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. 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.
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.
Cory Doctorow popularized the term enshittification in a 2022 blog post: ‘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.’
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. 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. Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking.
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 favorable 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 socioeconomic process that can reshape labor markets themselves.
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. Users often cite a sense of community and nostalgia as reasons to stay on platforms despite the quality decreasing over time.
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. 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.
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 retain 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.
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. 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.’
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. Jedi Blue is an agreement between Alphabet and Meta Platforms that allegedly gave Facebook an illegal advantage in Google’s ad auctions in exchange for Facebook’s word that it would end its own ad service plans.
The Daily Omnivore 