Enshittification

Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. 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 both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.

Canadian writer Cory Doctorow coined the neologism enshittification in November 2022.[1] The American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year, with Australia's Macquarie Dictionary following suit for 2024. Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com also list enshittification as a word.[2][3]

Doctorow advocates for two ways to reduce enshittification: upholding the end-to-end principle, which asserts that platforms should transmit data in response to user requests rather than algorithm-driven decisions; and guaranteeing the right of exit—that is, enabling a user to leave a platform without losing access to data, which requires interoperability. These moves aim to uphold the standards and trustworthiness of online platforms, emphasize user satisfaction, and encourage market competition.

History and definition

Cory Doctorow first used enshittification as a descriptor of service degradation and formalized its meaning in a November 2022 blog post that was republished three months later in Locus.[4] He expanded on the concept in another blog post[5] that was republished in the January 2023 edition of Wired:"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a 'two-sided market', where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."

In a 2024 op-ed in the Financial Times, Doctorow argued that enshittification' is coming for absolutely everything" with "enshittificatory" platforms leaving humanity in an "enshittocene".[6]

Doctorow argues that new platforms offer useful products and services at a loss, as a way to gain new users. Once users are locked in, the platform then offers access to the userbase to suppliers at a loss; once suppliers are locked in, the platform shifts surpluses to shareholders.[7] Once the platform is fundamentally focused on the shareholders, and the users and vendors are locked in, the platform no longer has any incentive to maintain quality. Enshittified platforms that act as intermediaries can act as both a monopoly on services and a monopsony on customers, as high switching costs prevent either from leaving even when alternatives technically exist. Doctorow has described the process of enshittification as happening through "twiddling": the continual adjustment of the parameters of the system in search of marginal improvements of profits, without regard to any other goal.[8] Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking.[9]

To solve the problem, Doctorow has called for two general principles to be followed:

In October 2025, Doctorow released a book titled Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.[11]

• The first is a respect of the end-to-end principle, which holds that the role of a network is to reliably deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers. When applied to platforms, this entails users being given what they asked for, not what the platform prefers to present. For example, users would see all content from users they subscribed to, allowing content creators to reach their audience without going through an opaque algorithm; and in search engines, exact matches for search queries would be shown before sponsored results, rather than afterwards.[10]
• The second is the right of exit, which holds that users of a platform can easily go elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with it. For social media, this requires interoperability, countering the network effects that "lock in" users and prevent market competition between platforms. For digital media platforms, it means enabling users to switch platforms without losing the content they purchased that is locked by digital rights management.[10]

Reception

"Enshittification" has been cited by various scholars and journalists as a framework for understanding the decline in quality of online platforms. Discussions about the term have appeared in numerous media outlets, including analyses of how tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon have shifted their business models to prioritize profits at the expense of user experience.[12] This phenomenon has sparked debates about the need for regulatory interventions and alternative models to ensure the integrity and quality of digital platforms.[13]

Henry Farrell applied the concept to US power in general: military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations.[14]

The American Dialect Society selected enshittification as its 2023 word of the year.[6][15]

The Macquarie Dictionary named enshittification as its 2024 word of the year, selected by both the committee's and people's choice votes for only the third time since the inaugural event in 2006.[16]

Impact

Academic researchers have further broadened the impact of the term by applying it to labour relations and the structure of digital work. In a 2025 study, Maffie and Hurtado argue that enshittification offers a useful framework for understanding how gig-economy platforms steadily degrade the quality of work available to independent contractors. They contend that platform companies undergo a predictable shift from providing favourable conditions to workers toward implementing policies that increase precarity, opacity, and unequal power dynamics. Their analysis positions enshittification as not only a description of consumer-facing platform decline, but a broader socio-economic process that can reshape labour markets themselves.[17]

A study was conducted by Ardoline and Lenzo that determines that platform decay causes cognitive and moral harm due to a loss in users' ability to process information.[18]

Users of platforms that have suffered from enshittification have continued to stay on those platforms due to a fear of missing out but often migrate between multiple different social media.[19] Users often cite a sense of community and nostalgia as reasons to stay on platforms despite the quality decreasing over time.[20]

Examples

See also

Further reading

External links

• A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator from Forbrukerrådet (Norwegian Consumer Council)