What is enshittification?
It’s not just you. The products you rely on really are getting worse, fast. And not by accident.
Enshittification /ɛnˌʃɪt.ɪ.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/ · noun
The pattern by which online platforms get worse on purpose. First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they become a giant pile of shit. And the worst part is, they don’t even die. They shamble on as zombie platforms, and everyone stays trapped inside.
The word was coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022. It was the American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year and the Macquarie Dictionary’s 2024 Word of the Year, and became the subject of his 2025 book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
The three stages
- Stage One: Good to Users. The platform runs at a loss to be great: cheap rides, chronological feeds, generous free tiers, no ads. It has a surplus, and it spends that surplus on you. Until you’re locked in.
- Stage Two: Good to Business Customers. Growth slows, so the surplus gets taken from users and handed to advertisers, sellers, and partners: algorithmic feeds, rising ad loads, pay-to-play reach, junk fees. Leaving would mean losing your friends, your followers, your files. Those are switching costs, and the platform is counting on them.
- Stage Three: A Giant Pile of Shit. With users and business customers both locked in, the platform claws back value from everyone at once: price hikes, paywalled features, degraded quality, the locks tightened another notch. And the platform doesn’t die. It just keeps shambling.
None of this is a natural lifecycle, and none of it is inevitable. Platforms get worse when the people running them calculate they can get away with it, and they stop when something stops them. The constant back-end adjustment of prices, rankings, and reach even has a name: twiddling. And the question that decides everything is whether anything constrains the hand on the knobs: competition, regulation, interoperability, or workers willing to say no.
How a platform goes to shit
The same story, as the sequence of choices it actually is. At every fork there is a door marked “stay good”. Watch which one gets picked:
You build something people love. The surplus flows to users.
Growth slows. Where does next quarter come from?
“Stay good to users”
↖ exits. rare.“Twiddle: more ads, paid reach, data harvest”
always picked ↓Business customers depend on you now. Their margins?
“Keep the deal fair”
↖ exits. rarer still.“Claw it back: junk fees, pay-to-play, paywalls”
always picked ↓💩 A giant pile of shit. And it still doesn’t die.
What it looks like in practice
The most decayed platforms on the documented record right now. Each links to a dated, fully sourced case file:
- Reddit88 · TERMINAL
- Twitter / X72 · SEVERE
- TikTok71 · SEVERE
- Facebook70 · SEVERE
- Discord69 · SEVERE
Browse all 42 case files in the index →
Or skip straight to the alternatives →
How we measure it
Each company’s severity (0–100) is computed mechanically from its documented record: dated symptoms, each citing a primary source, weighted by category (privacy and lock-in weigh most), source quality, and recency, with diminishing returns, so repetition can’t saturate the scale. A score of 100 is reserved for platforms that actually shut down, and almost none do. Enshittified platforms rarely die; they just keep shambling. The full rubric, including how publications are graded, is on the methodology page.
Why this site exists
It’s a simple story: I kept falling for it. A company shows up and does something genuinely great, and you fall for it honestly. You build your habits around it. Then the chipping starts. A fee here, a feature gone there, an ad where your friends used to be. The thing you loved becomes the thing you tolerate, then the thing you resent. And somehow you’re still paying for it.
I spent years in the airline business and watched it happen from inside an entire industry: everything unbundled, the seat, the bag, the legroom, all of it turned into line items. Not because flying got better. Because someone calculated the squeeze would be tolerated. Once you’ve seen that playbook up close, you see it everywhere. The index is the same play, run by different teams.
So when Doctorow gave the pattern a name, building this felt obvious: take enshittification from a word you’ve maybe heard to a record you can check. Full honesty: I still use some of the companies on this index. That’s not hypocrisy; that’s the point. The lock-in is real, the switching costs are real, and pretending we can all just quit is its own kind of lie.
Will the companies listen if enough of us keep receipts? Probably not. But records outlast spin, and every person who learns the pattern becomes a little harder to play. Document everything. Name the pattern. Keep the receipts. And if nothing else, we can all complain together.