important. You need to know what your values are. And then you need to maintain them. Even at the cost of the wrong short-term profitable opportunities.

Moisey Uretsky who effectively came up with the idea for and made most of the foundational "cannot touch" choices at DigitalOcean basically said for a long time we were not allowed to add anything to the control panel, period. He really didn't even want us moving stuff around too much. I seem to recall, although I could be misremembering, when we hired Jesse Chase (amazing hire) who was our first everything visual guy, it was somewhat contentious, he was bought in, but man, Moisey was adamant it stayed extremely simple. We had a lot of heated debate, but I always appreciated this, I thought it was a good rule of thumb - if it ain't br0ked don't fix it basically. I've not used DigitalOcean in a very long time, fingers crossed it's still simple and easy to use! :)