Enshittification

Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. 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 profits for shareholders.

Writer Cory Doctorow coined the neologism "enshittification" in November 2022, though he was not the first to describe and label the concept.^[1][2] The American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year.

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 data loss, which requires interoperability. These moves aim to uphold the standards and trustworthiness of online platforms, emphasize user satisfaction, and encourage market competition.

"Enshittification" was first used by Cory Doctorow in a blog post in November 2022,^[3] which was later republished in Locus in January 2023.^[4] He expanded on the concept in another blog post^[5] that was republished in the January 2023 edition of Wired:^[6]

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".^[7]

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, and once suppliers are locked-in, the platform shifts surpluses to shareholders.^[8] 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.^[6] 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.^[9] Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking.^[6]

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.^[10]
• 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.^[10]

The American Dialect Society selected "enshittification" as its 2023 Word of the Year.^[7][11]

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.^[12] This phenomenon has sparked debates about the need for regulatory interventions and alternative models to ensure the integrity and quality of digital platforms.^[13]

Once a disruptor competing with established hotel chains, Airbnb now charges nightly rates exceeding those of existing hotels.^[14] This is a direct result of Airbnb now charging customers and hosts a mark-up of over 45% in service fees on transactions that use the online platform.^{[citation needed]}

In Doctorow's original post, he discussed the practices of Amazon. The online retailer began by wooing 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^[6]

Doctorow has also criticised Amazon's Audible service, which controls over 90% of the audiobook market and applies mandatory digital rights management (DRM) to all audio books. Doctorow pointed out that this meant that a user leaving the platform would lose access to their audiobook library. Doctorow decided to independently distribute the audio version of his book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation since Amazon's system would not distribute it without DRM.^[15]

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 prioritise 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".^[16] 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".^[6]

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, which was followed by Google's collusion to rig 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".^{[6][10][17][18][19]}

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.^[20] The 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.^[20][21][22] 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.^[23][21][24]

The term was applied to the changes to Twitter in the wake of its 2022 acquisition by Elon Musk.^[25][17] 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,^[25] and the reduction of moderation.^[26] 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.^[27] In April 2024, Musk announced that new users would have to pay a fee in order to be able to post.^[28]

The changes led to a dramatic decline in revenue for the company. The increase in hate speech on the platform, particularly antisemitism and Islamophobia during the Israel–Hamas war, led to some organisations pulling advertisements.^[29] According to internal documents seen by The New York Times in late 2023, the losses from advertisers were projected to cost the company $75 million by the end of the year.^[30] Musk delivered an interview on November 29, in which he told advertisers leaving the website to "go fuck yourself."^[31][32] By August 2024, revenue had fallen 84% compared to before Musk's leadership.^[33]

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.^[34] 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.^[34]

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.^[35] 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.^[36]

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.^[37] 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.^[38][39]

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.^[40] Mathematical modeling has suggested that it is in the financial interests of app operators to offer their user base a sub-optimal experience.^[41]

• The dictionary definition of enshittification at Wiktionary