It seems like Astro is picking up a lot of the simpler use cases that Next used to serve. It's much simpler and doesn't have a lot of fancy bolts included, but a lot of sites don't really need them either...
I think Next + SSG jumpstarted a pretty cool revolution in web hosting, at least, where now you can easily use any of a dozen different frameworks and host them anywhere from Vercel to Netlify to Cloudflare Pages to an S3, etc.
These things come in cycles. Today's simple, elegant indie darling is tomorrow's bloated behemoth. Happens to everything from JS frameworks to browsers to entire ecosystems, in this case the Web itself.
I doubt anything we discuss today will still be relevant in ten years. Maybe not even five...
I get what you're trying to say: I too have very strong feelings about Vercel, it's lock in, it's operating model, and some underlying technical decisions they've made. But individually those are points that (if the company is listening) Vercel will address or go out of business.
There's no nuance in that way of thinking. Market forces will determine whether or not the company will succeed. But it's the obligation of the decision makers in your company to decide whether or not the problems that Vercel has are worth the risks and to what degree. There may be a tipping point - an enshittification point - at which the risks are no longer tenable. The way the term is commonly used doesn't make that clear - you've basically declared that the company will go south. Maybe it will, or maybe they'll listen to their customers.
IMO it's a useful word that accurately describes what happens to a lot of tech companies that grow too quickly (or try to, at least): They abandon their early/original customer base in pursuit of higher-profit customers. In the process, they often modify the original feature set or UX or pricing scheme, etc., in a way that negatively affects their early adopter user base. It's only natural for those early users to feel abandoned or betrayed.
Just blaming it on "market forces" seems like a bigger cop-out than actually calling out "enshittification". Companies have different cultures and values and leaders and different kinds of investors, and they can lead to different growth models and customer bases. It's in particular the kind of company that seeks fast, explosive growth (VCs and founders looking for a quick exit, maybe?) that's most likely to enshittify. Small, slowly-growing/mostly stable companies usually don't enshittify as much... bu you've probably also never heard of most of them.
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Vercel was once an indie darling too. I still wouldn't call it "enshittified", but their focus has definitely shifted. The rendering model of recent Next.js is way more complex (powerful too, but a lot harder to reason about) and Vercel the company is trying to value-add a lot of things (preview comments, toolbar, etc.) and also diversify into more backend/CDN/DB/KV stuff, like Cloudflare's other offerings. I still prefer Next & Vercel today, but I can't say people like me (small time web devs whose customers are mostly small businesses) are their primary focus anymore. What used to be a really amazing frontend web host for simple SSG sites with easy caching is quickly trying to become the next full-stack web monolith, and the number of times I've run into Next issues on other hosts over the years has led me to not even bother trying to deploy it anywhere else but Vercel these days. That was probably their end goal all along.
Whether it's an "enshittification" is a judgment call, but it pretty unmistakably feels like a deliberate pivot towards the enterprise and "real" web use cases that have a lot of complexity and need all the power of mixed static/server/client component trees. In response, I see a lot of simpler frontend projects move towards Vite or Astro instead.
I'm still grateful for Next/Vercel to have unified so much of the JS world that was previously super chaotic before Next took over everything... but I guess these things are cyclical, and it's only a matter of time before Next & Vercel get dethroned by the next hot young thing. It honestly feels like I'm watching Game of Thrones where every few years all the main characters die and are replaced by new queens. That's the web world for ya. Always has been, I guess.
It seems like Astro is picking up a lot of the simpler use cases that Next used to serve. It's much simpler and doesn't have a lot of fancy bolts included, but a lot of sites don't really need them either...
I think Next + SSG jumpstarted a pretty cool revolution in web hosting, at least, where now you can easily use any of a dozen different frameworks and host them anywhere from Vercel to Netlify to Cloudflare Pages to an S3, etc.
These things come in cycles. Today's simple, elegant indie darling is tomorrow's bloated behemoth. Happens to everything from JS frameworks to browsers to entire ecosystems, in this case the Web itself.
I doubt anything we discuss today will still be relevant in ten years. Maybe not even five...
> enshittifies
Can we stop using that terrible term?
I get what you're trying to say: I too have very strong feelings about Vercel, it's lock in, it's operating model, and some underlying technical decisions they've made. But individually those are points that (if the company is listening) Vercel will address or go out of business.
There's no nuance in that way of thinking. Market forces will determine whether or not the company will succeed. But it's the obligation of the decision makers in your company to decide whether or not the problems that Vercel has are worth the risks and to what degree. There may be a tipping point - an enshittification point - at which the risks are no longer tenable. The way the term is commonly used doesn't make that clear - you've basically declared that the company will go south. Maybe it will, or maybe they'll listen to their customers.
I'm gonna keep saying it as long as they keep doing it
IMO it's a useful word that accurately describes what happens to a lot of tech companies that grow too quickly (or try to, at least): They abandon their early/original customer base in pursuit of higher-profit customers. In the process, they often modify the original feature set or UX or pricing scheme, etc., in a way that negatively affects their early adopter user base. It's only natural for those early users to feel abandoned or betrayed.
Just blaming it on "market forces" seems like a bigger cop-out than actually calling out "enshittification". Companies have different cultures and values and leaders and different kinds of investors, and they can lead to different growth models and customer bases. It's in particular the kind of company that seeks fast, explosive growth (VCs and founders looking for a quick exit, maybe?) that's most likely to enshittify. Small, slowly-growing/mostly stable companies usually don't enshittify as much... bu you've probably also never heard of most of them.
-----------
Vercel was once an indie darling too. I still wouldn't call it "enshittified", but their focus has definitely shifted. The rendering model of recent Next.js is way more complex (powerful too, but a lot harder to reason about) and Vercel the company is trying to value-add a lot of things (preview comments, toolbar, etc.) and also diversify into more backend/CDN/DB/KV stuff, like Cloudflare's other offerings. I still prefer Next & Vercel today, but I can't say people like me (small time web devs whose customers are mostly small businesses) are their primary focus anymore. What used to be a really amazing frontend web host for simple SSG sites with easy caching is quickly trying to become the next full-stack web monolith, and the number of times I've run into Next issues on other hosts over the years has led me to not even bother trying to deploy it anywhere else but Vercel these days. That was probably their end goal all along.
Whether it's an "enshittification" is a judgment call, but it pretty unmistakably feels like a deliberate pivot towards the enterprise and "real" web use cases that have a lot of complexity and need all the power of mixed static/server/client component trees. In response, I see a lot of simpler frontend projects move towards Vite or Astro instead.
I'm still grateful for Next/Vercel to have unified so much of the JS world that was previously super chaotic before Next took over everything... but I guess these things are cyclical, and it's only a matter of time before Next & Vercel get dethroned by the next hot young thing. It honestly feels like I'm watching Game of Thrones where every few years all the main characters die and are replaced by new queens. That's the web world for ya. Always has been, I guess.
It's a tool of the lazy.
What is?
> What happens after Vercel enshittifies?
React enshittifies together (already happened) and slowly starts to die. People stop going crazy over SSR and go back to simpler HTML/CSS/JS pages.