The Feeling You Can't Shake

If you've spent any meaningful time online recently, you've probably felt it: a vague, persistent sense that the internet just doesn't work the way it used to. Search results feel gamed. Social feeds feel hostile. The apps you once relied on now seem designed to frustrate you into paying, clicking, or simply enduring. You're not imagining it — and you're not alone.

The term that has captured this collective frustration is enshittification, coined by writer and digital rights advocate Cory Doctorow. It describes a specific lifecycle that online platforms follow, one that explains why every digital space eventually turns against its users. But this isn't just a clever neologism making the rounds. It's a structural analysis of how incentive misalignment systematically degrades the platforms that mediate our digital lives — and understanding it is essential for anyone who builds, works on, or simply uses the internet.

The Three-Phase Lifecycle of Platform Decay

Enshittification isn't random. It follows a predictable, almost mechanical pattern that plays out across platforms regardless of their stated mission or founding ethos. The cycle has three distinct phases.

Phase One: Be Good to Users

A platform launches and needs users badly. It offers genuine value — useful features, generous free tiers, minimal advertising, strong community tools. The platform operates at a loss, subsidized by venture capital or a parent company's war chest. Every design decision prioritizes user acquisition and delight. The platform needs you, so it treats you well.

This phase is why people feel nostalgic for early versions of platforms. The platform was genuinely better then — not because the founders were saints, but because the economic model demanded it.

Phase Two: Squeeze Users, Reward Suppliers

Once a critical mass of users is locked in through network effects, habit, or switching costs, the platform shifts. Now it needs suppliers — advertisers, sellers, creators, content producers — more than it needs to keep users happy. The user experience degrades: more ads, algorithmic feeds that prioritize engagement over quality, paywalls where there were none. Meanwhile, suppliers get sweetheart deals, subsidized distribution, and priority access to the audience the platform spent Phase One assembling.

Phase Three: Squeeze Everyone, Reward Shareholders

Once suppliers are also locked in, the platform squeezes both sides. Users see more intrusive monetization, worse discovery, and enshittified features. Suppliers face higher fees, reduced organic reach, and mandatory ad spend to reach the audiences they built. The surplus value flows upward to shareholders and executives. The platform has become a toll booth on a road that users and suppliers built together.

Why This Keeps Happening

The cycle isn't a coincidence. It's the logical outcome of several structural forces working in concert.

• Network effects create lock-in. Once your friends, your content, or your business lives on a platform, leaving is costly. Platforms know this and exploit it.
• Surveillance advertising economics. When the business model is attention extraction sold to advertisers, user experience is a cost center, not a product. Degradation is a feature, not a bug.
• Financialization pressure. Public companies face quarterly earnings pressure. Private companies face investor exit timelines. Both create relentless incentives to extract more value from existing users rather than create new value.
• Regulatory vacuum. In most jurisdictions, there are few meaningful constraints on platform behavior toward users. Terms of service are written by the platforms, for the platforms.

The result is a digital ecosystem where the economic ratchet only turns in one direction: toward extraction.

The Signals Are Everywhere

You don't need an academic paper to spot enshittification. The signals are embedded in daily digital life.

1. Search degradation. Finding actual information through major search engines increasingly requires appending modifiers or switching to alternative indices. The default is SEO-optimized content designed to sell, not inform.
2. Algorithmic hostility. Feeds that once showed you what you followed now show you what the algorithm wants you to engage with — which is rarely what improves your life.
3. Feature removal disguised as updates. Features users love are quietly removed or paywalled, while new features nobody asked for are pushed to serve engagement metrics.
4. Enshittification as a verb. The term has entered mainstream vocabulary because the experience is universal. When millions of people independently arrive at the same diagnosis, structural analysis is confirming lived experience.

What Comes After Enshittification

Here's the uncomfortable truth: enshittification works — in the short term. Platforms that degrade user experience often see revenue climb, shareholder value increase, and executive compensation rise. The costs are externalized onto users and suppliers who have no recourse.

But there are limits. When extraction crosses a threshold, alternative behaviors emerge.

• Migration to smaller platforms. Users are increasingly willing to fragment across niche communities rather than tolerate degraded mainstream experiences.
• Open protocols over walled gardens. The growing interest in federated, interoperable protocols isn't just ideological — it's a direct response to platform decay. When you can't trust the platform, you need exit options.
• Regulatory momentum. Digital markets legislation in the EU and similar efforts elsewhere are attempting to address the structural conditions that enable enshittification — interoperability mandates, algorithmic transparency requirements, and restrictions on self-preferencing.
• Creator and business diversification. Smart creators and businesses are reducing platform dependency, building direct audience relationships through owned channels rather than rented audiences.

Practical Takeaways for Digital Citizens

Understanding enshittification isn't just diagnosis — it's strategy. Here's how to operate in a decaying digital landscape.

Build on owned infrastructure. Your website, your email list, your direct relationships. Anything that lives on a platform you don't control is a rental that the landlord can — and eventually will — reprice.

Diversify your digital presence. No single platform should be your sole distribution channel. When a platform enters Phase Two or Three of the cycle, you need alternatives already established.

Support interoperable alternatives. Open protocols, federated networks, and standards-based tools aren't just idealistic — they're structural hedges against enshittification. Use them, contribute to them, advocate for them.

Recognize the pattern early. When a platform starts making changes that benefit advertisers or suppliers at your expense, the cycle has begun. Don't convince yourself it will reverse. Plan your exit.

The Internet After Enshittification

The internet isn't broken beyond repair — but it is broken in ways that require structural understanding, not just individual frustration. Enshittification gives us a framework for seeing the pattern, naming the mechanism, and building alternatives that resist it.

The platforms of the future won't avoid enshittification through good intentions. They'll avoid it through architecture — distributed systems, interoperable protocols, and business models that don't depend on extracting maximum value from captive users. The next era of the internet belongs to systems designed so that the economic ratchet can turn in more than one direction.

The question isn't whether current platforms will continue degrading. The question is whether we'll build and support alternatives before they degrade beyond usefulness.