Enshittification (of Internet Platforms)

‘The great Enshittification’

The American Dialect Society selected it as the Word of the Year 2023 (https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/) and it’s been a favourite of the Hacker News community for quite a while. Enshittification is the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets.

The term was coined by the writer and activist Cory Doctorow in November 2022. Doctorow has also used the term platform decay to describe a similar concept.

I have recently come across a really interesting talk he gave at last year’s DEF CON 31 conference, during which he explains the concept and related dynamics further.

Here is how it works:

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. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Examples of enshittification include services and products provided by big tech companies like Amazon, Bandcamp, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Reddit.