Enshittification

What enshittification is

Enshittification is the slow decline of online platforms, in which a service that began as genuinely useful gradually gets worse - squeezing the people and businesses who depend on it to extract more profit, until little of its original value is left. The Canadian writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the word in November 2022, and it struck such a chord that the American Dialect Society named it word of the year for 2023. It put a name to something many people felt but struggled to describe: the nagging sense that the search engines, social feeds and apps we once liked keep getting worse.

The key insight is that this decline is not random, and it is not simply the result of lazy founders or tired engineers. Enshittification describes a predictable, staged process - one that follows the same shape across very different platforms, because it is driven by the same underlying incentives.

The three stages of enshittification

Doctorow breaks the pattern into three stages. First, a new platform is good to its users, offering a genuinely useful service to draw them in and get them settled. Next, once those users are hard to prise loose, the platform starts treating them worse in order to please its business customers - the advertisers and sellers who pay the bills. Finally, having locked in those business customers too, it turns on them as well, clawing back as much value as it can for its shareholders. What is left is a husk: a service kept just barely good enough that no one quite leaves.

Facebook is the textbook case. Early on it promised a feed of exactly what your friends posted, and no snooping. Once people had built their networks there, that feed filled up with ads and paid-for posts while genuine updates from friends were quietly turned down. Advertisers and publishers were courted, then squeezed in turn. The same arc - useful, then extractive, then hollow - has played out on platform after platform.

Why platforms get away with it

The engine of enshittification is lock-in: the difficulty of leaving once you have committed. Part of this comes from network effects, where a service is valuable mainly because everyone else is already on it. Part comes from switching costs - the friends, followers, photos, reviews or history you would lose by walking away. Even when a platform turns sour, leaving can feel like a loss, and loss aversion means losses weigh on us more heavily than equivalent gains, so we stay put and grumble.

There is a collective-action trap on top of this. You might happily leave if everyone left with you, but coordinating that is hard, so each person waits and nobody moves. Meanwhile the platform can quietly re-tune what you see, leaning on dark patterns and opaque feeds to shift value its way without ever announcing that the deal has changed.

Most of these platforms also sit between two groups - users on one side, businesses on the other - and quietly hold each hostage to the other. You stay because the sellers, advertisers or publishers are there; they stay because you are. That mutual dependence is what lets a platform keep taking more from both sides at once, since each group is stuck for as long as the other is.

Why enshittification is happening now

If the temptation to squeeze users has always existed, why has so much of the internet soured at once? Doctorow’s answer is that the forces which used to keep companies in check have weakened together. Healthy competition once meant a worsening service would lose customers to a rival; regulators once punished bad behaviour; users could route around restrictions with tools of their own; and workers could refuse to build something they found shabby. As each of those constraints faded, the impulse to extract went unchecked. The point is structural rather than accidental - which also means it is something policy can change, not a fixed law of nature.

Enshittification beyond social media

The pattern reaches well past social networks. Search engines now place paid results above the most relevant ones. On large shopping platforms, sellers pay for prominence, so the first result is often far from the best deal - studies of Amazon suggest you may have to scroll a long way down to find the cheapest option. Ride-hailing and delivery apps adjust pay and prices in ways that are hard for drivers to predict. And as software creeps into everything, the same logic follows: cars that rent you features by the month, or devices locked to a single brand of refill. This shades into planned obsolescence, where products are built to wear out, slow down, or fall out of support so you are nudged into buying the next one. In each case the user gradually shifts from being the customer to being the product - a process of commodification in which your attention, data or habits become the thing being sold.

Why enshittification matters

Enshittification matters because it explains, in plain terms, why the digital tools we rely on keep letting us down, and who benefits when they do. It reframes a vague frustration as something specific and addressable: not “the internet is bad now,” but “value is being moved from us to shareholders, because we are too locked in to object.” Taken to its limit, this is what some call technofeudalism - an economy where a few platform owners control the digital territory everyone else must operate on, and charge rent for access.

It also ties the rest of this cluster together. An enshittified platform, chasing engagement above quality, is exactly the kind of place where AI slop thrives, since cheap filler is good enough to keep the attention economy ticking over. The same retention-at-any-cost logic shows up in AI sycophancy, where a product is tuned to keep you happy and engaged rather than to tell you the truth. Seen this way, slop and sycophancy are not separate problems but symptoms of the same incentive.

The hopeful part is that Doctorow does not treat enshittification as inevitable. Because it grew out of specific choices - weak competition rules, light regulation, locked-down devices - it can be pushed back by reversing them: enforcing competition law, restoring privacy and consumer protections, defending the right to repair and to move your data, and strengthening the hand of workers. Naming the pattern is the first step towards resisting it.

How to spot and resist enshittification

The clearest sign of enshittification is a service you once valued getting worse in ways that help the company rather than you - more ads, fewer of the posts or results you asked for, handy features removed and then sold back, and an exit made quietly harder than the entrance. When you notice that, it is worth asking what is keeping you there. A telling move is the quiet rule change - a fee that appears, a limit that tightens, a setting that resets to the company’s advantage - dressed up as an improvement. Each step is small enough to shrug off, which is exactly how the deal gets rewritten without anyone quite deciding to leave.

Pushing back is mostly about protecting your own freedom to leave. Be wary of platforms that work hard to trap your data, your audience or your purchases inside their walls. Where you can, favour tools that are open, that talk to other services, and that you could walk away from without losing everything. Support efforts around data portability and the right to repair, which chip away at lock-in. And treat any “free” service as one where you may be the product - useful while the incentives align, but only for as long as they do.