Have you ever gone to a beloved website only to find it’s now so clogged with ads that you can barely see the content? Or is your business now paying way more for a worse software product, but you can’t afford to switch services? Turns out, there’s a term for that experience.
Cory Doctorow did us an invaluable service when he came up with the word ”enshittification,” which is also the title of his book. It is a crude yet brilliant term describing how so many of the online services and software that used to improve our lives have been systematically degraded.
Enshittification follows a clear trajectory. Platforms don’t start awful. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. They begin by being genuinely useful and even delightful before descending into mediocrity.
What Is Enshittification?
Enshittification is the systematic degradation of online platforms and digital services. It follows a three-stage cycle: first, a platform provides value to attract users; second, it exploits those users to attract business customers; and finally, it squeezes those business customers to maximize profits for shareholders, resulting in a broken user experience defined by ads, high fees and lock-in.
How Enshittification Happens
Enshittification follows a well-worn path. It might be a news website becoming unreadable because of pop-up advertising or a streaming service splitting a season of your favorite show across multiple months or a dating app offering a free version that’s designed to be near useless. Whatever the form, the process is familiar.
In the beginning, the creators feel passionate about solving a real problem. Early adopters spread the word because the service actually improves their lives. Growth happens organically because the product earns it.
Once the product has grown a significant user base, it’s time to bring in revenue. The changes required for this feel reasonable: maybe a few sponsored posts, some promoted content, but nothing too intrusive. Users grumble slightly but stick around because the core value proposition remains intact.
Before long, the need for greater growth and bigger profit results in business users getting squeezed. The company charges more for the same service, demanding higher fees for basic features, reducing organic search visibility unless users pay up. Business users comply because they’re dependent on the platform now.
Ultimately, once companies have saturated their market, eliminated their competition and locked in their users, we reach peak enshittification. Regular users battle ads, spam and algorithmic manipulation while enterprises find themselves paying more for an inferior service. The platform burns through goodwill like a drunk billionaire burns through cash. But by now, everyone is so locked in that they can’t easily leave.
Unfortunately, this is not a story limited to technology businesses. It’s a broader growth trajectory of companies across our current economic system.
Social Media Is the Clearest Example of Enshittification
Let’s examine Facebook — or Meta, as the sprawling behemoth is called now — because it’s the perfect enshittification specimen. Remember when you could post a photo and your friends would actually see it? Or when your timeline showed content from people you chose to follow, in chronological order?
Those days are long gone. Facebook’s organic reach has plummeted so dramatically that pages often struggle to reach even 5 percent of their followers without paying for the privilege. When Procter and Gamble cut $200 million from their digital advertising budget, they discovered that their reach actually increased by 10 percent. They were literally paying Facebook to make their marketing less effective.
I’ve experienced this kind of corporate mugging personally. At Container Solutions, I used to publish articles about artificial intelligence, and they’d get thousands of hits organically. But then my organic impressions dropped through the floor. Suddenly, after the traffic collapse, LinkedIn started trying to sell me ads to boost those same management posts. Funny how that works.
Yet LinkedIn advertising got me precisely nowhere: no return, no increased engagement, no meaningful metrics. Just vaguely increased amounts of something called “reach.”
Social media platforms seem so desperate for engagement that they now prioritize 60-second videos over thoughtful content, flooding feeds with whatever keeps people scrolling longest. The algorithm doesn’t care if you’re learning something valuable or connecting meaningfully with others. It cares about watch time, click-through rates and advertising revenue.
Enshittification Beyond Social Media
Don’t imagine this is limited to social media platforms. Enshittification is metastasizing across most digital services.
Streaming services started with a beautiful promise: pay one monthly fee, watch everything with no ads. Netflix was going to kill traditional television with its superior model. Fast-forward to today, and we’re paying for multiple streaming subscriptions, each with increasingly fragmented content libraries.
And guess what’s creeping back? Advertisements. Amazon Prime now serves ads unless you pay extra to remove them. Netflix offers cheaper tiers with ads. We’ve recreated cable television, except more expensive and more fragmented.
Even worse, these services are manipulating content to maximize subscription retention. Series that could easily be released as complete seasons are now stretched across multiple months, forcing viewers to maintain subscriptions longer. Attention-optimization algorithms are making decisions in the writers’ room in service of subscription retention rather than storytelling logic. The medium itself is being enshittified.
It’s not just an issue for the entertainment industry. How is your online shopping experience these days? Is what we’ve allowed to happen to our downtowns and main streets worth the service we now get? Online platforms initially offered better prices and convenience, driving many physical retailers out of business. Then, with the competition diminished, they started raising prices, reducing service quality and flooding their platforms with low-quality goods from random sellers.
Can Enshittification Be Prevented?
Preventing enshittification is difficult but not impossible. One approach is to align governance structures with long-term user interests rather than short-term shareholder returns. Companies that remain privately controlled, cooperatively owned or governed by mission-driven foundations sometimes have more freedom to resist aggressive monetization. For example, the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia remains one of the internet’s greatest success stories precisely because it was structured from the beginning to resist commercial pressure, and it encourage volunteers to contribute to its project. Likewise, open-source projects like Linux follow a similar pattern. They’re not trying to satisfy shareholders — they’re trying to satisfy users. The more people use Linux, the more developers contribute to improving it
Similarly, some digital services maintain strong reputations by emphasizing community governance and transparency. Wikipedia has remained free of advertising despite being one of the most visited websites in the world. Its nonprofit status and volunteer-driven editorial model make it structurally different from ad-driven platforms.
Another strategy for mitigating enshittification is interoperability. If users can easily move their data and social connections between services, the lock-in that enables exploitative monetization becomes weaker. We must return to interoperability to give us the right to modify and improve the digital tools we use.
Regulation may also play a role. Historically, governments have intervened when dominant technologies risked creating monopolies or restricting competition. A classic example is the standardization of telecommunications networks. In the early 20th century, telephone systems were often incompatible with each other, reinforcing regional monopolies. Regulatory frameworks in several countries pushed toward interoperability and universal service, ensuring that any telephone could connect to the broader network. Given the complexity of today’s global digital platforms, there are a wide range of approaches to tackling the regulatory issues being taken in different countries/jurisdictions.
The Role of Users in Shaping Platforms
Ultimately, enshittification reflects a structural tension between user value and profit maximization. Addressing the problem involves acknowledging the power of the user. We can choose to structure our technology systems around collaboration rather than extraction, around user value rather than shareholder value and around long-term sustainability rather than quarterly growth.
The future won’t belong to the enshittified platforms or the shareholders who demand infinite growth from finite systems. It will belong to users who refuse to accept that any future is inevitable and who keep using technology to connect, create, and resist in ways that surprise and delight each other.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is enshittification?
Enshittification is a term coined by the writer Cory Doctorow that describes how the online services that used to improve our lives have been systematically degraded. Platforms begin by being genuinely useful but then descend into mediocrity and nuisance.
Why do online platforms get worse over time?
Often starting with high-minded ideals, enthusiastic startups face pressure for greater profit as the company grows. When the platform goes public or takes on serious investment, it needs growth, profit, and ever-increasing returns. The pattern is to start small and user-focused, scale rapidly, monetize aggressively, then squeeze out every penny possible from the product.
What are examples of enshittification?
Enshittification happens on platforms including social media, streaming services and news sites. Individual users get bombarded with ads, spam and algorithmic manipulation. Enterprise users pay more for worse service.
Does enshittification only affect tech companies?
No, enshittification is also visible in the entertainment industry, publishing and many other fields. It reflects the broader growth trajectory of companies in our current economic system.
