Enshittification

Definition

Enshittification is the term coined by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022 to describe the predictable pattern by which online platforms degrade over time. 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. Wikipedia

Doctorow’s three-stage model is the canonical version: 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. Wikipedia

The word entered mainstream usage fast. The American Dialect Society named it 2023 Word of the Year. Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary did the same for 2024. Doctorow expanded the framework into a 2025 book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

The mechanism Doctorow identifies isn’t moral failure on the part of any one company. It’s structural. Two-sided platforms sit between users and business customers. Once both sides are locked in — through network effects, switching costs, contractual exclusivity, or interoperability barriers — the platform can shift value allocation away from the parties using it and toward its shareholders, with limited consequences. The locked-in users and businesses can complain but can’t leave easily. The platform extracts. Quality declines. Eventually the platform collapses or stagnates.

In marketing, enshittification matters for two reasons that pull in opposite directions. The first is that marketers operate on enshittifying platforms — buying ads on Meta, ranking in Google Search, distributing through Amazon, building audiences on YouTube and TikTok. The deterioration of those platforms directly shapes what marketing on them costs and what it can achieve. The second is that brands themselves can enshittify. The same dynamic Doctorow describes for platforms applies to subscription services, loyalty programs, app-based businesses, and increasingly to consumer products that have been turned into recurring-revenue plays. A loyalty program that started generous and got stingy. A streaming service that added ads after promising it never would. A printer that locked out third-party ink cartridges. The pattern is the same.

How Enshittification Works (The Mechanism)

There isn’t a calculation, but there is a sequence. Doctorow’s framework breaks the decay into three phases, each tied to a shift in how the platform allocates the value it captures.

Phase 1 — Good to users. The platform subsidizes user experience, often using investor capital. Search results are accurate. Feeds are chronological and friend-centered. Marketplaces show the product you searched for. Prices are low. Quality is high. The goal is acquisition and lock-in.

Phase 2 — Good to business customers, worse for users. Once enough users are locked in, the platform pivots. User-facing quality drops to make room for business customers (advertisers, sellers, app developers). Organic reach declines so brands have to pay for distribution. Search results fill with sponsored slots. Recommendation feeds tilt toward whatever generates engagement, not what users came for. The user experience gets worse, but users stay because leaving is hard.

Phase 3 — Bad for everyone except shareholders. Once business customers are also locked in, the platform turns on them too. Ad prices rise. Take rates climb. Promised reach disappears. Features that brands relied on get paywalled or removed. The platform extracts as much as possible from both sides while spending the minimum needed to keep them from leaving. Quality collapses. Trust evaporates. Phase 3: If the corporate clients are also successfully bound to the platform because it’s where they reach their target group or can be found by them in the first place, ‘enshittification’ has entered the final phase. Doctorow believes corporate clients are now being exploited too with operators and their shareholders trying to retain as much profit as possible for themselves. Advertising placement costs increase sharply, while the service for users often deteriorates significantly. Gdi

Paul Krugman has formalized a version of this mathematically as an “earnings inflection strategy” — an obvious optimal policy for a monopolist with a captive user base. The answer seems obvious: offer really good value to your customers at first, to build up the size of your network, then enshittify — soak the customer base you’ve built. The enshittification could take the form of charging higher prices, but it could also involve reducing quality, forcing people to watch ads, etc. Substack

The factors that determine how fast and how far enshittification proceeds, per Doctorow, are: competition (less competition, faster decay), regulation (less enforcement, faster decay), interoperability (more lock-in, faster decay), and labor power (weaker worker pushback, faster decay).

Implications for Marketing

A few places enshittification is reshaping marketing right now.

Paid distribution costs keep climbing. As organic reach on social platforms has fallen toward zero, brands have been forced into paid amplification, and the unit economics keep getting worse. CPMs on Meta and YouTube have risen sharply over the past decade with no corresponding increase in user attention. The same dollars buy less.

Search marketing is being reshaped. Google Search, the workhorse of digital marketing for two decades, has visibly degraded. Enshittification is a ride through all the bait-and-switch tactics, financial trickery, and gatekeeping to which Big Tech platforms subject users. A prime example is how Google began degrading its always reliable workhorse of a product, search, in the mid-aughts, once there was no more room for its flagship segment to grow. AI Overviews, more aggressive ad placement, and antitrust pressure are all rewriting what SEO does and what it’s worth. Washington Monthly

Marketplaces are squeezing sellers. Amazon sellers face rising fees, mandatory ad spend to remain visible, and competition from Amazon’s own private-label products. The same pattern shows up on Etsy, Uber Eats, and DoorDash.

