Enshittification is the word that finally explains why your favorite app keeps getting worse. Coined by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022, enshittification names the predictable three-stage decay of two-sided online platforms, first good to users, then squeezed to please business customers, then squeezed again to satisfy shareholders. The American Dialect Society named it 2023 Word of the Year. Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary gave it the same honor in 2024. Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, and Dictionary.com all added it. This guide explains how enshittification works, why it is almost impossible to avoid under current market conditions, which platforms are in which stage right now, and what you can actually do about it as a user.
Table of Contents
- What is enshittification
- The three stages of enshittification
- Why enshittification happens (and why it feels inevitable)
- Real-world enshittification examples in 2026
- Five signs your favorite platform is being enshittified
- What you can do as a user
- Frequently asked questions
What is enshittification
Enshittification describes a specific pattern of platform decay. A digital service starts by attracting users with a genuinely useful free or cheap offering. Once users are locked in by switching costs, network effects, or data gravity, the platform starts squeezing those users to benefit advertisers, sellers, or other business customers. Once those business customers are locked in too, the platform squeezes them as well to extract maximum value for shareholders. The user experience degrades at every step. So does the experience for the advertisers and sellers who built their businesses on top of the platform.
The word itself is blunt on purpose. It joins the prefix en- (“cause to be”), the vulgarism, and the suffix -ification (“the process of making”). Doctorow chose the term precisely because academic language like “platform decay” or “digital market concentration” fails to convey the lived experience. You do not feel platform decay when you try to cancel a streaming service. You feel something shorter and ruder.
Who coined the term
Cory Doctorow published the first essay using the term in November 2022 on his blog Pluralistic. He developed the argument through 2023 in Wired, Financial Times, and a series of lectures including the McLuhan Lecture at the Internet Archive. His 2024 book The Internet Con and 2025 follow-up Enshittification expanded the framework.
Why the word stuck
Before enshittification, critics had no shared vocabulary for the feeling that every app was getting worse at the same time. Words like “monopoly,” “rent-seeking,” and “walled garden” were technically accurate but emotionally distant. Enshittification gave the feeling a name, and naming it made the pattern easier to recognize. Once you see it in one platform, you see it everywhere.
The three stages of enshittification
Doctorow’s model breaks enshittification into three phases. The transitions are rarely announced and often invisible until a user suddenly realizes the service they loved in 2018 is not the service they are paying for in 2026.
Stage 1: Good to users
The platform subsidizes the user experience with venture capital or profitable side businesses. Uber rides cost less than a taxi. Amazon had free two-day shipping and low prices. Google Search returned the result you wanted in the first three links. Facebook showed you posts from friends in chronological order. Content was organic. Moderation was reasonable. The product was the product, not the user.
Stage 2: Good to business customers
Once user growth stabilizes and switching away becomes painful, the platform turns to advertisers, sellers, publishers, or developers. The algorithm is tuned to reward paid placement. Free tiers get worse. Search results get polluted with sponsored content. Google Search started promoting ads, then promoting its own shopping results, then generating AI summaries that kept users on Google instead of sending them to sites. Amazon started charging sellers for every slot on a product page, to the point where the first 20 results for a search are paid placements.
Stage 3: Value extraction
Once the business customers are locked in too, the platform squeezes them. Facebook started downranking news publisher posts and throttling organic reach so pages had to pay to reach subscribers they had already earned. Amazon Prime Video added ads in January 2024 to a service users already paid for, then charged 2.99 a month to remove them. Reddit raised API prices in 2023 so high that third-party apps shut down. Users, business customers, and shareholders are all now extracting value from a service that no longer delivers much of it.
Why enshittification happens (and why it feels inevitable)
The reason enshittification appears almost everywhere at once is that four structural conditions of the modern internet all push in the same direction. Doctorow calls these the “four horsemen” of platform decay.
Switching costs and lock-in
Leaving a platform is hard. Years of chat history live in Messenger. Your whole professional network is on LinkedIn. Your playlists are in Spotify. Your photos are in Google. Interoperability was designed out of modern services on purpose. When switching costs are high, platforms can degrade quality without losing users, because leaving is more painful than staying.
Weak antitrust enforcement
From the 1980s until recently, regulators treated market concentration as fine if consumer prices stayed low. Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp. Google bought YouTube, DoubleClick, and Waze. Amazon bought Whole Foods, MGM, and dozens of smaller rivals. When no credible competitor exists, the incentive to keep users happy collapses.
