A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage
Score one for the good guys.
I’m on a tour with my new book Enshittification: Catch me next in New Orleans, Chicago and Los Angeles! Full schedule with dates and links here.
Sometimes, you really can vote with your wallet. I know, I’m generally pretty down on this kind of thing, but sometimes, it works!
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits
Here’s the latest victory from the land of wallet-based elections: Synology, a leading maker of “network-attached storage” (NAS) devices, has done a quiet (but total) 180 on its enshittificatory policy of blocking third party hard drives from its products:
Network-attached storage devices are basically boxy computers with a bunch of slots for hard-drives and one or more network cards so you can connect them to your wifi or wired network. You fill them with hard-drives and plug them in, and they show up on your network as a file-server: any device on the network can connect to them and access their files. They’re great for things like libraries of music or videos, which can be streamed to your TV or smart speakers. They’re essential for people who work with very large files — musicians, photographers, video and sound editors, etc. They’re also great for home backups, a single storage system that everyone in your household can back up all their data to. The better ones also have some kind of “NAT traversal” that lets you connect to them from the road — just plug your NAS into your home broadband and you can access your files from anywhere in the world.
Synology doesn’t just make NAS boxes, they also make hard-drives that go inside them. Earlier this year, Synology pushed an update to its devices that caused them to reject hard-drives manufactured by their rivals, including giants like Seagate. This was a blatant piece of rent-seeking, a page straight out of the inkjet printer playbook, where the company that made the box decided that this gave them the right to decide what you could put in the box.
When your printer updates itself to reject generic ink, there’s an implied threat: anyone who disenshittifies this printer — by making another update that restores generic ink support — risks prosecution under “anti-circumvention” laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These are laws that ban reverse-engineering, even for lawful purposes, like restoring generic printer ink support:
The same goes for Synology. Under a decent and sane system of tech regulation, Synology’s move to take away support for the vast majority of hard drives ever manufactured would prompt some other manufacturer to leap into the market and restore that support, by making alternative software for Synology’s products. That represents a huge potential risk to Synology — once you’re running a rival’s software on your Synology product, it’s a short leap to buying your next product from the company that saved your ass.
But because that kind of reverse-engineering is banned, enshittifiying companies like Synology don’t have to worry about that kind of usurpation. They can enlist the justice system to destroy any company that tries to rescue us from their predatory behavior.
That leaves us with comparatively weak defenses against enshittification, like complaining in public, and/or buying someone else’s products. These are much weaker than responses like “having a regulator fine Synology a zillion dollars for screwing us” or “having a rival company sell us a tool to disenshittify the product we already have.”
Sometimes, though, those weaker measures really work. The hard drives that go in Synology’s devices are fully standardized, and the data you store on them is far more valuable than the box you put them in. People in the market for a new NAS box can mix and match any hard drive with any NAS enclosure…except Synology’s. That’s a huge commercial disadvantage for Synology, and the fact that you can throw away your Synology box and keep your drives, and that any drive will work with any product except Synology, means that people really were able to vote with their wallets. After a catastrophic drop in sales, Synology pushed another software update that restored its support for every kind of drive.
Of course, no one should ever buy a Synology product again. They have shown us what they do when they have power over you and no one should ever give them any power over their economic future.
Remember, for enshittification to work, the company has to have locked in its users and/or business customers. Making things worse without some kind of lock-in simply precipitates a mass departure.
Contrast Synology’ story with Chamberlain’s. Chamberlain is a private equity-backed monopolist, a garage door-opener company that bought all the other garage door-opener companies, and then withdrew support for Homekit, a standardized way for apps to connect to home automation systems (like garage door-openers):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain
When Chamberlain nuked Homekit support, they forced every owner of every Chamberlain garage door-opener (which is basically all garage door-openers) to switch to using Chamberlain’s app to open and close their garages, and now every time you open your garage, you have to look at seven ads.
Where Synology customers found it easy to switch vendors, Chamberlain customers are pretty stuck. Partly, that’s because Chamberlain owns all the competing brands, so they are all defective in the same way. But also, it’s because garage door-openers have to be installed, generally by a professional, and switching openers is an expensive, logistically complex operation. Of course, Chamberlain’s app — like all apps — is off-limits to rival companies that might reverse engineer it to block its apps, thanks to the anticircumvention law’s prohibition on reverse-engineering closed systems. Chamberlain’s openers are also closed systems, which prevents rivals from reverse-engineering them and restoring Homekit integration.
It’s interesting to compare Synology to other companies that enshittified, only to face a humiliating climbdown and blood on the C-suite’s walls. There was Unity, the giant game-development tool monopolist who decided to institute a “shared success” program where they’d put a tax on any game made with their product that did well. Interestingly, they didn’t want a “shared failure” program where they’d help defray the losses of any unsuccessful game made with their product. This is like the company who sold a hammer to the carpenter who renovated your kitchen demanding a share of the proceeds when you sell your house. After a mass revolt — including an industry-wide, very public switch to Unity’s competitors — the company fired its top managers and abandoned its rent-seeking efforts:
https://venturebeat.com/games/john-riccitiello-steps-down-as-ceo-of-unity-after-pricing-battle/
Then there’s Sonos, who remotely, irreversibly downgraded every smart speaker they’d ever sold in a doomed bid to create a unified app for the speakers and a set of headphones they were hoping to launch. The headphones fizzled, users were furious, and the CEO was defenstrated (but the speakers still don’t work):
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342179/sonos-ceo-patrick-spence-resignation-reason-app
And earlier this year, HP, the world’s most habitual and egregious enshittifier, climbed down from a breathtaking act of enshittification. The company announced that anyone calling for tech support would be put into a mandatory 15 minute hold, even if an operator was available to help out. The idea was to punish people for seeking help from a human, rather than making do with the much cheaper (and shittier) chatbot option.
People hated this and arose in towering fury, so intense that HP — world champion enshittifiers HP — backed down:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/22/ink-spattered-pitchforks/#racehorse-semen
If only every company could be punished for enshittifying this way. If only, say, Reddit had gotten a suitable beat-down after its shameful attacks on third-party apps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Reddit_API_controversy
But Reddit is hard to leave. We might hate is asshole management, but we like each other, and so we hold each other hostage there because we can’t agree on when to leave or where to go next.
Reddit enshittified, and so did Synology, and Synology’s outraged (former) customers made them pay for it. It’s one of those rare instances in which voting with your wallet actually works. Savor it.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/22/ink-spattered-pitchforks/#racehorse-semen
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/10/synology/#how-about-nah