Content saturation is a downstream effect. The same platforms that pushed brands toward paid distribution also incentivized high-volume content production, then trained AI on that content, then opened the floodgates further. Because of (again, often AI-fueled) content saturation, misinformation and disinformation are widespread on the web. Mightybytes

Brand-level enshittification has real costs. Brands that enshittify their own products — surprise fees, harder cancellations, downgraded entitlements, ad insertion in previously ad-free experiences — face real consumer backlash. Netflix’s ad tier rollout, Adobe’s subscription-only pivot, and various airline loyalty devaluations all triggered measurable trust losses. The short-term revenue lift often masks longer-term equity damage.

Owned channels matter more again. The strategic response across the industry has been to invest in audiences and content the brand actually controls — email lists, owned communities, direct e-commerce, original content. The antidote to enshittification isn’t abandoning technology; it’s stewardship in creating and sharing quality content on a platform you own that contributes value to your target audience (not the platform). Elevate Next

Comparison to Adjacent Concepts

Concept	Core mechanism	What it explains	How it differs from enshittification
Enshittification	Sequential value extraction from users, then businesses, then everyone	Why platforms decay over time	Sequenced three-stage pattern tied to two-sided lock-in
Rent-seeking	Extracting value without creating it	Why monopolists raise prices without improving products	A broader economic concept; enshittification is a specific applied case
Innovator’s dilemma	Incumbents fail to disrupt themselves	Why market leaders get displaced	About strategy failure; enshittification is about deliberate extraction
Goodhart’s Law	When a measure becomes a target, it stops measuring	Why optimized metrics produce bad outcomes	About measurement gaming; enshittification is about value reallocation
Race to the bottom	Competitive pressure drives standards down	Why low-margin industries cut corners	Driven by competition; enshittification is driven by its absence
Lock-in	Switching costs trap users	Why people stay with bad services	A precondition for enshittification, not the same thing
Shrinkflation	Smaller portions at the same price	Why packaged goods quietly shrink	Single-axis (size); enshittification is multi-axis decay
Dark patterns	Manipulative UX designed to extract	Why opt-outs are hidden and cancellations are buried	A tactic used during enshittification, not the full phenomenon

Best Practices

For brands operating on enshittifying platforms:

Diversify distribution. Treat any platform you don’t own as a rented audience. Build email lists, podcast subscribers, app downloads, and other direct channels that survive platform changes.

**Track the deterioration. **Most marketing teams measure performance against last quarter, not against the long-run platform baseline. Watching cost per acquisition climb over five years tells a different story than watching it climb quarter-over-quarter.

Invest in earned trust. As platforms get less trustworthy and content gets less credible, brands that maintain consistent quality and honesty over time build a kind of equity that paid distribution can’t buy.

For brands considering enshittifying their own products:

Distinguish revenue from value extraction. Raising prices on a product that’s getting better is different from raising them on one that’s getting worse. The first is normal business. The second is enshittification, and customers notice the difference.

Watch the lock-in dependency. Brands that can only get away with degrading their product because customers can’t leave easily are exposing themselves to a class of risk — regulatory, reputational, competitive — that often shows up later than the revenue lift.

Don’t break the deal mid-stream. Customers who signed up for an ad-free experience and got ads, or a perpetual license and got a subscription, or a loyalty program at one earn rate and got another, react worse than customers who never had the better deal in the first place. The bait-and-switch pattern is what makes enshittification especially damaging.

Audit your dark patterns. Hidden fees, hard-to-find cancellation flows, default opt-ins, and surprise charges. Each one might individually pencil out. In aggregate they signal exactly the trajectory consumers (and increasingly regulators) recognize.

Future Trends

A few directions worth tracking.

Regulatory response is accelerating. The EU’s Digital Markets Act, the UK’s Digital Markets Competition and Consumers Act, US antitrust cases against Google and Meta, and FTC click-to-cancel rules all target enshittification dynamics directly. Some of the levers Doctorow identifies — interoperability mandates, anti-lock-in rules — are now active policy.

AI is both accelerator and target. Generative AI is making content saturation worse, automating dark patterns, and enabling new forms of extraction. It’s also become a target of the same critique — AI products that started capable and got worse, AI subscriptions that quietly raised limits, AI tools that locked away features that used to be free.

Subscription fatigue is real and measurable. The proliferation of subscription services has produced a backlash visible in churn data, particularly in streaming and software. Brands that enshittified their subscriptions early are losing customers; brands that haven’t are being watched closely.

“De-enshittification” as positioning. A small but growing set of products are explicitly positioning themselves against the pattern — open-source alternatives, customer-owned cooperatives, single-payment software, ad-free social platforms. Whether any of them scale remains open, but the positioning is finding an audience.

