Not too many years ago, you could watch endless YouTube videos with ease, but now you must sit through unskippable ads to access the content you want—unless you pay. Twitter used to be a space to collect news, engage with verified figures, and discuss world events, but is now teeming with verified scammers. Instagram was once an app to post and admire cute photos, but it now apes TikTok and prioritises scrolling through viral and commercial short videos chosen by an algorithm. Google helped you find articles of repute and academic papers for projects, but now serves up an AI-generated mishmash of content that you will have to further vet.
What caused this degradation across your favourite platforms and apps? One theory that has gained traction is enshittification.
What is enshittification?
In 2022, the Canada-born author, tech journalist, and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification.” The now-viral term helped put a name to a change that internet users are noticing: the feeling that many of your digital experiences, transactions, and services are not improving with time, but are actually becoming worse because of their makers’ updates.
Enshittification, according to Doctorow, is a way of naming the process through which internet platforms are being made deliberately worse for customers, by their decision-makers, until they decay completely.
“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,” wrote Doctorow in a blog post in 2023.
Enshittification is also used to refer to a range of symptoms that degrade your experience as an internet user or customer. Some examples include the insertion of advertisements, self-preferencing by tech companies, unfair bias in search results, once-free features becoming paid, genuine products being replaced with lower-value dupes, and more.
Doctorow also points out how apps offer massive potential for enshittification, because app users often have less freedom to block ads when compared to users who are accessing the same platform via the web.
Why does enshittification matter?
Last year, in his Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin, Doctorow pointed to four factors that could either constrain or enable the enshittification of platforms, based on how strong they are.
These factors were [1] competition, [2] regulation, [3] self-help measures by users, and [4] the unionisation of tech workers. When these four factors are strengthened, according to Doctorow, internet platforms are forced to become better for users. When weakened, however, customers are more vulnerable to being exploited by tech giants.
In other words: when your experience with a shopping app or a streaming platform grows worse, much of this enshittification can be traced back to the dominance of just a few Big Tech players, looser antitrust enforcement by authorities, customers’ diminished capacity to control their digital experiences, and/or the inability of tech workers to say no to exploitative bosses, according to the author.
How have social media companies changed their user experience?
Meta-owned Facebook is an example that Doctorow frequently cites to demonstrate enshittification. Originally meant to serve users and help them stay connected, Facebook users are now “locked in” along with advertisers and publishers, according to him, meaning that content from these latter two groups now take precedence over less profitable posts, such as content from friends and those you are following.
Instagram is yet another example of this enshittification, with advertisements and recommended content now often crowding out updates from those you actually care about—without your consent. Now, with AI-powered accounts joining the fray, human users compete for attention with non-human accounts.
Switching platforms becomes difficult because a large number of people need to depart at once in order for the move to be effective, but it can happen.
“All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword,” noted Doctorow in his 2024 speech.
Enshittification can also be seen with X (formerly Twitter) after Elon Musk’s takeover. Once a platform where verified world leaders, journalists, celebrities, and other noteworthy figures could connect with audiences, Twitter under Musk soon made its free blue tick verification a paid feature that could be bought by anyone ranging from neo-Nazis to scam bots in order to boost their presence, degrading the platform experience for everyone. Tweets, once an unchangeable record, can now be edited—if you pay for the privilege.
Dating apps such as Bumble and Hinge have also been accused of becoming “enshittified,” with certain profile selection, profile exposure, profile filters, and viewing features put behind paywalls, in order to encourage subscriptions. For instance, the feature to undo a mistaken “swipe left” gesture that rejects a profile is also a paid privilege on Bumble.
Enshittification could further explain the recent changes made to browsers like Google, which has injected its Generative AI-powered Overviews into the search experience, so that users are first shown a mashup of search results pulled from random sources across the web, with more errors likely to appear. This also preferences Google as opposed to other, more authoritative news sources and/or smaller publishers.
How have streaming and entertainment platforms changed?
Amazon Prime, Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify are all examples of how enshittification can affect even daily activities such as watching your favourite TV show or listening to music.
Rising subscription prices have nudged users to either pay more in order to again access the ad-free content they were enjoying at lower prices, or be forced to watch ads.
YouTube, for example, has degraded its free experience with multiple unskippable ads even as it tried to push more users to opt for its ad-free YouTube Premium subscription service. In addition to this, YouTube has also worked to obstruct the user experience of those who rely on external ad-blocking extensions in order to continue watching videos without forced commercial breaks. The company further announced a ‘Hype’ feature in certain countries that allows users to help boost creators in the YouTube Partner Program (those with 500 to 5,00,000 subscribers) and increase their exposure; this leads to users being shown more fan-promoted content.
Meanwhile, users have taken to social media to complain how the free version of Spotify is close to unusable, with non-paying users unable to even have control over the order in which they listen to their chosen songs. This dissatisfying experience pushes people into a paid subscription or forces them to find an alternative. Doctorow further alleged that Spotify replaces the ambient artists in its most popular playlists with soundalikes who aren’t entitled to royalties.
How have e-commerce platforms changed?
In a 2022 blog post, Doctorow used the case of e-commerce giant Amazon to give an example of enshittification, noting that “Amazon is an enshittified endless scroll of paid results, where winning depends on ad budgets, not quality.”
Doctorow went on to highlight how both sponsored product listings as well as Amazon’s own products often take precedence while a user is searching for items, meaning that they are not necessarily being shown the best products first.
Google, Apple, and Spotify have also been accused of this kind of self-preferencing, where content that is more profitable to the companies is shown first, to the loss of other business rivals.
Meanwhile, the difficulty of cancelling an Amazon Prime account became a legal challenge in itself. Per a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit, Amazon allegedly enrolled millions of customers in Amazon Prime subscriptions without their consent, and also complicated the cancellation process.
The e-commerce giant will have to pay $2.5 billion to settle the case—a slap on the wrist for a company with a market cap of over $2 trillion.