The enshittification of the customer base

For the last few years of running my company, I signed customer support emails as Andrew.

Andrew is not my name. I picked it because customers were kinder to Andrew than they were to Laura. Andrew got the benefit of the doubt. Andrew’s answers were accepted the first time. Nobody explained to Andrew how their own product worked. When I eventually handed most of the first-line support to AI, I kept the signature, partly because it was easier and partly because by then it felt like the house style.

I want to be careful about what that story is evidence of. It is one person’s inbox. But I stopped running the experiment because I already knew the result.

The people who bought the first boards

The first customers were builders. They bought a development board because they wanted to make something out of it, and they arrived expecting to do work.

They read the documentation. They filed real bug reports, sometimes with a fix attached. They understood that a small sensor company was not going to have an answer to every question within the hour, and that some of what they were attempting had never been attempted with our hardware before, so we would be figuring it out together. When something worked, they told other people. When something did not, a fair number of them told us how to fix it.

That is not nostalgia for better people. It is a description of a filter. Early on, our product was hard enough to use that it selected for a certain kind of customer.

The people who bought the last boards

Then we got easier to buy from, and more people bought.

The requests changed shape. Free customization for one specific use case. Free consulting, delivered as a support ticket. Firmware treated as free because the SDK was open source, though the firmware never was. An answer within the hour, on a Sunday. Amazon shipping. A refund because the sensor did not do a thing we had never claimed it did, and a chargeback when the refund was declined.

The framing I keep coming back to is not that customers got worse. It is:

Growth diluted the contributor class and amplified the extractor class.

The average customer did not get less intelligent. The average interaction got less informed, less patient, and less reciprocal. What disappeared was not competence. It was reciprocity.

Our own Eternal September

There is a name for this from the early internet. Every September, a new cohort of university students arrived on Usenet, behaved badly, and got socialized by the regulars until they knew the norms. Then in late 1993 commercial providers opened the gates, the flood stopped being seasonal, and it became known as the September that never ended.

The obvious reading is that newcomers ruin things. That is not what the research says, and the more interesting version is less flattering to me.

In 2016 a group of researchers studied a Reddit community that took an enormous newcomer surge and came out the other side intact. It survived because it had active, coordinated moderators, enough shared identity that existing members policed norms themselves, and technical systems that absorbed the rest. The surge was not the deciding factor. The capacity to absorb it was.

We had that capacity once. A forum with several of us answering on it, engineers who liked talking to customers, enough people that norms got transmitted rather than diluted. Then the team dispersed, and it was me. One person cannot socialize a growing customer base. One person can only answer tickets, and eventually not even all of those.

So the newcomers did not join our culture. They became it.

It was not only us

For a while I assumed this was a me problem, or a hardware problem.

Then Pew asked 9,609 Americans about it in late 2024 and 47% said public behavior had got ruder since the pandemic, one in five saying a lot ruder. That is about behavior in general rather than customers specifically, so it is context and not proof. But it matched what the inbox felt like.

The closer research is on customer incivility itself, and it is fairly bleak. A two-wave study of frontline service workers, surveyed before the pandemic and again in late 2020, found the path from customer rudeness to worse job performance, running through emotional exhaustion, became more pronounced after the pandemic began. One study, one country, 211 people. Not a law of nature. But the direction is the one everyone working a counter would guess.

At some point the bad interactions stopped feeling like exceptions and started feeling like the operating environment.

Open source was never a promise of free labor

Publishing your SDKs does not mean you have agreed to work for free, forever, for anyone who downloads them. Maintainers know this. Tidelift’s 2024 survey of open source maintainers found 60% are unpaid hobbyists, 48% feel underappreciated or that the work is thankless, and 39% say users are too demanding and expect too much of them. Sixty percent have quit a project or considered it.

One maintainer quoted in their report put it better than I can:

Most users, even ones who require fixes, are not willing to roll up their sleeves to help. They just expect someone else to fix it for free.

People wanted the benefits of open source without any of its obligations, and were often annoyed to learn there were obligations.

The trust loop

The uncomfortable part, and the part that implicates me, is that bad behavior makes a company defensive. Every abused return policy tightens the return policy. Every chargeback adds a verification step. Every ticket demanding an immediate answer to a question already answered in the docs pushes you toward the canned reply, then toward the macro, then toward the bot. Warmth is expensive, and hostility raises the price.

Your customers then experience all of that as the company getting worse. Which it did. I did make it worse. I made it worse in direct response to what people were doing to me, and the people who got the colder version were mostly not the people who caused it.

We talk about enshittification as something platforms do to users, extracting more and giving less until the thing is hollow. Cory Doctorow named that, and he was right about it. But the arrow points both ways.

Sometimes companies enshittify because shareholders demand extraction. Sometimes they enshittify because customers teach them that trust is too expensive.

A modest proposal

People used to argue for mandatory military service on the grounds that it built discipline and a sense of shared obligation.

I would like to propose an update. One semester of customer support, retail, or a fast food counter during the lunch rush. Not as punishment. Just long enough to learn that the person on the other side of the counter is also a person, and that they can tell when you are being unkind to them because of the name at the bottom of the email.

Andrew would like that very much.