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Enshittification

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern 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 users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.

Canadian writer Cory Doctorow coined the neologism enshittification in November 2022.[1] Though he was not the first to describe the concept,[2][3] his term has been widely adopted. 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.[4][5]

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

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Cory Doctorow popularized the term "enshittification" in a 2022 blog post.
"An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification", a talk by Cory Doctorow at DEF CON 31 in 2023

The use of scatological terminology with a -fication suffix was in occasional use in the late 2010s and early 2020s, including with reference to degrading software systems. A 2018 Naked Capitalism post referred to the "crapification" of software used by Boeing,[6][7] and Wendy A. Woloson used the term "encrappification" to describe the proliferation of cheap goods in American economic history.[8][9] However, Cory Doctorow was the first specifically to use enshittification as a descriptor of service degradation and to formalize its meaning, in a November 2022 blog post[10] that was republished three months later in Locus.[11] He expanded on the concept in another blog post[12] that was republished in the January 2023 edition of Wired:[13]

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 enshittification, 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".[14]

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.[15] 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.[13] 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.[16] Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking.[13]

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

  • 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.[17]
  • 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.[17]

In October 2025, Doctorow released a book titled Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It.[18]

Reception

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Doctorow's concept has been cited by various scholars and journalists as a framework for understanding the decline in quality of online platforms. Discussions about enshittification 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.[19] This phenomenon has sparked debates about the need for regulatory interventions and alternative models to ensure the integrity and quality of digital platforms.[20]

Henry Farrell applied the concept to US power in general: military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations.[21]

The American Dialect Society selected enshittification as its 2023 word of the year.[14][22]

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.[23]

Impact

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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.[24]

A study was conducted by Ardoline et al. that determines that platform decay causes cognitive and moral harm due to a loss in users' ability to process information.[25]

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.[26] Users often cite a sense of community and nostalgia as reasons to stay on platforms despite the quality decreasing over time.[27]

Examples

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Airbnb

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See also: Airbnb § Criticism and controversies

Originally meant to be a cheap alternative to hotels, Airbnb became a popular company in the platform economy. However, in similar enterprises in the platform economy which offer very cheap prices, once the venture capital runs out, the cheap prices are gone. This is presumably what happened to Airbnb, where prices of many places hosted there have since increased to be higher than hotels, often with fewer amenities, deceptive advertising, additional rules and fees by hosts, less quality control, and sometimes hidden cameras.[28]

Amazon

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See also: Criticism of Amazon

In Doctorow's original post, he discussed the practices of Amazon. The online retailer began by attracting users with goods sold below cost and (with an Amazon Prime subscription) free shipping. Once its user base was solidified, more sellers began to sell their products through Amazon. Finally, Amazon began to add fees to increase profits. In 2023, over 45% of the sale price of items went to Amazon in the form of various fees.[29] Doctorow described advertisement within Amazon as a payola scheme in which sellers bid against one another for search-ranking preference, and said that the first five pages of a search for "cat beds" were half advertisements.[13]

Doctorow has also criticized Amazon's Audible service, which controls over 90% of the audiobook market and applies mandatory digital rights management (DRM) to all audio books. He pointed out that this meant that a user leaving the platform would lose access to their audiobook library. In 2014, Doctorow decided to no longer sell his audiobooks via Audible but produce them himself instead, even though doing so meant earning a lot less than he would have by letting Amazon "slap DRM" on his books. He has since published over half a dozen of his audiobooks independently, as Amazon's system would not distribute them without DRM.[30][31]

Dating apps

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The market for dating apps has been cited as an example of enshittification due to the conflict between the dating apps' ostensible goal of matchmaking, and their operators' desire to convert users to the paid version of the app and retaining them as paying users indefinitely by keeping them single, creating a perverse incentive that leads performance to decline over time as efforts at monetization begin to dominate.[32]

Facebook

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See also: Criticism of Facebook