End-of-growth pressure
Once a platform hits every possible user, growth must come from squeezing more revenue per user. Netflix cannot sign up a billion more customers, so it cracks down on password sharing and adds an ad tier. Spotify cannot expand its user base infinitely, so it raises prices, cuts royalties to independent artists, and pushes AI-generated tracks. The same logic applies to every mature platform.
The “twiddling” problem
Because modern platforms run on software, every parameter can be adjusted continuously. Ad load, algorithmic ranking, commission rates, search weighting, recommendation mix, notification frequency. Doctorow calls this “twiddling.” A platform can ship ten small changes a week that each shift value slightly from users to the platform. Individually they are invisible. Cumulatively they transform the service. This is also a core mechanic behind the dead internet theory, which describes how automated content and engagement now dominate many feeds.
Real-world enshittification examples in 2026
Every major consumer platform currently shows enshittification symptoms at some stage. Here are the clearest case studies as of 2026.
Google Search
Stage 3. Users report the service is noticeably worse than it was five years ago. The first screen is often 60 percent ads, 30 percent AI Overview, and 10 percent organic results. Independent publishers have lost between 30 and 70 percent of their referral traffic since 2023 as AI summaries keep users on google.com. The 2024 antitrust ruling in the United States declared Google a monopolist in search, but remedies remain unresolved.
Amazon Prime
Stage 3. The marketplace now prioritizes paid placements over organic relevance. Prime Video introduced ads in January 2024 on content users had paid to watch ad-free. Prime shipping windows have widened. Counterfeit products persist because Amazon earns margin on them regardless. The 2025 Federal Trade Commission 2.5 billion dollar settlement over Prime dark patterns confirmed what users had felt for years.
Stage 2 to 3 transition. The 2023 API pricing changes shut down third-party apps like Apollo and Sync, ending the user experience that had attracted power users for 15 years. Moderators, the unpaid labor that keeps subreddits functional, organized blackouts in June 2023. The post-IPO Reddit has leaned into AI training data licensing, making user content the primary product while users themselves get a worsening feed.
Instagram and Facebook
Stage 3. Instagram abandoned the chronological feed of friends years ago for an algorithm that mostly shows paid posts and recommended Reels. Facebook started downranking news publisher posts in 2021, then cut off news entirely in Canada and Australia rather than pay for it. BeReal briefly showed what a non-enshittified Instagram could look like in 2022, which is exactly why, as we covered in BeReal versus Instagram, Meta cloned the feature and absorbed it.
Spotify
Late Stage 2. Spotify has raised prices three times since 2023 while reducing royalties to independent artists. The service now demotes songs with under 1,000 annual streams. Profile hijacking by AI-generated tracks has reached a point where jazz artists find new albums in their catalog they did not record, a pattern we covered in detail. Users pay more for a worse catalog. Artists earn less. Shareholders get the margin.
X (formerly Twitter)
Aggressive Stage 3. The 2022 acquisition compressed years of enshittification into months. Verification became pay-to-play. API access ended for most researchers and third-party developers. The algorithm now prioritizes Premium users regardless of engagement. Link posts are suppressed because external links lead users off platform.
The AI-as-a-service wave
2023 to 2026 introduced a new class of platforms following the same pattern. ChatGPT launched free, then added Plus at 20 dollars a month, then Pro at 200 dollars, with the cheaper tiers getting worse model access and tighter rate limits. OpenAI killing Sora after six months of burning 15 million dollars a day showed how quickly the economics force cutbacks. Running AI locally on your own hardware is increasingly the only way to guarantee consistent performance.
Five signs your favorite platform is being enshittified
Use this quick diagnostic to spot enshittification before it becomes severe. If three or more of these apply to a service you use daily, you are watching it happen in real time.
- The paid tier gets features the free tier used to have. Ad-free viewing was free. Now it costs extra. Unlimited storage was free. Now it is throttled. Features migrate upward as lock-in deepens.
- The algorithm shows you less of what you asked for. You followed a creator. You subscribed to a channel. You friended a person. Now their posts appear less often than sponsored content from accounts you have never heard of.
