Enshittification

Created at
4 February 2025
Last modified
6 February 2025
Status
🌲 tree

Enshittification (wikipedia link) can loosely be defined as the process by which online platforms' quality gradually decreases over time. Wikipedia explains the process as:

Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

Cory Doctorow coined the term in late 2022, but the concept (under the more family friendly but less grabby name "platform decay") has been around before that.

Doctorow points to the enshittification process as a classic pattern of late-stage platform capitalism.

The pattern of enshittification, through the lens of my reading and experience, looks something like this:

  • Make a cool service that people want to use and offer it to users free / at a fraction of the cost.
    • This is made possible thanks to the venture capital model, in which investors pump money into startups in the hope that they'll one day become goliaths, and the millions invested turn into billions of stock value.
    • People will naturally jump on the bandwagon of this new and great service, because why not? We all want to be trendsetters.
  • Once users are locked in, offer those users (their info, their attention, hopefully their wallets) to your suppliers (or advertisers on your platform).
    • Users are now a captive audience, and you can safely degrade their experience to improve the benefits to your suppliers (and the money they will provide you).
  • Once both users and suppliers are locked in, shift to profit extraction, degrading the experience for both users and suppliers in order to maximise profits for shareholders.
  • Eventually reach a tipping point, and go out of business.

This is especially egregious with social networking, where the network effect ensures that users are locked into the platform until a mass exodus occurs.