A few days ago I wrote about the enshittification of the music industry by apps like Spotify.

But I neglected to mention what enshittification actually is.

Enshittification is a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow in 2022 in this blog post titled “Social Quitting”, and expanded upon the idea in a blog post titled “Tiktok’s Enshittification”.

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.

Enshittification is (Probably) Coming

The depressing thing about this concept is just how much economic sense it makes if platforms don’t care about their users. If the owners/investors simply want to make a quick billion dollars or double their investment, then this pattern of behavior makes perfect sense.

The list of companies, apps, and services that have been hit by enshittification is long (and will likely continue to get longer every day), but here are some of the biggest and most obvious ones:

• Amazon: Remember when Amazon sold things cheaper than you could get them at a physical store? Or when Prime Shipping was guaranteed 2-days? Or when the first 6 search results weren’t ads? Me too, and it seems like those days are gone.
• Facebook: Several years ago Facebook’s algorithm pushed posts from media companies into user’s feeds, increasing these companies reliance on Facebook for traffic. Then Facebook started prioritizing “boosted” (paid) promotional posts, which it calls “recommended” posts to users.
• Google Search: Even before the latest wave of “AI Assisted Search”, Google has been moving down the enshittification trail. From taking up most of the search results page with links to various Google properties (instead of external websites), or summarizing information and answering questions directly on the search page (depriving websites of clicks and revenue), to increasing the number of ads on any given search page. It will be interesting to see how Google’s behavior may change in the future once the consequences of the Google monopoly trial are announced.
• Reddit: Once Reddit announced its IPO, it increased its API prices so much that almost every single 3rd-party Reddit app was forced to shutdown. In response, users and (unpaid) site moderators were forced to use the 1st-party Reddit app that was much worse than the 3rd-party alternatives that were shut down. The move to price out the 3rd-party apps was done seemingly since 3rd-party apps could hide ads, and Reddit has begun selling its users’ data to Google exclusively.
• Smart TVs: Not just confined to online apps, smart TVs are essentially advertising machines. Content companies like Netflix pay the TV maker to show ads for Netflix shows, and TV makers also get to sell the data collected from their internet-connected TVs. It seems like the least ad-filled smart TV option is currently an Apple TV, although those are among the most expensive streaming boxes.