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Let's bring to the fore the topic of enshittification, a recent term that aims to explain why online platforms and services feel like they're getting worse over time
Following last week’s discussion of dark or deceptive patterns online, I thought it might be good to expand a bit further outward into a phenomenon that affects nearly every online platform out there, especially when it comes to making life worse for the average consumer of an online service or site.
Today’s Tech Thoughts aims to bring to the fore the topic of enshittification, a more recent bit of terminology that aims to explain why online platforms and services feel like they’re getting worse over time.
What’s this about enshittification?
Enshittification, a term coined by author Cory Doctorow in 2022, is a phenomenon — or perhaps it’s more accurately a trend by now — in which an online service or platform gradually decays in terms of quality.
The process of enshittification occurs when an online platform starts off with a tremendous value proposition for an average consumer, encouraging its use. The value proposition of a platform for a common user is slowly eroded, however, to better serve businesses. In the closing steps, the service degrades even further for both users and businesses as shareholders are prioritized.
As Doctorow put it in a January 2023 Wired article, “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.”
This death isn’t quite literal, however. Some services shamble onwards despite being degraded to a point of near-uselessness, but the idea stands: the enshittification of a service or platform is no fun for many users, especially when you consider that last week’s talk of dark patterns form a small part — or perhaps are a symptom of — enshittification.
What does enshittification look like?
If you’re wondering what enshittification looks like, reflect on your everyday use of your smartphone or computer. Let’s say, for instance, the ability to search for things, colloquially known as Googling it.
Google started off as a search engine providing results with minimal ads on the platform. As its userbase grew, Google then increased advertising, introduced search engine optimization, and eventually, installed artificial intelligence in search to try and guess what you want instead of giving you the tools to search for something yourself.
Amazon, the now-ubiquitous online shopping service, was one of the major triggers for discussing enshittification back in the day, As I remember it, it started off by selling books, then it branched out into providing a means for smaller businesses to sell their product. This movement to support businesses also allowed Amazon to place in more ads and get businesses to spend on advertising and optimization.
If you’ve been using social media for more than a few years, think about how social media platforms like Facebook, or X, or TikTok gradually waited until they had a massive userbase to try and monetize user and influencer participation accordingly.
Worse still, it feels as if everything owned by a corporate interest is bound to follow this life cycle of enshittification eventually, and users are left adopting services whose user experiences eventually suck to the point of worthlessness.
Disenshittifying things will take work
The enshittification process, while seemingly inevitable, is not absolute.
Doctorow himself, in a lecture, said there are ways to fight back and “overthrow” enshittification, and Trump’s trade war may even help in pushing countries to fight back by having them prioritize making laws that actively make it more difficult to enshittify things.
Doctorow wrote, “As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.”
A video of that lecture is available here, but some major takeaways from Doctorow’s essays point to some potential remedies.
Laws breaking up monopolies and encouraging competition would be good.
Lessening the opacity by which a company operates, and making its rules and processes more visible and more readily available to scrutiny would be great.
Further, especially in terms of consumer electronics or purchasable items, allowing third-parties to modify or otherwise tinker with things they’ve bought — something we normally ascribe to ownership — to their benefit would also help too.
The truth is, disenshittification will take work, and quite a lot of political will. But it’s work worth doing, if only for the ability to have more agency in our lives and to reduce the amount of low-quality service we now get as consumers. – Rappler.com