According to Doctorow, Facebook offered a good service until it had reached a "critical mass" of users, and it became difficult for people to leave because they would need to convince their friends to go with them. Facebook then began to add posts from media companies into feeds until the media companies too were dependent on traffic from Facebook, and then adjusted the algorithm to prioritize paid "boosted" posts. Business Insider agreed with the view that Facebook was being enshittified, adding that it "constantly floods users' feeds with sponsored (or 'recommended') content, and seems to bury the things people want to see under what Facebook decides is relevant".[33] Doctorow pointed at the Facebook metrics controversy, in which video statistics were inflated on the site, which led to media companies over-investing in Facebook and collapsing. He described Facebook as "terminally enshittified".[13]

[edit]
See also: Criticism of Google

Doctorow cites Google Search as one example, which became dominant through relevant search results and minimal ads, then later degraded through increased advertising, search engine optimization, and outright fraud, benefitting its advertising customers. This was followed by Google rigging the ad market through Jedi Blue to recapture value for itself. Doctorow also cites Google's firing of 12,000 employees in January 2023, which coincided with a stock buyback scheme which "would have paid all their salaries for the next 27 years", as well as Google's rush to research an AI search chatbot, "a tool that won't show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see".[13][17][34]

Reddit

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See also: 2023 Reddit API controversy
Reddit users protest the changes on r/place. "Spez" is the username of the Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman.

In 2023, shortly after its initial filings for an initial public offering, Reddit announced that it would begin charging fees for API access, a move that would effectively shut down many third-party apps by making them cost-prohibitive to operate.[35] CEO Steve Huffman stated that it was in response to AI firms scraping data without paying Reddit for it, but coverage linked the move to the upcoming IPO; the move shut down large numbers of third-party apps, forcing users to use official Reddit apps that provided more profit to the company.[35][36][37] Moderators on the site conducted a blackout protest against the company's new policy, although the changes ultimately went ahead. Many third party Reddit apps such as the Apollo app were shut down because of the new fees.[38][36][39]

Spotify

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With a familiarity that physical media is less accessible and more difficult to operate, Spotify consolidated the market on digital media. This was modeled after Napster's model of cornering the market.[40] Spotify began to implement short-form video features, a system that some academics describe as prioritization of profit-extraction over user-oriented experience.[41]

Twitter / X

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Main article: Twitter under Elon Musk

The term was applied to the changes to Twitter in the wake of its 2022 acquisition by Elon Musk.[42][34] This included the closure of the service's API to stop interoperable software from being used, suspending users for posting (rival service) Mastodon handles in their profiles, and placing restrictions on the ability to view the site without logging in. Other changes included temporary rate limits for the number of tweets that could be viewed per day, the introduction of paid subscriptions to the service in the form of Twitter Blue (later renamed to X Premium),[42] and the reduction of moderation.[43] Musk had the algorithm modified to promote his own posts above others, which caused users' feeds to be flooded with his content in February 2023.[44] In April 2024, Musk announced that new users would have to pay a fee to be able to post.[45]

Uber

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See also: Controversies involving Uber

App-based ridesharing company Uber gained market share by ignoring local licensing systems such as taxi medallions while also keeping consumer costs artificially low by subsidizing rides via venture capital funding.[46] Once they achieved a duopoly with competitor Lyft, the company implemented surge pricing to increase the cost of travel to riders and dynamically adjust the payments made to drivers.[46]

