If you’ve spent any meaningful time online in the past decade, you’ve probably felt it: platforms you once loved gradually becoming worse. More ads. More paywalls. More manipulation. Worse search results. Less control.
This phenomenon has a name: “enshittification.”
The term was popularized by writer and activist Cory Doctorow to describe the lifecycle of many digital platforms. His argument is straightfoward: platforms start by being good to users, then when growth is not anymore possible in numbers of users, they shift to value extraction as much as possible for themselves, by making their services worse for everyone.
But enshittification didn’t appear overnight. It’s the result of structural incentives built into the modern capitalist economy.
Let’s try to unpack how we got here.
When platforms are young, their primary goal is growth. They need users.
So they design experiences that are fast, free, and delightful.
Think about the early days of:
During this stage, users are the product being cultivated. Platforms burn investor money to grow fast, optimizing everything for adoption.
It works. The platform becomes dominant.
Once a platform has captured a massive user base, something changes.
The company now has market power.
Suddenly, the platform becomes a gatekeeper between businesses and users.
This is where the platform begins shifting value away from users and toward advertisers, sellers, and partners.
Examples include:
On Instagram, creators noticed that organic reach collapsed as the platform pushed paid promotion.
On Amazon, many sellers now must pay for ads just to appear in search results.
The platform still works, but the user experience begins to degrade.
The final phase is where enshittification becomes impossible to ignore.
At this stage, the platform no longer primarily serves users or business partners. Instead, it begins aggressively extracting value for itself. Because the platform has already locked in its ecosystem, it can now squeeze every side of the market.
Users experience worsening interfaces, more ads, intrusive tracking, and algorithmic manipulation. Meanwhile, businesses, creators, and developers face increasing fees, declining reach, and stricter platform rules.
This is possible because leaving the platform has become difficult. The social networks, audiences, and marketplaces people depend on are already embedded in it.
Examples of this phase can be seen across the tech industry:
In this stage, the platform essentially taxes its own ecosystem. It charges users with attention, businesses with fees, and creators with visibility restrictions.
Over time, the experience becomes worse for nearly everyone involved. But because the platform has become deeply integrated into everyday digital life, users and businesses often feel they have no viable alternatives.
The result is a degraded but highly profitable ecosystem: one optimized not for quality, but for extraction.
Enshittification is not just bad product design. It’s the natural outcome of the system these platforms find themselves in: capitalism.
At least 3 strong structural forces drive it.
Most large tech platforms are funded by venture capital.
Investors don’t want stable businesses. They want exponential returns.
A platform cannot simply be “good.” It must grow revenue every quarter.
Once user growth slows, the only option left is monetization extraction. As the pace of growth demanded simply cannot be fulfilled.
Platforms benefit from network effects: the more people use them, the more valuable they become.
This creates lock-in.
You can’t easily leave:
Even if the platform gets worse, users stay because the social graph is trapped there.
Many tech markets, as all markets tend toward monopolies or oligopolies.
Without real competition, companies face little pressure to maintain quality. If a worthy alternative arises in the horizon, it is quickly acquired by these companies.
I wish I had a silver bullet for this, but instead I only have a small list of things that could help, a lot of wishful thinking in my brain.
In short, governments need to intervene.
The Digital Markets Act in the European Union aims to limit the power of large gatekeeper platforms. It’s by far not enough, but it is a start.
So far I haven’t seen any big movements from politicians and countries achieving big things against such big techs, and understadably so. It is impossible to negotiate against corporations that have already accumulated such amount of money and power.
One solution is forcing platforms to become interoperable. Either by popular pressure or regulations.
Imagine if you could leave WhatsApp but still message your contacts.
This would dramatically reduce company lock-ins for their SAAS subscriptions, and re-enable competitivity of quality of service.
Some technologists advocate decentralized social networks like Mastodon and Bluesky or protocols like ActivityPub and fediverse.
These systems distribute control rather than concentrating it in a single company. Supporting the development and emancipation of such system should be on everyone’s to-do list.
Ultimately, the era of enshittification raises a fundamental question:
Should the infrastructure of our digital lives be controlled by profit-maximizing platforms?
The internet is no longer just a tool.
It’s where we socialize, learn, organize politically, and build communities.
If the incentives remain the same, the cycle of enshittification will likely repeat again and again.
The challenge now is not just building better technology.
It’s building better systems around it.