Digital platforms that once felt indispensable—from search engines to social networks to shopping apps—are steadily degrading in ways everyday users can see and feel, a slide now widely labeled “enshittification”, Dec. 16, 2025.
The pattern isn’t random bad luck: it’s the predictable result of lock-in, two-sided markets, and profit incentives that slowly reroute value away from users and toward advertisers, partners, and shareholders.
Executive summary
Enshittification is not “the internet getting old.” It’s a business strategy: make the product great to attract users, then reshape it to favor paying customers, then extract value from everyone.
The word went mainstream for a reason. The American Dialect Society crowned it the 2023 Word of the Year, reflecting how broadly people recognize the pattern now (American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year announcement).
“Broken internet” isn’t just ads. It’s also pay-to-play ranking, dark patterns, degraded search and discovery, and intentional friction that makes leaving costly.
There are credible paths to “disenshittification.” The most scalable ones expand competition and make exit real through portability and interoperability.
Enshittification explained: the three-stage decline of digital platforms
“Enshittification” is a blunt word for a familiar experience: the app you loved becomes harder to use, noisier, more expensive, and less aligned with your interests—without any single update that explains the full collapse.
Technology critic Cory Doctorow popularized the term by describing a repeatable lifecycle in platform businesses: they start out serving users, then shift to serving business customers, then squeeze both. His Jan. 23, 2023 essay frames it as “how, exactly, platforms die” (Doctorow’s WIRED essay on the “enshittification” of TikTok).
The three stages, in plain English
Stage 1: Win users. Low friction, high usefulness, generous features. The goal is growth and habit formation.
Stage 2: Win business customers. More tools for advertisers, brands, sellers, and publishers—even if it degrades the user experience.
Stage 3: Extract from everyone. More ads, more fees, more algorithmic gatekeeping, more “pay to be seen.” Users and business customers both lose, but the platform captures more value in the short term.
By 2025, the concept had expanded beyond tech circles into a broader cultural diagnosis, including The New Yorker’s essay on “The Age of Enshittification”, which links the term’s popularity to widespread frustration with multiple services degrading at once.
What “a broken internet” looks like in real life
Enshittification doesn’t usually arrive as one dramatic policy change. It shows up as a thousand small frictions and trade-offs that all push in the same direction: less user agency, more extraction.
Discovery becomes pay-to-play. Search results, app store rankings, and social feeds increasingly privilege what’s monetizable over what’s relevant.
Choice shrinks behind “convenience.” Defaults and walled gardens narrow where you can go and what you can do, while making the closed ecosystem feel like the “safe” option.
Fees multiply and hide. New tiers, new surcharges, and new “service” fees appear, often framed as upgrades rather than takeaways.
Leaving gets expensive. Photos, purchases, social graphs, playlists, and professional networks become switching costs—so even unhappy users stay.
Why it keeps happening: incentives that reward extraction
The core reason platforms enshittify is simple: once a company has captured enough attention or dependency, it can change the rules. Digital services are unusually “tunable”—they can be re-ranked, re-priced, re-limited, and re-packaged quickly.
Lock-in is the hidden engine
If users can exit easily, enshittification is risky. If users can’t—because their data, community, or workflow is trapped—enshittification is profitable.
That’s why the most important question in any “broken internet” story is not “Why did this app add more ads?” It’s “What stops you from leaving?”
Two-sided markets create built-in hostage dynamics
Many platforms sit between two groups—users and advertisers, buyers and sellers, creators and audiences. When both sides depend on the platform, the company can raise the “take rate” by adding friction, fees, and preferential treatment for whoever pays.
The attention tax compounds over time
Once growth slows, the platform’s easiest path to higher revenue is to squeeze more out of the same users: more ad load, more subscriptions, more sponsored placements, more “boosting.” The product experience becomes a battleground for monetization rather than a tool built for the user.
A short timeline: warnings that predate the word “enshittification”
The internet didn’t “suddenly” break. The incentives behind today’s platform decay were flagged years before the term took off—often framed as concerns about closed ecosystems, fragmentation, and the shift from an open web to controlled gatekeepers.
Aug. 17, 2010: A provocative cover story argued the open web was being eclipsed by semiclosed apps and platforms (“The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.”).
Dec. 1, 2010: Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee warned that, if key trends proceed unchecked, the web “could be broken into fragmented islands” and urged continued open standards and neutrality (“Long Live the Web” in Scientific American).
March 23, 2012: A Pew Research Center project surveyed experts on “apps vs. the web,” capturing early anxieties about walled gardens and user power in an app-dominated future (Pew Research Center’s “The Future of Apps and Web”).
Taken together, those warnings form a throughline: the internet becomes most extractive when the dominant gateways are allowed to become unavoidable.
What comes next after enshittification
There’s no single fix, because enshittification is not one bug—it’s the output of a system. But there are interventions that change the incentive landscape enough to matter at scale.
1) Make markets more “contestable” so exit becomes real
The most direct antidote to platform decay is competition pressure. If a company can’t assume users and business customers are trapped, it has to keep the product meaningfully good.
In the EU, that idea is embedded in the Digital Markets Act, which aims to make digital markets “fairer and more contestable” by setting obligations and prohibitions for large “gatekeeper” platforms (European Commission overview of the Digital Markets Act).
2) Interoperability is not nostalgia—it’s leverage
Interoperability sounds technical, but the idea is human: you should be able to switch services without losing your identity, your relationships, or your data. Email works this way. The web works this way. Many modern platforms do not.
The Federal Trade Commission has emphasized that interoperability can enhance consumer choice and facilitate switching—and has argued that claims of “privacy and security” are sometimes used as a pretext to block competition (FTC staff discussion on interoperability, privacy and security).
3) A practical “disenshittification” checklist
If you want to judge whether a platform is getting better or worse—and whether policy or product changes are moving in the right direction—look for these signals:
Can users export their data in usable formats? Not just “download,” but move.
Can users bring their social graph? Or do they start over from zero?
Are defaults user-aligned? Or are they optimized for monetization?
Is ranking transparent enough to audit? Or is visibility effectively pay-to-play?
Are paid tiers additive? Or do they “paywall” what used to be standard?
What you can do right now
No individual can “opt out” of the modern internet entirely, and you shouldn’t have to. But you can reduce your exposure to the worst forms of extraction—especially the kind built on lock-in.
Diversify your defaults. Use multiple channels for communication and discovery so one platform can’t dictate your entire digital life.
Prefer tools that let you leave. If you can export your data, you can bargain—because your exit is credible.
Pay when it genuinely buys alignment. A service funded by you is often less incentivized to treat you as inventory.
Watch for “quality down, friction up.” When basic tasks take longer and upsells increase, the extraction phase has likely begun.
