The Enshittification of the Internet: Why Platforms Decline
If you feel like your favorite apps and websites are getting worse, you are not imagining it. Search engines are crowded with ads, social media feeds are full of irrelevant videos, and online shopping feels like navigating a maze of sponsored products. This frustrating process has a formal name: enshittification.
What is Enshittification?
Writer and technology activist Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in late 2022. He used it to describe the predictable lifecycle of digital platforms. The concept resonated so strongly with internet users that the American Dialect Society named it their Word of the Year for 2023.
Doctorow argues that online platforms do not break by accident. Instead, they decline through a deliberate, profit-driven economic cycle. The companies intentionally degrade the user experience to extract more money from both their users and their business partners.
The Three Stages of Platform Decay
According to Doctorow, the enshittification lifecycle happens in three distinct stages:
- Stage 1: Good to Users. The platform operates at a loss to attract a massive user base. They offer incredible value, clean interfaces, and low prices. Think of early Uber offering five-dollar rides or early Amazon selling books below cost.
- Stage 2: Good to Business Customers. Once users are locked in, the platform shifts its focus to suppliers, creators, or sellers. The platform makes things slightly worse for users to reward these business partners. For example, a social network might show users more ads so they can pay creators higher ad-revenue shares.
- Stage 3: Good to Shareholders. Once the business partners are entirely dependent on the platform, the company squeezes everyone. They charge sellers higher fees, show users more intrusive ads, and cut creator payouts. All the surplus value goes directly to the company shareholders. After this stage, the platform becomes nearly unusable.
Specific Examples of the Decline
To understand this theory in action, we just have to look at the biggest tech companies in the world.
Amazon: From “The Everything Store” to an Ad Network
Amazon is the textbook example of enshittification. Ten years ago, searching for a product on Amazon brought up the best matches based on reviews and price. Today, the first page of Amazon search results is almost entirely “Sponsored Products.”
Amazon now forces third-party sellers to buy ads just to be seen. In 2023, research showed that Amazon takes an average cut of over 45% from its third-party sellers through referral fees, fulfillment fees, and advertising costs. Because sellers have to pay Amazon so much money, they raise the prices of their goods. The user gets a higher price, the seller makes less profit, and Amazon collects the difference.
Google Search: The Rise of Spam and Ads
Google used to be a simple white page that instantly directed you to the most relevant website. Now, searching for a basic term often yields a full screen of sponsored links before you ever see an organic result. Furthermore, Google frequently highlights its own products (like Google Flights or Google Shopping) ahead of competitors. Users are forced to scroll past AI-generated summaries and advertisements to find actual human-written content.
Uber and Lyft: High Fares and Low Pay
In the early 2010s, Uber and Lyft heavily subsidized rides using venture capital money. A rider could cross a city for a few dollars, and the driver received a massive bonus. This killed off the traditional taxi industry. Today, riders pay premium prices while drivers frequently report taking home less than half of the total fare. The platforms clawed back the value to reach profitability.
TikTok: The Newest Victim
TikTok grew rapidly because it offered an incredibly accurate algorithm that showed users highly entertaining videos without asking for anything in return. It also offered creators explosive organic reach. However, in late 2023 and early 2024, TikTok began pushing “TikTok Shop.” Now, users find their feeds cluttered with influencers selling cheap products, and creators are pressured to sell items to maintain their views.
Why Does This Happen?
You might wonder why users do not simply leave these platforms when they start to decline. The answer comes down to a few basic economic principles.
High Switching Costs and Lock-In
Tech platforms rely heavily on network effects. You stay on Facebook or Instagram because your friends and family are there. You keep selling on Amazon because that is where the buyers are. These are called high switching costs. When leaving a platform requires you to abandon your social circle or your business revenue, the platform has you locked in. Once you are locked in, the company can safely worsen the experience without losing you.
Lack of Meaningful Competition
In the past, if a service got too expensive or annoying, a competitor would steal its customers. Today, the tech industry is dominated by monopolies and duopolies. Google controls over 90% of the search market. Apple and Google control the only two major mobile app stores. Without aggressive competition, these companies have no incentive to treat their users well.
Shareholder Demands
Publicly traded companies cannot just be profitable. Wall Street demands endless, quarter-over-quarter growth. Once an app connects every person on Earth, it cannot grow its user base anymore. The only way to show growth to shareholders is to extract more money from the existing users by cutting costs and increasing fees.
Is There a Way Out?
Reversing this trend requires significant structural changes to the tech industry.
One solution is stricter antitrust enforcement. Government bodies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) under Chair Lina Khan have recently started suing companies like Amazon and Meta for anti-competitive behavior. Breaking up monopolies forces companies to compete for users again.
Another solution is legally mandated interoperability. Imagine if you could send a message from a small, independent social app directly to your friends on Instagram. If you did not have to leave your friends behind, you could easily quit a platform the moment it started showing you too many ads.
Until these laws change, users will have to navigate a web that increasingly prioritizes corporate profits over the human experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who coined the term enshittification? Author and digital rights advocate Cory Doctorow coined the term in a November 2022 essay published on his blog. The term quickly went viral and became widely adopted by journalists and tech critics.
Why do tech companies ruin their own products? Companies degrade their products to extract more profit for their shareholders. Once they have trapped a large user base and eliminated their competitors, they no longer need to offer a great experience to keep people around.
Can a platform recover from enshittification? Recovery is rare. Once a company becomes dependent on high profit margins from ads and seller fees, shareholders will rarely allow the company to reduce those profits to make the user experience better.
How can users avoid enshittified platforms? Users can seek out open-source or non-profit alternatives. For example, using Wikipedia for information, shopping locally instead of on Amazon, or switching to decentralized social networks like Mastodon can help you avoid platforms driven purely by shareholder profits.