In future you can just say that rather than talking in circles and making no sense. Goodbye.

Your point is that the issues don’t affect the core experience, and I’ve explained how that’s wrong, and you’ve ignored it.

You’re also now blatantly mischaracterising what I’ve said.

If you want me to keep talking to you, I need you to tell me that you are actually curious to understand what I have to say.

Yes, you ignored the worst parts of it in favour of things you could dismiss for yourself, and then you ignored me pointing that out. I’m not going to keep explaining this to you any further.

Okay, I don’t understand how and you haven’t explained it, you’ve just said that you don’t personally care about it, which isn’t an argument I can respond to. You’re free to have your opinion, but I don’t see how it’s relevant here.

Sure, if you ignore the worst parts of it that I explicitly laid out and only focus on how it makes you feel personally, then I can see how you might feel that way.

Yes, I’m so angry and salty that I checks notes wrote a detailed and even-handed analysis of the situation with appropriate caveats. How dare I state facts with sources and explanations of my reasoning.

I’m just absolutely raging. It’s embarrassing, frankly. I’m making a fool of myself. I can’t believe I lost control like that and said words that I believe to be true. Who does that? Unhinged behaviour. Just wild. I should be banned.

That’s one way it happens, but in general the term appears to be about decline in quality for the purposes of profit-seeking, regardless of whether services were offered for free or not.

The wiki article starts with this:

Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

Other articles I looked at seem to agree with this basic concept.

And like I said, spam from scammers and inbox spam are examples of shittiness that seep in regardless of if you engage or not. There is no “no marketplace plz” option, and even if there were scammers can still send you friend request spam.

The steam marketplace is an attempt to monetise the user base by creating a bunch of microtransactions and taking a cut for the store. They have created a speculative market, which is essentially gambling, and made it available to minors. This market is designed to exploit people’s psychological weaknesses.

Yes, users and devs get a cut too, and that’s better than some sites will do to you, but creating a market also has a bunch of externalities - extra problems that are offloaded onto other people and not borne by valve.

So suddenly we’ve got a bunch of scammers creating accounts to make money, which obviously can scam users, plus it generats spam, and it creates a need for user-hostile security. Now I can’t friend my kid’s account without spending money on it for instance,

Also there’s the item spam. Now when I get a notification I don’t know if it’s a community forum reply, or just more worthless junk in my inventory. The inventory could have just been a way to store game gifts and other things of actual value, now I never look at it because it’s just full of trash.

Some of these are minor inconveniences, but that’s how enshittification happens. It’s little, creeping annoyances that get worse and worse until it starts to make people look for alternatives.

And like I said, it’s not as bad as other places. Steam is still the best distribution platform out there, but it has enshittified a little bit. It has to, because the interests of the owners and the interests of the users are fundamentally at odds - more money spent means more money for the owners.

You can’t do whatever you want with open source either. One big stipulation of copyleft licenses is the share-alike clause, which means you can’t make modifications and then decide your program is now closed-source, so it protects the code from being enclosed again.

I mean yes you can make whatever modifications you want, generally, but it’s not totally unrestricted.

I would say the marketplace is a form of enshittification. They’re not burrowing headfirst into the shit like some platforms, but it’s an inevitable trend regardless.

Plus who knows what happens when gabe isn’t around any more. Best case scenario is he leaves the company to the workers as a co-op and then it has a chance to be a lasting legacy, but maybe it goes to someone who puts it up to be publicly traded and that’s game over.