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Enshittification is a business model in which digital platforms progressively degrade the experience for users and commercial partners after achieving market power, allowing the company to extract greater economic value.
The concept, coined by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow, describes a recurring pattern in which platforms initially prioritise users, later redirect value toward advertisers, sellers, or other business customers, and eventually extract value from almost everyone who depends on them.
Google Search, Facebook, Amazon, streaming services, social media networks, gig economy platforms, software subscriptions, and digital marketplaces all provide examples of the broader forces Doctorow identifies.
The process is closely associated with network effects, switching costs, platform dependency, declining competition, data accumulation, and shareholder pressure for continued financial growth. Artificial intelligence has intensified the problem by making it cheaper to produce enormous quantities of low-quality content, advertising, and automated engagement.
Enshittification therefore extends beyond poor product decisions or incompetent management. It describes an economic incentive structure in which a successful platform can become more profitable by making its underlying service progressively worse. Understanding that process helps explain why so many once-useful digital products increasingly feel cluttered, expensive, intrusive, and difficult to leave.
Key Takeaways
- Enshittification describes the progressive extraction of value from users and business customers by dominant platforms.
- Network effects and switching costs make declining services difficult for users and businesses to abandon.
- Advertising, subscriptions, fees, data extraction, and algorithmic manipulation can accelerate platform degradation.
- Artificial intelligence is increasing the volume of low-quality content competing for attention across digital platforms.
- Competition, interoperability, regulation, and user control can provide mechanisms for reversing the process.
The business logic behind enshittification
In the early 2000s, Google Search was widely regarded as a remarkably efficient gateway to the emerging web. Its interface was sparse, advertising was relatively limited, and search results generally provided a direct route to information.
Facebook initially offered a similarly uncomplicated proposition: connect with friends and family through a relatively clean social feed. Amazon built its reputation as an enormous online marketplace where consumers could compare products while independent merchants gained access to a rapidly expanding customer base.
The commercial logic was straightforward. A platform first had to become useful enough to attract users. Once it achieved scale, it could attract advertisers, merchants, developers, creators, and other commercial participants.
As more people joined, the platform became increasingly valuable because other people were already there. This created a network effect that made competitors less attractive and switching more difficult. The problem begins when the incentives change.
A company that has spent years building a user base may eventually discover that extracting more value from that established audience is easier and more financially rewarding than continuing to invest heavily in improving the underlying experience.
Advertising can become more aggressive. Subscription tiers can multiply. Fees can increase. Algorithms can prioritise content that generates engagement rather than content that users genuinely want. Search results can become increasingly commercialised. Features that were once included in the basic product can become paid extras.
This is the central idea behind enshittification.
Cory Doctorow coined the term in 2022, initially using it to describe the deterioration of major digital platforms. He subsequently developed the concept through essays and his 2025 book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. The term rapidly escaped the technology sector and became a broader description of declining consumer experiences in markets where companies possess substantial control.
The American Dialect Society selected “enshittification” as its 2023 Word of the Year, demonstrating how effectively the term captured a widespread public frustration with deteriorating digital services.
From user growth to platform extraction
Doctorow’s model can be understood as a progression rather than a single event.
During the first phase, a platform must make itself valuable to users. It may subsidise access, invest heavily in infrastructure, tolerate relatively generous terms for creators and sellers, and minimise intrusive monetisation. The objective is growth.
The strategy makes economic sense because digital platforms often have high fixed costs but relatively low marginal costs. Building a global search engine, social network, operating system, marketplace, or streaming infrastructure can require enormous investment, but serving another user does not necessarily require an equivalent increase in expenditure. Growth therefore becomes extraordinarily valuable.
Once a platform reaches critical mass, however, its relationship with users can change. Network effects create dependency. A person’s friends are on Facebook. Their purchase history and reviews are on Amazon.
Their search history and behavioural data are associated with Google. Their professional network may exist on LinkedIn. Their entertainment preferences are stored across streaming platforms. Their audience may be concentrated on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or another platform.
