“Enshittification” of Online Services
In 2023, the American Dialect Society chose “Enshittification” as Word of the Year. This word was made up to explain the noticeable (unnecessary) deterioration in the quality of online services and social media platforms.. The inventor of the term, Cory Doctorow, says that it happens in three stages.
Let’s take the following example of Facebook.
Stage One: Providing a good service for users
In 2006, Facebook opened to the general public. Back then, a lot of its target audience was on MySpace, a social platform created in 2003 by former punk singer Tom Anderson and marketing executive Chris DeWolfe. The co-founders ended up selling MySpace off to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for a massive $580 million USD. This was a fatal mistake. First, MySpace was not an adequate website; it glitched, it bugged, and there were way too many ads. Also, Rupert Murdoch was (and is) seen as this evil Australian billionaire. He, unsurprisingly, ended up selling the app to Specific Media which harvested users’ browsing history, demographic data, and other unique information for targeted advertising (Doctorow, 2023). Anywho, it was just seen as a lame app and people did not hesitate to move towards FaceBook once their friends got onto it. Facebook offered the following: less ads, no spying on and exploiting of its consumers, and allowed them to see what they wanted to see; posts from friends, artists, groups you joined. Haha. That’s ironic to say looking back, isn’t it? During this phase, the users lock each other into the app by making it a structural foundation of their relationships (Doctorow, 2025).
Stage 2: Prioritizing business customers and throwing users under the bus
On The Daily Show (2025), Doctorow said the following: “Mark Zuckerberg knows this and he understands that so long as you love your friends more than you hate him, he can make life worse for you and you’ll stay there”.
Remember around 3 sentences ago when I said Facebook claimed they wouldn’t spy on their consumers?
Wouldn’t you know it…. Of course they did! During step two, they sold all the harvested data to advertisers for targeted ads, and lowered the quality of the experience for users (Nikiforuk, 2024).
Stage 3: Platforms start screwing over advertisers.
This is the terminal phase. They take advantage of both users and advertisers in order to increase the platform’s own profit and increase the revenue brought to shareholders.
For users, this looks like having way too many ads, sponsored posts and high engagement junk (i.e. AI slop) while the interesting content you want to see gets buried down.
For companies it shows up as less engagement from their own followers: estimated organic reach went from an estimated 16% in 2012 to 1-2.2% in 2025 (“The Dramatic Decline of Facebook Organic Reach (2012-2025)”).
For advertisers, this shows up as paying for ineffective ads and their engagement falling into “fraud”. As in, their viewers are not natural users but rather bots (Cons, 2025).
In conclusion, services are getting “sh*ttier”, but prices go up, and user experience goes down. We have gotten to a point of monopolistic greed where we are no longer prioritized within our consumption, and are bound by complicated contracts (both legal and social) which prevent us from healthy and ethical connections and consumption.
Sources:
Cons, Roddy. “Cory Doctorow, Author, Explains ‘Enshittification’ and How Facebook Takes Advantage of Users: “We’re Locked To.” AS USA, 16 Dec. 2025, en.as.com/latest_news/cory-doctorow-author-explains-enshittification-and-how-facebook-takes-advantage-of-users-were-locked-to-each-other-f202512-n/#:~:text=Full%20enshittification%20hits%20in%20Stage,over%20the%20last%20few%20years.
“The Dramatic Decline of Facebook Organic Reach (2012-2025).” CampaignPros, campaignpros.io/learning-center/facebook-organic-reach-decline.
Nikiforuk, Andrew. “The Enshittification of Everything.” The Tyee, 15 July 2024, thetyee.ca/Analysis/2024/07/15/Enshittification-Everything.
Doctorow, Cory. “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok.” WIRED, 23 Jan. 2023, www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow.
