What is enshittification?

It’s not just you. The products you rely on really are getting worse, and it isn’t an 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. Even then it rarely dies, because leaving is exactly what it spent two stages making hard.

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:

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
• Discord68 · 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 ever do. The full rubric, including how publications are graded, is on the methodology page.

Why this site exists

Honestly? Because I kept falling for it. A company shows up with something genuinely great, you build your habits around it, and then the chipping starts: a fee here, a feature gone there, an ad where your friends used to be. Eventually the thing you loved turns into something you merely tolerate, and somehow you’re still paying for it every month.

I also spent years in the airline business, which meant watching this happen from the inside. The seat, the bag, the legroom: everything got unbundled and turned into a line item, not because flying got better but because someone had calculated exactly how much squeezing people would put up with. Once you’ve watched that playbook up close, you start seeing it everywhere. Most of this index is the same play run by different teams.

So when Doctorow gave the pattern a name, building this site felt like the obvious next step: turn enshittification from a word you’ve maybe heard into a record you can actually check. And yes, I still use some of the companies on this list. That isn’t hypocrisy so much as proof of the problem: the lock-in is real, the switching costs are real, and pretending we can all just quit is its own kind of lie.

Will any of these companies change because a website kept receipts? Probably not. But records outlast spin, and everyone who learns to spot the pattern gets a little harder to play. If nothing else, we can all complain together, with citations.