Leaving is possible, but leaving does not necessarily mean simply deleting an application. It can mean abandoning accumulated data, relationships, followers, reviews, professional contacts, purchasing history, reputation, or years of creative work. That creates switching costs.
A platform no longer needs to compete solely by offering the best experience. It can increasingly depend upon the difficulty of leaving.
When advertisers become more important than users
The second phase occurs when platforms begin redirecting value toward their commercial customers. Advertising is an obvious example. A social network can initially prioritise posts from friends and family because that is what makes the service useful. As the user base expands, however, the platform can insert advertisements, recommended content, sponsored posts, shopping features, and algorithmically selected material.
The economic incentive is powerful. A user’s attention has become inventory. The platform can therefore attempt to maximise the amount and value of attention it sells rather than maximising the quality of the experience that produces that attention. This distinction is fundamental.
A platform can be technically successful while becoming less useful to the person using it. If an algorithm increases time spent on a service, generates more advertising impressions, and increases revenue, the company can regard the change as successful even when users find the resulting experience more frustrating.
Facebook and Instagram illustrate this transformation. Their original social networking functions remain, but users increasingly encounter recommended videos, advertisements, commercial content, influencers, and algorithmically selected material alongside posts from people they deliberately chose to follow.
Google Search has undergone its own evolution. Search remains extraordinarily powerful, but commercial results, advertising, shopping modules, maps, featured snippets, knowledge panels, and AI-generated answers occupy increasing amounts of the search interface. The fundamental purpose of search remains intact, yet the relationship between the user, the publisher, and the platform has become substantially more complicated.
The issue is not that advertising or commercialisation is inherently illegitimate. Digital services require revenue. The concern is what happens when monetisation becomes sufficiently powerful that the platform’s commercial objectives begin to undermine the usefulness that originally attracted users.
The final stage: Everyone becomes the product
Doctorow’s third stage is the most severe. At this point, the platform has extracted considerable value from its users and business customers, but financial markets continue to demand growth. The company therefore begins searching for additional sources of revenue.
Users encounter higher prices, more advertisements, more aggressive recommendation systems, reduced functionality, intrusive prompts, and increasingly complex subscription structures. Businesses face higher commissions, greater advertising requirements, reduced organic reach, and more dependence on paid placement. The platform effectively begins extracting value from both sides.
Streaming services provide a particularly recognisable example. Netflix helped popularise the idea that consumers could access a large library of entertainment for a recurring monthly payment without traditional television advertising. The streaming market subsequently fragmented as studios launched competing services, raised prices, introduced advertising-supported tiers, restricted account sharing, and increasingly divided content among separate platforms.
Consumers gained greater control over when and how they watched television, but the economics of the market gradually began recreating several characteristics associated with traditional pay television.
The result is not necessarily identical to the old cable model, but the underlying frustration is familiar. Consumers can end up paying for several services to access content that was once available through a smaller number of subscriptions.
Amazon and the marketplace problem
Amazon demonstrates another dimension of enshittification because it operates simultaneously as a retailer, marketplace, logistics provider, advertising platform, technology company, and service provider.
The marketplace originally offered independent merchants access to millions of potential customers. Over time, however, sellers have become increasingly dependent upon Amazon’s advertising system, fulfillment infrastructure, ranking algorithms, commissions, policies, and account enforcement mechanisms.
For a merchant, visibility can become inseparable from paid advertising. A product can technically remain available without advertising while becoming practically invisible to potential customers. This creates a structural imbalance.
Amazon controls the marketplace while sellers compete within rules established by Amazon. The company can simultaneously earn money from product sales, marketplace fees, fulfilment services, advertising, subscriptions, and other services.
The problem is not necessarily that any individual fee or service is unreasonable. The broader issue is the accumulation of economic dependencies. A seller who relies heavily on Amazon may have limited practical ability to leave without losing access to a substantial customer base. That is precisely the kind of lock-in that makes enshittification economically sustainable.
