Enshittification

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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, companies 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 profits for shareholders.

The term was first coined by tech blogger Corey Doctorow in November 2022 and has since gained widespread recognition.

How it works

"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." -Corey Doctorow, Wired, 2023

Enshittification at it's core is a three-stage process.

1. Companies offer their product or service to users with great incentive to try and build an established userbase. It is usually during this stage the company is the most focused on providing a positive user-experience and listening to feedback.
2. Once a stable userbase is locked in, companies offer access to the userbase to business customers with great incentive. This stage is usually when the user-experience begins to decline as the company is now more focused on catering to partners such as suppliers and advertisers.
3. When both users and business partners are locked in, the company shifts it's surpluses to the shareholders. It no longer has any incentive to grow or maintain quality for either of it's customer bases and relentlessly seeks profit at any rate for the shareholders. Companies at this stage also tend to have such a large market presence that switching barriers naturally (or intentionally) fall into place for those trying to leave for alternatives.

Why it is a problem

Erosion of user experiences

It can cause frustration among customers, for example Netflix has started locking down movies behind expensive plans, so customers are frustrated into subscribing to a more expensive plan.

Adversarial business relationships

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Platform death

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Possible solutions

End-to-end principal

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Right of exit

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Public backlash

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Alternative platforms

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Examples

E-commerce

In Doctorow's original post, he discussed the practices of Amazon. The online retailer initially drew in users with products sold below cost and free shipping. Once its userbase was well established, 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. Amazon also allows sellers the ability to push their listing higher in search results via it's paid Sponsored Products program. 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

eBay is another e-commerce site that followed a similar trajectory, initially offering low fees and a robust buying/selling protection system. Once it's userbase of largely secondhand buyers and sellers was solidified, eBay raised seller fees and began incentivizing large volume sellers - often actual businesses - with lower selling fees should they subscribe to eBay Store. eBay sellers are also no longer able to leave negative feedback for buyers, greatly reducing the ability of sellers to avoid bad actors. Since then, eBay has introduced promoted listings that are effectively analogous to Amazon's paid sponsored listing system. eBay has also encouraged sellers to use AI generated descriptions that often misrepresent the condition of items being sold, along with opting all of it's users into in-house AI training by default as of it's April 21, 2025 privacy policy revision.

Media streaming platforms

The enshittification of Netflix is similarly reflected in other streaming platforms such as YouTube TV and Amazon Prime Video, where prices have increased despite a decline (or at least no perceivable improvement) in overall service quality.

Search engines

Google...

Social media

Facebook...

Twitter/X...

TikTok...

Software

Windows

Video Games

Unity...