OpinionIf you've ever felt like your favorite platform isn't what it used to be, you're not imagining things. There's actually a term for this phenomenon: enshittification. Coined by journalist and activist Cory Doctorow in 2022, enshittification describes the predictable lifecycle of digital platforms as they gradually degrade their service quality in pursuit of maximum profit extraction. It's a pattern we've seen repeat itself across the internet, and understanding it helps explain why so many of our online experiences feel worse than they used to.
Enshittification follows a three-stage pattern that Doctorow identified as almost inevitable for platforms operating under certain economic conditions:
Stage One: Be Good to Users
In the beginning, platforms are generous to their users. They offer free services, useful features, minimal advertising, and genuine value. The platform needs to attract users, build a network effect, and establish itself as indispensable. During this honeymoon phase, venture capital funding subsidizes the user experience. Everything feels great because the platform is optimizing for growth, not profit.
Stage Two: Abuse Users to Be Good to Business Customers
Once the platform has locked in a substantial user base and achieved market dominance, it pivots. Now it starts to abuse its users to court business customers: advertisers, publishers, content creators, or anyone willing to pay for access to the captured audience. User experience degrades as the platform prioritizes paying customers. Features get paywalled, ads multiply, algorithms change to favor paid content, and organic reach plummets.
Stage Three: Abuse Everyone
Finally, having locked in both users and business customers, the platform abuses everyone. It claws back value from business customers while continuing to degrade the user experience. Fees increase, algorithmic visibility becomes a paid privilege, terms of service become more extractive, and the platform uses its monopolistic position to squeeze every possible dollar from both sides of its marketplace. At this point, the platform has become actively hostile to the very people who made it valuable in the first place.
Enshittification isn't usually the result of individual malice or incompetence. It's a structural problem rooted in how digital platforms are financed and governed.
Most platforms begin with venture capital funding that expects exponential returns. Investors aren't satisfied with modest, sustainable profits; they want hockey-stick growth curves and eventual monopoly positions. This creates immense pressure to prioritize short-term metrics, user acquisition, and market dominance over long-term sustainability or user satisfaction.
Additionally, these platforms often benefit from what economists call "network effects." The value of Facebook, Twitter, or Amazon increases as more people use them, which creates natural monopolies. Once a platform achieves dominance, switching costs for users become prohibitively high. Where else would you go when all your friends are on Facebook, all the sellers are on Amazon, or all the videos are on YouTube? This lock-in effect allows platforms to degrade service without losing their user base.
Finally, regulatory capture and the absence of interoperability standards mean users can't easily take their data, connections, and history to competing platforms. You're not just locked into Facebook's service; you're locked into your entire social graph, years of photos, and accumulated digital identity.
Amazon began with a radical focus on customer satisfaction. Prices were competitive, selection was vast, reviews were genuine, and shipping was fast. Jeff Bezos famously kept an empty chair in meetings to represent the customer.
In stage two, Amazon shifted focus to marketplace sellers and advertisers. The company realized it could extract more value by becoming a platform for third-party sellers rather than just a retailer. Today, searching for products on Amazon increasingly surfaces sponsored listings, knock-off products, and sellers who've gamed the system. The first page of results is often dominated by ads, and distinguishing genuine reviews from fake ones requires detective work.
Now in stage three, Amazon squeezes both sellers and customers. Sellers face increasing fees, mandatory participation in programs like Fulfilled by Amazon, and competition from Amazon's own private label products that use seller data. Customers endure a degraded shopping experience filled with sponsored content, confusing search results, and the constant upselling of Amazon Prime and other services. The platform that once obsessed over customers now optimizes for extraction.
Facebook launched promising to connect people with their friends and family. The early platform was chronological, ad-free, and genuinely useful for maintaining relationships. It grew explosively because it delivered real value.
Stage two began when Facebook pivoted to advertising and opened its platform to businesses and publishers. The chronological feed disappeared, replaced by an algorithmic feed that prioritized "engagement." Publishers were courted with promises of reach, only to have that reach throttled once they became dependent on Facebook traffic. Users saw less content from friends and more from advertisers and publishers.
Today, Facebook abuses both users and publishers. The News Feed is a chaotic mix of ads, sponsored content, suggested posts from pages you don't follow, and the occasional update from actual friends. Publishers who built audiences on Facebook now must pay to reach the same people who explicitly chose to follow them. Users experience an increasingly manipulative platform designed to maximize "engagement" (often through outrage and division) rather than genuine connection. Privacy erosion, psychological manipulation through algorithmic feeds, and the platform's refusal to adequately address misinformation represent the final stage of extractive behavior toward everyone.
Twitter began as a simple, powerful tool for public conversation. It was where news broke, communities formed, and public discourse happened in real-time. The platform was relatively unmonetized, which paradoxically made it more valuable as a space for authentic communication.
Stage two saw Twitter struggle to monetize while maintaining user experience. Advertising increased, but Twitter never achieved the advertising dominance of Facebook. The platform experimented with algorithmic timelines and promoted tweets, gradually degrading the chronological experience users valued.
The acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022 accelerated enshittification dramatically. Verification became a paid feature divorced from actual identity verification, making it harder to identify authentic accounts. The algorithm was changed to boost paying subscribers, degrading the experience for everyone else. Content moderation collapsed, leading to increased harassment and misinformation. Rate limits were imposed on reading tweets. Third-party apps that users loved were killed. The platform, rebranded as X, now represents a case study in enshittification on fast-forward—extracting value while offering increasingly less to both regular users and creators.