Social media and the economics of attention
Social media provides perhaps the clearest demonstration of the phenomenon because the fundamental commodity is human attention. The earliest social networks had a relatively simple value proposition. Users created profiles, connected with people they knew, and shared material. As platforms matured, algorithmic ranking became increasingly important because chronological feeds could not efficiently manage enormous quantities of content.
Algorithms were therefore introduced to determine what users saw. That created a new opportunity and a new vulnerability. Once a platform controls the ranking system, it can determine which material receives attention. Content that provokes strong reactions can outperform content that is accurate, nuanced, or socially constructive because anger, outrage, fear, novelty, and controversy frequently generate interaction.
The result can be a feedback loop. Engagement produces data. Data improves targeting. Better targeting increases advertising value. Advertising revenue encourages greater optimisation for engagement. The algorithm becomes increasingly focused on measurable behaviour rather than the quality of the user’s experience.
This helps explain the proliferation of rage bait, sensationalism, repetitive short-form videos, low-effort viral content, and increasingly automated material across major platforms.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating the problem
Generative artificial intelligence has introduced a new dimension to enshittification. Producing mediocre digital content used to require substantial human effort. AI systems can now generate text, images, video, audio, product descriptions, advertisements, comments, summaries, and other material at extraordinary scale. That creates an economic paradox.
The cost of producing content has fallen dramatically, but the amount of human attention available to consume that content has not increased at the same rate. The result is an information glut.
Search engines, social networks, online marketplaces, and content platforms must increasingly distinguish valuable material from enormous quantities of automatically generated material. When their algorithms reward volume, engagement, or freshness without adequately measuring quality, AI can intensify the degradation.
This does not mean artificial intelligence itself causes enshittification. AI is a technology that can be used to improve products, reduce costs, enhance accessibility, and generate genuinely useful information. The problem emerges when companies use it primarily to maximise the quantity of magnetisable material while reducing the human and editorial investment required to maintain quality. In that environment, AI can become an accelerant for an existing economic model.
Enshittification beyond big tech
The concept has also become useful because similar incentives appear outside traditional technology companies. Gig economy platforms can initially attract workers with flexible schedules and attractive incentives before changing compensation structures once sufficient numbers of workers and customers depend on the service. Dating applications can provide free access while introducing increasingly sophisticated subscription tiers designed to monetise users seeking greater visibility or functionality.
Software companies have increasingly moved from perpetual licenses toward recurring subscriptions. Subscription economics can provide businesses with predictable revenue, but they can also create incentives to maintain recurring payments rather than deliver products that customers purchase once and own indefinitely.
Academic publishing offers another example of market concentration and dependency. Researchers need access to prestigious journals for professional advancement, while universities need access to large collections of scholarly publications. The resulting ecosystem can make publishers extremely difficult to bypass despite widespread dissatisfaction with prices and access restrictions.
These examples are not identical, and the term should not be applied so broadly that it loses analytical value. Enshittification is most persuasive when it identifies a specific combination of dependency, declining competition, extraction, and incentives rather than simply serving as another word for “bad product“.
Why consumers keep using products they dislike
One of the most important aspects of enshittification is that dissatisfaction does not necessarily produce abandonment. A consumer may complain about Instagram while continuing to use it because their friends are there. A seller may dislike Amazon’s fees while remaining because Amazon provides access to customers that would otherwise be difficult to reach. A business may resent software subscription costs while continuing to use the product because migrating thousands of files, employees, workflows, and integrations would be expensive. This is the power of switching costs.
Network effects make the problem even more difficult. A competing social network can create an excellent product, but its value remains limited if nobody else is using it. A competing marketplace can offer lower fees, but sellers will not necessarily migrate unless customers follow them.
This produces the classic chicken-and-egg problem of platform competition. The incumbent does not necessarily have to be better. It only has to remain sufficiently useful while maintaining a sufficiently large network.
