Are we watching the Enshittification of Swissbeatbox?

Swissbeatbox no longer meets the standards it once set for itself. How, then, should fans measure their behavior?

Are we watching the Enshittification of Swissbeatbox?
A sampling of the r/beatbox posts about Swissbeatbox, drama, and toxicity

I’ve been hanging out on r/beatbox recently. Navigating the great enshittening has taken me from one social media platform to the next, so at the moment, it’s mostly Reddit and Instagram. Twitter is a cesspool for hate, Facebook is also hate but somehow boring (??) and I am not good enough at social media to gain traction on newcomers like Bluesky. Oh well. (Follow me on social media please lmfao!! The content is good even if i’m not “good at social media.”)

For those who don’t know about the great enshittening, is a theory by the writer Cory Doctorow about the decline in the quality of the tech products that dominate our lives. The process, he explains, has three steps. 

“First, it is good to its users, then, it abuses its users to make things better for its business customers; finally, it abuses those business customers to claw back all the value for itself. Then, it dies.”

The process isn’t malicious. It is a product of tech companies getting too big. Maybe next year, this theory suggests, Reddit will surge in usage among the type of culture-setting folks who make a social media platform blow up and I will need to find a new place to talk about beatbox because at a certain size, Reddit, or any other tech company is so big it doesn’t have to be good anymore. 

The irony, as I look to Reddit for refuge from the great enshittening, is that r/beatbox is aflame with discussion of another enshittening, and this time, it’s Swissbeatbox that has supposedly become shit.