You know the feeling. You open an app you’ve used for years, and something is off. A new banner ad. A darker pattern. A feature you loved, quietly buried three menus deep. You tell yourself it’s just you — maybe you’re getting older, crankier, harder to please.
It’s not you. It was never you.
Software doesn’t decay. It gets hollowed out — deliberately, systematically, by people who know exactly what they’re doing.
The word for it is enshittification, and it’s the most honest term the internet has produced in a decade. Coined by Cory Doctorow, it describes a pattern so predictable you could set your watch by it: a platform starts by being genuinely useful to users. It builds trust, loyalty, a sense that this thing was made for you. Then, once the audience is locked in, the platform starts extracting — from advertisers first, then from the users themselves. The product doesn’t improve. The monetization does.
Think about the apps you used to love. The search engine that used to find things. The social feed that used to show you your friends. The shopping site that used to have reviews you could trust. They didn’t lose their way. They found a new one — and you weren’t on it.
Here’s what most people get wrong: they blame bad design. They blame lazy developers. They blame incompetence. But the people running these platforms aren’t stupid. They’re optimizing — just not for you. Every dark pattern, every intrusive ad, every feature stripped away and sold back as a subscription — that’s not failure. That’s strategy.
The product isn’t getting worse. The product was never the product. You were.
This is the twist nobody wants to accept: enshittification isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the system working exactly as designed. When a company’s incentives reward quarterly growth over durable quality, the math always points the same direction. Squeeze the users. They won’t leave — switching costs are too high, the alternatives are sparse, and everyone else is enshittifying too. So the pressure increases. And increases. And increases.
You’ve felt this. You open your phone and the experience is somehow worse than last month. Not broken — just slightly more hostile. A nudge toward the paid tier. A suggestion you didn’t ask for. A notification designed to manufacture anxiety rather than deliver value.
This is managed decline dressed up as innovation.
And it’s everywhere. Search results are ads with answers sprinkled between them. Operating systems ship with bloatware you can’t remove. Productivity tools bury essential features behind paywalls while adding AI features nobody asked for. The pattern is so consistent it’s almost comforting — at least you know what’s coming.
When every platform treats its users as a resource to be mined rather than a relationship to be maintained, quality becomes a competitive disadvantage.
That’s the part that should make you angry. Not that companies are greedy — we knew that. But that the entire incentive structure of modern software actively punishes the kind of long-term thinking that produces good products. A company that invests in durability, that refuses to exploit its users, that builds something meant to last — that company gets acquired, outgrown, or starved of capital. The market doesn’t reward restraint. It rewards extraction.
So what do we do? First, we stop pretending this is normal. We stop accepting the slow erosion as the cost of progress. We name it when we see it — in product reviews, in feedback forms, in conversations with friends deciding which tools to adopt. We support the independents, the open-source projects, the companies that still believe a product should serve the person using it. And when a platform crosses the line, we leave — even when it’s inconvenient, even when there’s no perfect alternative.
Because here’s the thing about enshittification: it requires your complicity. It requires you to stay. It requires you to shrug and adapt and lower your expectations until you can’t remember what good software felt like.
The most powerful thing you can do as a user is refuse to forget what the product was like before they decided you were the product.
Remember. And act accordingly.
FAQ
Q: Isn't this just how business works? Companies need to make money.
A: Yes, companies need revenue. But there's a difference between sustainable monetization and extracting rent from captive users who can't easily leave. The former builds value; the latter destroys it. Enshittification is the latter, dressed up as the former.
Q: So what am I supposed to do — stop using all software?
A: No. But you can be intentional: favor open-source alternatives, pay for tools that respect you, abandon platforms that cross your line, and most importantly, stop being surprised when it happens. Awareness is the first defense.
Q: Is there any counterexample — a platform that resisted this?
A: A few. Wikipedia, Signal, and some indie developers have held the line. But they're exceptions precisely because the incentive structure works against them. Their survival is proof it's possible — and proof of how rare it is.