Talk:Enshittification

Some stuff to expand on/include? Keep to the narrow definition on the page?

When companies gradually make their existing products less functional to push sales of new ones, and avoid providing customer service to customers, is that enshittification? What are some other good terms for that?

While enshittification is the trendy term for this decay in digital services, there are several other established and more specific terms for the practices you described:

1. Planned Obsolescence

This is the most common term for deliberately designing products with a limited lifespan to force consumers to buy newer models. It includes several sub-types:

• Functional Obsolescence: Engineering products with technical limitations or using inferior materials so they break or fail sooner than they naturally should.
• Systemic Obsolescence: Using software updates to make older hardware incompatible or slower (often called "software bloating" or "throttling").
• Contrived Fragility: Choosing fragile materials or suboptimal layouts specifically to increase wear and tear.

2. Service Degradation

This refers to the intentional lowering of quality or accessibility in customer support and services.

• Support Decay: When companies eliminate human support for everyone except high-paying "enterprise" tiers, leaving regular customers to deal with chatbots or non-existent service.
• Customer Irrelevance: A hallmark of late-stage capitalism where companies feel they no longer need to compete for customer satisfaction because they have achieved a monopoly or "lock-in".

3. Other Descriptive Terms

• Platform Decay: A more polite or academic synonym for enshittification, used to describe the systematic decline in quality of major internet platforms.
• Crapification: Another synonym used interchangeably with enshittification to describe once-useful products becoming "crap" as they prioritize rent-seeking over value.
• Adversarial Commercialization: A term used to describe when a company stops treating customers as peers and starts treating them as a "leash to be yanked" for more money.
• Rent-Seeking: When a company focuses on extracting value from existing users (through fees, subscriptions, or gated features) rather than creating new wealth or value.

CrookKilla (talk) 19:43, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

Enshittification per Cory Doctorow is a higher-level pattern that composes these practices into a pattern of major development stages of a whole bunch of different services (lock-in end-users, exploit end-users for the benefit of business customers, exploit business customers for the benefit of the platform — platform becomes a pile of shit, hence enshittification).

And while I distinctly remember him approving broader use of the term for cases that don't strictly fit that pattern but fit the "sense" of the word about technology getting worse — this is the page about the word and its definition. Sticking to the canonical interpretation makes sense to me. Especially when this wiki has (or can/should have) pages on more specific issues where only they apply. D-side (talk) 13:13, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. Agree. CrookKilla (talk) 03:33, 4 March 2026 (UTC)