Cory Doctorow coined this term a while back and even wrote a book about it.

“Enshittification” is the gradual degradation of online platforms, where services initially provide high-quality, free, or cheap value to attract users, then pivot to prioritize advertisers, and finally extract all value for themselves, ultimately harming both users and business customers.

I love this term.

It describes so much of what I’ve seen in tech over my lifetime. Seriously great products and processes enabled by the “world wide web” of the mid to late 90’s, eventually to succumb to ads, paywalls, popups, and “nickel and dime” schemes in both physical and online products.

If you’ve ever wondered by Outlook is now a subscription service instead of a standalone product that you’d buy in CompUSA, I mean, Best Buy? This is why.

I don’t run ads here, partly in protest to this trend.

My websites that I run are served very efficiently from blog storage and I refuse to run ads on them that hinder your experience reading them. It’s my response to this general market trend in hopes that I can align myself with old men yelling at clouds, smelling new books in a local book store, and oogling over some LP’s.

There are stages to “enshittification”.

Cory describes “enshittification” in 3 stages.

Stage 1: Good to Users. Platforms use subsidies or excellent service to attract a large user base, creating a “lock-in” effect.

Think about how Facebook gradually took over from MySpace, for example.

The requirement to have a college email address made it feel more exclusive compared to MySpace, which additionally drew people in.

I was in college right as it was coming online, and everyone else had a Facebook account, why wouldn’t I, a freshman in college, use it? Besides, MySpace felt so high school.

And with all of your friends and family on Facebook, why would you leave?

Stage 2: Abuse Users for Business Customers. Once users are locked in, the platform degrades the user experience to favor business customers (advertisers, sellers) to generate revenue.

At some point in 2009, I got addicted to a dumb game on Facebook called “Mafia Wars”. I even created a second Facebook account to try to build up my “mafia” more quickly.

It “gamified” my time, which meant that I had to log in every few hours to perform some actions, then wait for reset timers to cool down.

Later, I got blasted by Farmville requests from other friends (and family). I even enjoyed the Simpsons: Tapped Out for a while, too (which was admittedly hilarious in some ways).

Little did we realize that ads were creeping in, and microtransactions were happening so that we wouldn’t have to wait as long for those timers to reset.

Besides, what’s a few dollars for a game you spend a lot of time on?

It’s just so satisfying to have that one special edition character roaming around your virtual Springfield. At least that’s what the dopamine told me.

We as human beings started to become the product for our technical shareholders.

Stage 3: Abuse Business Customers for Themselves. Finally, the platform squeezes the business customers, taking nearly all the value for shareholders and executives, leaving a broken, less usable platform.

Enter today. What do we see most at Facebook these days? I’ll share what I see:

  • Posts shown to me that encourage me to get angry, because I’m more likely to interact with them.
  • Misorganized posts and threads that make context absolutely devoid of meaning, creating content that’s shouted into the void.
  • Ads that are disguised like posts and show up when scrolling anywhere.
  • Feed algorithms that sometimes deprioritize the things I’d like to see.
  • Occasionally something good, usually over in the Marketplace side of things.
  • etc.

There was even legal action in this space, specifically the Cambridge-Analytica data scandal, where political campaigns were altered due to the way these algorithms worked, often in nefarious and orchestrated ways.

Having BMW charge you per-month to use your own heated seats was a big step into the world of enshittification, too.

But since law takes longer to litigate than “innovation” iterates, we are regularly left behind by the drastic and ill-conceived actions of a few tech companies. They pocket the money and run, then broker a reduced set of fines that usually don’t reflect the real impact they’ve left on us.

So anyway…

Probably the best way to read / learn about “enshittification” is directly from the source on YouTube, at CloudFest 2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-fC-2Bpo

He even went on the Daily Show, which was hilarious and amazing to watch.

Up next, Norway?

I wanted to mention it in today’s blog post because even Norway has gotten in on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

It’s a wonderful, tongue-in-cheek take on that whole situation we face ourselves in today. Give it a watch!

Perhaps with enough time, we all can refocus our attention away from the tech billionaries running the show now and back to ourselves, our friends, our family, and our own lives.

One can dream!