Google Search once delivered remarkably clean, relevant results. The original appeal was the stark white page with a search box—no clutter, no manipulation, just good results based on PageRank and relevance.
Stage two brought the gradual creep of advertising disguised as results. Google introduced AdWords, initially clearly marked but increasingly designed to blend with organic results. Shopping results, map results, and knowledge panels began crowding out traditional web links. Google prioritized its own properties (YouTube, Maps, Shopping) in results.
Currently, Google Search increasingly feels like an ad delivery system that occasionally provides useful information. The first screen of results often contains zero organic web links—just ads, shopping results, "people also ask" boxes, and featured snippets. Google has been accused of promoting low-quality content from sites that play the SEO game while demoting smaller, independent websites. The recent integration of AI-generated summaries threatens to eliminate website traffic altogether while still relying on those websites' content. Users searching for information face a gauntlet of commercial interests, while websites that create the content Google summarizes receive less traffic and revenue.
YouTube began as a genuine video-sharing platform where creators could build audiences and express themselves freely. Early YouTube was chaotic, creative, and creator-friendly. The platform provided tools, hosting, and discovery.
Monetization marked stage two. YouTube introduced the Partner Program, sharing ad revenue with creators. This seemed creator-friendly, but it gave YouTube tremendous power over creator livelihoods. Gradually, the platform changed algorithms to favor watch time over creativity, implemented increasingly restrictive content policies to appease advertisers, and demonetized videos arbitrarily. Creators built careers on the platform only to find the rules constantly changing beneath them.
Today, YouTube squeezes both creators and viewers. Creators face algorithmic mystery meat that determines their visibility, arbitrary demonetization, and pressure to optimize for the algorithm rather than their audience. YouTube Premium and channel memberships allow the platform to extract money directly from users while reducing the share given to creators. Viewers endure aggressive advertising, including unskippable ads and the constant upselling of YouTube Premium. The platform uses its monopoly position in online video to force increasingly worse deals on everyone involved.
Enshittification persists because the incentives driving platform capitalism are fundamentally misaligned with user welfare. Several factors enable and accelerate the pattern:
Lack of Competition: Antitrust enforcement has been weak, allowing platforms to achieve and maintain monopolistic positions. Network effects create natural barriers to entry, and existing platforms acquire potential competitors before they can threaten dominance.
No Interoperability: Users can't easily move their data, relationships, and history between platforms. Imagine if you could use any email client to send messages to anyone else regardless of their email provider—that's interoperability. Most social platforms deliberately prevent this, creating lock-in.
Regulatory Capture: Platforms have successfully lobbied against regulation that would protect users or enable competition. Section 230 protection, weak privacy laws, and resistance to data portability requirements all enable extractive behavior.
Surveillance Capitalism: The business model itself is extractive. Free services are funded through data collection and behavioral manipulation. The product isn't the service; it's the users' attention and data.
Short-Term Incentives: Public markets and venture capital both reward short-term growth and extraction over long-term sustainability. Quarterly earnings reports incentivize platforms to continuously squeeze more value from their position.
Doctorow argues that enshittification isn't inevitable if we change the structural conditions that enable it. Potential solutions include:
Interoperability Requirements: Mandating that platforms allow users to move their data and maintain connections across services would reduce lock-in and enable competition.
Stronger Antitrust Enforcement: Breaking up monopolies and preventing anti-competitive acquisitions would create genuine alternatives for users.
Privacy Regulation: Strong privacy laws would limit the data collection that funds surveillance capitalism and enables manipulative algorithms.
Worker and User Power: Allowing platform workers to organize and giving users democratic input into platform governance could align incentives with user welfare.
Alternative Ownership Models: Cooperative platforms, public utilities, or non-profit models might avoid the extractive pressures of venture-capital-funded growth.
Individual action is limited when facing monopolistic platforms, but some strategies can help:
Support decentralized and federated alternatives like Mastodon, which can't be enshittified by a single corporate owner. Use platforms that respect users through sustainable business models rather than surveillance and extraction. Advocate for regulation that protects user interests. Choose open-source and interoperable tools when possible.
Most importantly, recognize that when a platform is free, heavily funded, and growing rapidly, enshittification is likely coming. The early generous treatment isn't altruism—it's the bait. Understanding the pattern helps us make more informed choices about which platforms to invest our time and data in.
Enshittification explains why so many digital platforms that once felt revolutionary and empowering now feel extractive and hostile. It's not just nostalgia making us remember the "old internet" fondly—these platforms genuinely were better before their operators decided to cash in on their monopoly positions.
The pattern is so predictable because it's structural, not personal. As long as platforms operate under venture capital funding, pursue monopoly positions, and face minimal regulation or competition, they will continue to follow the same arc: be good to users, abuse users for business customers, then abuse everyone.
Breaking this cycle requires more than individual choice or platform goodwill. It requires structural changes to how digital platforms are regulated, funded, and governed. Until then, we can expect each new promising platform to eventually follow the same depressing trajectory from innovation to extraction.
The question isn't whether the platforms we currently enjoy will eventually enshittify—it's how long we have before they do, and whether we'll build alternatives that break the pattern before it's too late.