- Canceling is harder than signing up. The dark pattern Doctorow calls the “roach motel.” You joined in two clicks. Leaving takes a phone call, a cancellation web form buried five menus deep, and a retention offer you did not request.
- The product changes without announcement. A feature you relied on disappears. A pricing tier silently shifts. The API documentation quietly updates. You notice only when something breaks.
- Complaints stop getting answered. Support becomes a chatbot. The chatbot becomes a FAQ. The FAQ becomes dead links. Real humans are reserved for paying customers, and even then are hard to reach.
What you can do as a user
Individual action cannot reverse structural enshittification. Platform economics and weak antitrust do that. But you can reduce your personal exposure, build switching options, and support services with business models less prone to decay.
Reduce data gravity
The more data lives inside a single platform, the harder leaving becomes. Export chat histories, photos, playlists, and contacts regularly. Use standards-based formats when possible. Treat cloud-only storage as rented, not owned. Your browser’s built-in password manager is a classic example of data gravity, which is exactly why we recommend using a dedicated password manager that exports to standard formats.
Pay for services that do not have ads
Free services must eventually enshittify because someone has to pay. Paid services can also enshittify, but the pressure is weaker and the user has more leverage. Kagi for search, Fastmail for email, Bear for notes, and most open-source alternatives work on subscription or one-time-purchase models without advertising. You still lose something if they change. You lose less, more slowly.
Support interoperable and self-hostable tools
Matrix, Mastodon, and Bluesky all rely on open protocols. RSS still works. Self-hosted Nextcloud replaces Google Drive. Obsidian stores notes in plain Markdown files you own. The friction is real. So is the freedom. Every protocol-first choice reduces a future switching cost.
Recognize manipulation when you see it
The same tricks used to maximize ad views are used to maximize retention, cancellation friction, and upsell conversion. Infinite scroll, variable rewards, loss aversion framing, and dark patterns in checkout all share the same playbook. The man who invented infinite scroll publicly regrets it for a reason. Knowing the mechanics does not immunize you, but it slows the pull.
Be skeptical of AI-powered “helpers”
AI assistants embedded inside platforms are now the fastest enshittification vector. They surface what the platform wants you to see, not what you asked for. A recent Stanford study showed that chatbot sycophancy actively degrades user judgment. When the AI is also the sales channel, its advice cannot be trusted.
Frequently asked questions
Is enshittification a real word?
Yes. Merriam-Webster, Cambridge Dictionary, and Dictionary.com all added enshittification as a standard entry. The American Dialect Society selected it as 2023 Word of the Year. Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary selected it as 2024 Word of the Year. It is informal and profane, but it is fully lexicalized.
Who invented the word enshittification?
Canadian science fiction writer and journalist Cory Doctorow coined the term in a November 2022 post on his blog Pluralistic. He developed the framework in a series of essays and lectures through 2023 to 2025, and in two books, The Internet Con (2024) and Enshittification (2025).
Can enshittification be reversed?
Rarely, and only when competitive pressure or regulation forces a change. Historical examples include Microsoft after the 2001 antitrust ruling and Apple unlocking some App Store alternatives in the European Union after the 2024 Digital Markets Act. Most enshittified platforms either keep declining or get replaced by a newer competitor that starts the cycle over.
Is enshittification the same as capitalism?
No. Doctorow is clear that enshittification is a specific pattern enabled by modern internet conditions. Network effects, high switching costs, weak antitrust, and the ability to twiddle parameters continuously without transparency. Pre-internet businesses could also decline in quality, but usually slower, more visibly, and under more competitive pressure.
Which platforms have not been enshittified yet?
Services run as non-profits (Wikipedia, Signal, Mozilla Firefox), open protocols (Mastodon, Matrix, RSS, email), small paid indie tools (Bear, Kagi, HEY), and self-hosted tools (Nextcloud, Obsidian, Home Assistant). None are immune. All are harder to enshittify because they either lack the business model pressure or can be forked and replaced if they try.
The bottom line
Enshittification is not a conspiracy. It is the predictable outcome of a business environment that rewards short-term value extraction, tolerates monopoly, and makes user switching expensive. Every platform you use is somewhere on the curve. Recognizing the pattern does not stop it, but it helps you choose where to spend attention, money, and data in a way that leaves you less trapped when the current services go through Stage 3. The internet you had in 2012 is not coming back. The choices you make about where to rebuild it are up to you.
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