A 2025 study by Maffie and Hurtado examines how gig-economy platforms undergo patterns of value-extraction analogous to enshittification, with specific relevance to ride-hailing firms such as Uber. The authors identify three mechanisms through which platforms shift from initially favourable conditions towards labour-exploitation: (1) burden-shifting, where operational costs are transferred to workers (e.g., driving expenses, vehicle maintenance); (2) feature-addition and alteration, meaning new demands or algorithmic changes increase worker effort or risk; and (3) market-manipulation, involving reductions in worker bargaining power, increased competition among drivers, or opaque deactivations. They argue that platforms like Uber initially lure drivers with promises of flexibility and earnings, but as scale and market power grow, worker conditions deteriorate through these mechanisms, a pattern that aligns with the broader lifecycle of platform decay described by the enshittification concept. Maffie and Hurtado further show that workers respond by three main strategies: effort-recalibration (reducing input as return diminishes), multi-homing (joining multiple platforms simultaneously), and what they term toxic resilience (persisting despite deteriorating conditions). The study thus extends the enshittification framework from digital media and advertising platforms into the labour domain of ride-hailing and gig work, emphasising how platforms that once offered "freedom" may gradually degrade worker value in favour of shareholder or platform-owner profit.[24]

Unity

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See also: Unity (game engine) § Runtime fee controversy

The proposed (and eventually abandoned) changes to the Unity game engine's licensing model in 2023 were described by Gameindustry.biz as an example of enshittification, as the changes would have applied retroactively to projects which had already been in development for years while degrading quality for both developers and end users, while increasing fees.[47] While the Unity Engine itself is not a two-sided market, the move was related to Unity's position as a provider of mobile free-to-play services to developers, including in-app purchase systems.[48]

