In a 2023 Wired article, Cory Doctorow coined the term 'Enshittification' to describe the inevitable decay of two-side online products and services, and it spread like wildfire in tech circles.
When I first heard about Netflix making a bid to acquire WBD, 'netflixification' popped into my head—fully formed and ready to use.
It's a derivative term but they're not the same things.
The difference is that Netflix actually cares about its users. This is bound to get diluted with the ad-supported tier they now have, but like Amazon... customer centricity is embedded deep into their core identity.
And yet, it is my belief that Netflix went down the wrong path by creating its own production house and having it blend in with independent film production companies. Amazon did the same thing by launching its own house brands for every imaginable product category.
But why? Was there something wrong with the products that predated Amazon lookalikes? Or were the movies produced before Netflix not good enough?
Did the world really need more stuff, or was the cookie jar too lucrative for platform owners? I think the question answers itself.
I can't speak for all users but I've personally never felt excited by the Netflix banner. I love the platform, but have a deep and abiding ambivalence about its media empire.
I think I know the reason why. When DreamWorks or Village Roadshow greenlight a production, they do it because the concept has legs as a standalone entity. Netflix churns out media to keep its users from getting bored. There’s no Darwinian survival pressure.
Those are vastly different goals and they create vastly different production philosophies and processes.
Amazon has its own reasons. No one's leaving Amazon if it didn't make tees, kitchen scissors, and USB C cables, but house brands don't need to pay Amazon for distribution, and so the margin saved is profit. Amazon products don't need to be the best, they just need to push volume.
Just like enshittification is the inevitable decay of two-sided online platforms caused by misaligned incentives, netflixification is the inevitable decay of aggregators caused by the distribution of self-owned products.
In an ideal world, Netflix wouldn't be allowed to gobble up other media entities to protect diversity in the creative industry.
Sure, Netflix has produced great movies and television. That's not the point. A thousand monkeys hacking away at typewriters will eventually reproduce a Shakespeare—it doesn't make the monkey a playwright.
Great products are built from a desire to build great products. If the product itself becomes a byproduct of some other, secondary goal, it logically follows that you’re likely to end up with a middling product.