Enshittification

Enshittification is the term coined by author and activist Cory Doctorow for the process by which online platforms steadily degrade the value of what they offer to their users in order to extract more value for shareholders.

The name puns on the trajectory many services follow: they begin generous, buy the loyalty of their users and business partners with good terms, then – once switching away is costly – squeeze all three groups harder and harder. It is a lifecycle of decaying quality driven by the incentive to monetize a captive audience.

How it works

Doctorow describes it as a two-stage process of surplus transfer. First, the platform shifts value away from users toward business customers (advertisers, sellers, developers). Then it shifts value away from those business customers toward the platform’s own shareholders – often by feeding its own services with the data and attention of everyone else.

The key condition is switching costs: the platform becomes “too big to care” because users and partners find it too expensive or inconvenient to leave. Enshittification is not a bug – it is the predictable outcome of a business model that has no competition forcing it to stay good.

Why it matters

Understanding the term gives people a shared vocabulary for a pattern most users feel but struggle to name: the app that used to work, that now sells ads, harvests data, and buries the features you joined for. Naming it is the first step to resisting it.