In response to these changes, many game developers announced their intention to abandon Unity for an alternative engine, despite the significant switching cost of doing so, with game designer Sam Barlow specifically using the word enshittification when describing the new fee policy as the motive.[49] Use of the Unity engine at game jams declined rapidly in 2024 as indie developers switched to other engines. Unity usage at the Global Game Jam declined to 36% that year, from 61% in 2023. The GMTK Game Jam also reported a major decline in Unity usership.[50][51]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Gault, Matthew (November 26, 2024). "'Enshittification' Is Officially the Biggest Word of the Year". Gizmodo. Archived from the original on November 27, 2024. Retrieved February 4, 2025.
  2. ^ Smith, Yves (November 18, 2018). "Boeing, Crapification, and the Lion Air Crash". Naked Capitalism. Archived from the original on May 11, 2020. Retrieved February 4, 2025.
  3. ^ Tkacick, Maureen (September 18, 2019). "Crash Course". The New Republic.
  4. ^ "enshittification". www.merriam-webster.com. Retrieved May 3, 2025.
  5. ^ "Dictionary.com | Meanings & Definitions of English Words". Dictionary.com. Retrieved May 3, 2025.
  6. ^ Smith, Yves (November 18, 2018). "Boeing, Crapification, and the Lion Air Crash". Naked Capitalism. Archived from the original on May 11, 2020. Retrieved February 4, 2025.
  7. ^ Tkacick, Maureen (September 18, 2019). "Crash Course". The New Republic.
  8. ^ "The encrappification of America dates back centuries." Wendy A. Woloson, Crap: A History of Cheap Goods in America. University of Chicago Press, 2020, p. 2.
  9. ^ Megan Volpert, Crapification Syndrome: When Hilarity Slides into Nausea. Pop Matters, May 15, 2020.
  10. ^ Doctorow, Cory (November 15, 2022). "Social Quitting". Archived from the original on October 30, 2023. Retrieved October 23, 2023.
  11. ^ Doctorow, Cory (January 2023). "Social Quitting". Special Features. Locus. Vol. 90, no. 1 #744. pp. 29, 49. Archived from the original on January 2, 2023. Retrieved December 13, 2023.
  12. ^ "Pluralistic: Tiktok's enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow". January 21, 2023. Archived from the original on November 9, 2023. Retrieved November 10, 2023.
  13. ^ a b c d e f Doctorow, Cory (January 23, 2023). "The 'Enshittification' of TikTok". Wired. Condé Nast. Archived from the original on June 1, 2023. Retrieved June 1, 2023.
  14. ^ a b Doctorow, Cory (February 7, 2024). "'Enshittification' is coming for absolutely everything". Financial Times. Archived from the original on February 8, 2024. Retrieved February 24, 2024.
  15. ^ Birch, Kean (November 10, 2023). "Data Paradoxes". Data Enclaves. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 107–124. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-46402-7_6. ISBN 978-3-031-46402-7 – via Springer Link.
  16. ^ Doctorow, Cory (March 8, 2023). "Twiddler: Configurability for Me, but Not for Thee". Communications of the ACM. Archived from the original on September 17, 2023. Retrieved September 15, 2023.
  17. ^ a b c Doctorow, Cory (May 9, 2023). "As Platforms Decay, Let's Put Users First". Electronic Frontier Foundation. Archived from the original on October 22, 2023. Retrieved September 15, 2023.
  18. ^ Doctorow, Cory (2025). Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. Verso Books. ISBN 978-1836742227.
  19. ^ Multiple sources:
  20. ^ "Enshittification, Disenshittification and The Bezzle: Cory Doctorow in conversation with Randall Munroe | Berkman Klein Center". cyber.harvard.edu. April 24, 2024. Retrieved June 21, 2024.
  21. ^ Newman, Abraham L. "The Enshittification of American Power". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved September 29, 2025.
  22. ^ Zimmer, Ben (January 5, 2024). "2023 Word of the Year is 'enshittification'". American Dialect Society. Retrieved January 6, 2024.
  23. ^ Wiseman, Lewis (November 26, 2024). "Macquarie Dictionary names 'enshittification' as 2024 Word of the Year. But what does it mean?". ABC News. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  24. ^ a b Maffie, Michael David; Hurtado, Hector (August 5, 2025). "The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy". British Journal of Industrial Relations. doi:10.1111/bjir.70004. ISSN 0007-1080.
  25. ^ Ardoline, Michael J.; Lenzo, Edward (July 26, 2025). "The cognitive and moral harms of platform decay". Ethics and Information Technology. 27 (3): 37. doi:10.1007/s10676-025-09846-1. ISSN 1572-8439.
  26. ^ Doctorow, Cory (2023). The internet con: how to seize the means of computation. London ; New York: Verso. ISBN 978-1-80429-216-7.
  27. ^ Simpson, Ellen; Semaan, Bryan (October 16, 2025). "The Enshittification of the Creative Internet". Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9 (7): CSCW489:1–CSCW489:24. doi:10.1145/3757670.
  28. ^ Zickgraf, Ryan (January 6, 2024). "Airbnb Was Supposed to Save Capitalism. Instead, It Just Devolved Into Garbage". Jacobin. Retrieved June 5, 2024.
  29. ^ Doctorow, Cory (January 23, 2023). "Tiktok's enshittification". Medium. Retrieved May 18, 2025.