Platform exhaustion among creators. YouTubers, Substackers, podcasters, and Instagram creators have all begun moving more aggressively toward direct relationships with audiences (Patreon, owned email lists, memberships) precisely to insulate themselves from platform decay. The brands that distribute through those creators inherit the same pattern.

FAQs

Is enshittification just a synonym for “things getting worse”? No. It’s a specific pattern with a mechanism. The defining features are two-sided markets, sequential value reallocation (users, then businesses, then shareholders), and lock-in that prevents either side from leaving. A product that’s just getting worse without those structural conditions isn’t necessarily enshittifying in Doctorow’s sense.

Is enshittification inevitable? Doctorow argues no — it depends on the constraints around a platform. Competition, regulation, interoperability, and labor power all slow or prevent the cycle. Where those constraints are weak, the pattern runs. Where they’re strong, platforms can stay good longer.

How is this different from normal business maturity? Mature businesses raise prices, optimize operations, and shift their focus from growth to profitability. That isn’t enshittification. The distinction is whether the customer experience improves, stays the same, or degrades in service of extraction. Mature pricing increases tied to improved quality are normal. Hidden fees, surprise downgrades, and quality cuts behind a price-equivalent label are enshittification.

Does the term apply outside tech? Increasingly, yes. The framework has been applied to airlines, hotels, banking, healthcare, news media, and consumer packaged goods. Anywhere there’s lock-in and the ability to silently reduce quality, the pattern can run.

Is the term itself a marketing problem? Some brand teams have pushed back on using it in formal contexts because of the vulgarity. The Australian Macquarie Dictionary, the American Dialect Society, and several major publications have used it without issue. In B2B and consumer marketing copy, “platform decay” tends to be the cleaner synonym.

Can a brand recover after enshittifying? Sometimes, but slowly. Reversing the pattern usually requires both restoring product quality and visibly signaling the change — and consumer skepticism after a bait-and-switch tends to be durable. The recovery curve is steeper than the decline curve.

How does enshittification interact with advertising? Directly. Many of the second-phase enshittification moves Doctorow describes — degrading user experience to make room for business customers — are advertising-driven. Brands that buy ads on enshittified platforms are part of the mechanism, even when they’re also victims of it later.

Is enshittification the same as platform decay? Doctorow uses both terms. “Platform decay” is the more clinical synonym; “enshittification” is the original and more widely used.

What’s the relationship between enshittification and consumer trust research? Strong. Erosion of trust in platforms, brands, and institutions tracks the broader cultural recognition that the deal has shifted. Edelman Trust Barometer data, Pew studies on social media trust, and various consumer skepticism indices all show patterns consistent with the framework.

What’s the most useful thing for marketers to take from this? Treat audience access as a strategic asset, not a permanent right. Platforms that look free or cheap today are accumulating leverage that will be used later. Investments that build direct relationships with customers — owned channels, brand equity, community — appreciate exactly as the rented options depreciate.

Related Terms

• Platform decay
• Two-sided market
• Network effects
• Lock-in
• Rent-seeking
• Dark patterns
• Subscription fatigue
• Shrinkflation
• Walled garden
• Interoperability

Sources

• Doctorow, C. (2023). “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok.” Wired — https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
• Wikipedia, “Enshittification” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
• “The Cory Doctorow Doctrine,” Washington Monthly — https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/10/30/the-cory-doctorow-doctrine-enshittification/
• Krugman, P., “The General Theory of Enshittification” — https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-general-theory-of-enshittification
• “Cory Doctorow: ‘Enshittification’ or why platforms became useless,” GDI — https://gdi.ch/en/publications/trend-updates/cory-doctorow-enshittification-or-why-platforms-became-useless
• “Is Enshittification Our Biggest Marketing Challenge?” Mightybytes — https://www.mightybytes.com/insights/enshittification-marketing-challenges/
• “Enshittification and more from WARC’s 2026 Marketers Toolkit,” Edison Agency — https://edison.agency/news/warcs-2026-marketers-toolkit
• “Google, enshittification, and the lure of parasite brands,” Basic Arts — https://basicarts.org/google-enshittification-and-the-lure-of-parasite-brands/
• “Enshittification 101: Understanding the Decline of Digital Platforms,” The Unfuckening — https://theunfuckening.substack.com/p/enshitification-101-understanding
• “Overcoming Enshittification,” Elevate Next — https://www.elevate-next.com/blog/overcoming-enshittification
• “Enshittification: Cory Doctorow on the Collapse of Digital Platforms,” Medium — https://medium.com/@timventura/enshittification-cory-doctorow-on-the-collapse-of-digital-platforms-e12155ff0f08