The social cost of a degraded internet
The consequences extend beyond annoyance. When search engines become less useful, people spend more time finding reliable information. When advertising overwhelms digital services, users are exposed to greater commercial pressure. When social networks optimise for outrage, public discourse can become more polarised. When platforms favour large advertisers and established businesses, smaller companies and independent creators can struggle to compete. Privacy can also suffer.
The more valuable users become as sources of behavioural data, the stronger the economic incentive becomes to monitor, profile, predict, and influence their behaviour. There is an additional cultural cost. When a small number of platforms control distribution, they acquire enormous influence over which information, creators, products, and ideas receive attention. Competition is therefore not merely a matter of consumer choice. It can determine the diversity and resilience of the information environment itself.
Enshittification is not inevitable
The existence of these incentives does not mean that every platform must inevitably deteriorate. Competition can constrain extraction. Regulation can prevent abusive practices. Interoperability can reduce switching costs. Data portability can make it easier for users to move between services. Open protocols can prevent individual companies from controlling entire communication networks. Antitrust enforcement can also play an important role.
When dominant platforms acquire potential competitors, impose discriminatory conditions, favour their own products, or prevent rivals from accessing essential infrastructure, competition authorities can intervene. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act represents one major attempt to impose obligations on designated “gatekeeper” platforms, including requirements concerning interoperability, data access, and self-preferencing.
The effectiveness of such measures will depend on enforcement, technical implementation, and the ability of regulators to keep pace with rapidly changing technology. There is also a role for alternative architectures.
Federated services such as Mastodon demonstrate that social networking does not necessarily require a single company to control the entire network. Open-source software can provide alternatives to proprietary systems. User-controlled data can reduce dependency. Community-owned platforms and cooperative structures can create different incentives.
None of these approaches automatically produces a better service. They demonstrate, however, that the architecture of a digital platform is not predetermined.
Reclaiming the digital economy
Enshittification is ultimately more useful as an economic diagnosis than as an insult. The term captures a recognisable sequence. A company creates a valuable service. Users arrive. Network effects develop. Businesses follow. The platform gains market power. Switching becomes difficult. Monetisation increases. Quality begins to decline. The company discovers that users and commercial partners have fewer realistic alternatives than they once did. At that point, the deterioration can become self-reinforcing.
The answer is not to romanticise the early internet. The internet has always contained advertising, commercial exploitation, misinformation, monopolistic behaviour, surveillance, scams, and poor-quality content. Nor is every price increase or new advertisement evidence of enshittification.
The more important question is whether a platform’s economic incentives have become disconnected from the interests of the people who depend upon it.
That distinction matters because digital infrastructure is no longer peripheral to modern life. Search engines determine how information is discovered. Social networks influence public conversation. Marketplaces determine how businesses reach customers. Cloud services support essential institutions. Software platforms control professional workflows. Artificial intelligence increasingly mediates how people create and consume information. When these systems deteriorate, the consequences are economic, social, and political.
The original promise of the internet was not that every service would remain free forever. It was that digital networks could dramatically reduce the cost of communication, information, participation, and commerce.
Preserving that promise requires competition, interoperability, meaningful consumer rights, transparent algorithms, sustainable business models, and institutions capable of preventing excessive concentrations of private power.
Enshittification is therefore not a theory claiming that every company is secretly conspiring against its customers. It is a description of what can happen when powerful platforms discover that extracting value from dependency is more profitable than continuously earning loyalty through quality. The difference is significant.
A genuinely competitive market forces companies to keep earning customers. A highly concentrated market can allow companies to monetise customers who have fewer practical choices. That is why enshittification feels as though it is everywhere.
The underlying problem is not that technology suddenly became worse. The problem is that the economic incentives surrounding technology changed. Once the platform becomes indispensable, the cost of making it better may no longer produce the same financial return as finding new ways to extract value from the people already inside it.
Recognising that pattern is the first step toward changing it. The future of the digital economy will depend not only on what technologies companies invent, but also on who controls them, how easily users can leave, how effectively competitors can enter, and whether society continues to accept declining quality as the unavoidable price of convenience.
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