Enshittification, also called platform decay, is a term describing how two sided online platforms tend to deteriorate in quality over time. Under the pattern the term names, a platform first offers a high quality service to attract users, then shifts to favor business customers such as advertisers or third party sellers, and finally degrades the experience for everyone in order to maximize returns for its owners and shareholders. The degradation is often carried out through continual small adjustments to the platform's rules and algorithms, described as twiddling, and users are frequently locked in by high switching costs and network effects that make leaving difficult even as quality falls. The term was popularized by the Canadian writer Cory Doctorow starting in 2022 and was later named word of the year by the American Dialect Society for 2023 and by Australia's Macquarie Dictionary for 2024. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Core MechanismThe pattern proceeds in stages: a platform first offers a high quality service to attract and lock in users, then shifts value toward business customers such as advertisers and third party sellers once those users are captive, and finally extracts value for its own shareholders at the expense of both groups, since high switching costs prevent either from leaving even after quality declines. 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia, Enshittification
Lead section
The American Dialect Society selected enshittification as its 2023 Word of the Year, with Australia's Macquarie Dictionary following suit for 2024.
Lead paragraph, three-stage description of the pattern
Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users. Over time, they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers. Ultimately, they degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximise short-term profits for shareholders.
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