  30. ^ Doctorow, Cory (July 25, 2022). "Why none of my books are available on Audible". Medium.
  31. ^ Doctorow, Cory (July 31, 2023). "Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it". Medium.
  32. ^ Rosalsky, Greg (February 13, 2024). "The dating app paradox: Why dating apps may be worse than ever". NPR. Retrieved February 17, 2024. Dating apps aren't alone in seemingly getting worse when they try to make money. In fact, last year journalist Cory Doctorow coined a term for this pattern: 'enshittification.' Basically, Doctorow says tech platforms start off trying to make their user experiences really good because their first goal is to try to become popular and achieve scale. But over time, they inevitably pursue their ultimate goal of making money, which ends up making the whole user experience 'enshittified.'
  33. ^ Zitron, Ed (March 27, 2023). "Google, Amazon, and Meta are making their core products worse — on purpose". Business Insider. Archived from the original on October 23, 2023. Retrieved October 23, 2023.
  34. ^ a b Naughton, John (March 11, 2023). "Users, advertisers – we are all trapped in the 'enshittification' of the Internet". The Guardian. Archived from the original on May 31, 2023. Retrieved June 1, 2023.
  35. ^ a b Wright, Jennifer C (2024). Stakeholder Management in Change Initiatives: Reddit Changes Its API Pricing. London: Sage Publications. doi:10.4135/9781071941379. ISBN 978-1-0719-4137-9 – via SAGE Knowledge.
  36. ^ a b Breland, Ali. "Why Reddit is destined to turn to crap". Mother Jones. Archived from the original on July 5, 2023. Retrieved September 15, 2023.
  37. ^ Hagen, Sal (2023). "No Space for Reddit Spacing: Mapping the Reflexive Relationship Between Groups on 4chan and Reddit". Social Media + Society. 9 (4) 20563051231216960. doi:10.1177/20563051231216960. ISSN 2056-3051.
  38. ^ Plunkett, Luke (June 28, 2023). "Minecraft Subreddit Loses Support From Devs Who Disapprove Of Reddit Changes". Kotaku. Archived from the original on October 24, 2023. Retrieved October 23, 2023.
  39. ^ Ashworth, Boone (June 17, 2023). "The Reddit Blackout Is Breaking Reddit". Wired. Archived from the original on June 17, 2023. Retrieved June 18, 2023.
  40. ^ Snowden-Leak, Richard (2024). "Always Late Capitalism: Quantity not Quality in the Age of Contentification" (PDF). Intersections: A Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies. 4: 11.
  41. ^ Hagh, Anita. "Caught in the Spectacle: Disruptive Digital Literacies as Pushback Against Dynamic Platform Governances": 351. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  42. ^ a b Ball, James (July 4, 2023). "The slow, sad death of Twitter". The New European. Archived from the original on July 5, 2023. Retrieved July 5, 2023. That means lots of blue ticks stop paying – but everyone else is forced to read the low-quality content that the remaining blue ticks produce. This is what is powering the enshittification of Twitter.
  43. ^ Masnick, Mike (July 5, 2023). "It Turns Out Elon Is Speedrunning The Enshittification Learning Curve, Not The Content Moderation One". Techdirt. Archived from the original on October 16, 2023. Retrieved October 16, 2023.
  44. ^ Newton, Casey (February 15, 2023). "Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first". The Verge.
  45. ^ Gavin, William (April 15, 2024). "Elon Musk says new X users have to pay to tweet". Quartz.
  46. ^ a b Zuckerman, Ethan (October 4, 2023). "How we've enshittified the tech economy". Prospect. Retrieved February 9, 2024. A similar phenomenon is playing out across the digital economy, as tech-powered giants who surfed the digital wave to success abandon the practices that made them popular with consumers in the first place. Having done that, they then turn on their suppliers as well, in a bid to claw back all the value for themselves. Whenever this happens it doesn't end well for anyone.
  47. ^ Sinclair, Brendan (September 15, 2023). "Unity's self-combustion engine | This Week in Business". GamesIndustry.biz. Archived from the original on October 12, 2023. Retrieved October 13, 2023.
  48. ^ Vilberg, Petter (September 14, 2023). "Unity's Just Not Into You, Indie Developer". Game Developer. Retrieved November 15, 2023.
  49. ^ Kerr, Chris (September 13, 2023). "Rust creator tells Unity to 'get fucked' in response to runtime fees". Game Developer. Archived from the original on November 7, 2023. Retrieved November 7, 2023.
    Citing: Maiberg, Emanuel (September 12, 2023). "'This Is a Disaster:' Game Developers Scramble to Deal With Unity's New Fees". 404 Media. Archived from the original on November 7, 2023. Retrieved November 7, 2023.
  50. ^ Bespyatova, Ekaterina (August 23, 2024). "Organizers of the GMTK Game Jam: Over the year, the share of Unity games declined sharply, while the share of Godot games increased". App2 Top.
  51. ^ "Game Engine Popularity in 2024". GameFromScratch. January 29, 2024.

Further reading

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[edit]
  • The dictionary definition of enshittification at Wiktionary
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