Enshittification: why platforms get worse, explained
Enshittification is Cory Doctorow's term for the predictable way platforms decay: good to users first, then degraded to favour advertisers and sellers, then extracting from everyone until only a husk remains. It was Word of the Year in 2023 because everyone recognised it. The root cause is structural: [the users are not the ones paying](/social-media-without-ads).
You have felt it even if you did not have the word for it: the app that used to be good, and got worse. The search results that became adverts. The feed that filled with strangers. The platform you loved that, year by year, started to feel like it was working against you. There is now a precise term for this decay, it caught on so fast it won Word of the Year, and understanding it explains an enormous amount about why the internet feels worse than it used to.
The term is enshittification. It is not mine; it belongs to the writer Cory Doctorow. But it describes the exact problem I built a company to avoid, so I will explain it faithfully and then, clearly flagged, say where 142 sits in relation to it.
The three stages
Doctorow’s insight, coined around 2022 and named Word of the Year in 2023, is that platform decay is not random. It follows a pattern, in roughly three stages.
Stage one: good to users. A new platform is generous to the people using it. The feed is full of what you want, the search is clean, the prices are low, the service is delightful. This is how it attracts a large user base and locks it in, because once your friends, your photos, your history are all there, leaving gets costly.
Stage two: good to business customers, at users’ expense. Once the users are captured, the platform shifts to pleasing the people who actually pay it: advertisers, sellers, partners. Your feed fills with ads and promoted content; the clean search fills with paid placements; the experience degrades, but you stay, because leaving is hard. Value is being moved from you to the business customers.
Stage three: extracting from everyone. Eventually the platform turns on its business customers too, raising their costs and squeezing their margins, clawing back the value it once handed them. Now it serves only itself, extracting from users and customers alike, until it is a hollowed-out husk that people use out of habit and lock-in rather than love. Then, often, it dies or is abandoned.
You can map this onto platform after platform, which is exactly why the word resonated.
Why it happens
Enshittification is not caused by villainy or incompetence. It is caused by structure, specifically by the gap between who uses a platform and who pays it.
When users do not pay, they are not the customer; they are the inventory. The platform’s duty is to its actual customers, the advertisers and sellers, so when user experience and customer revenue conflict, revenue wins, and the experience degrades. Lock-in is what makes this possible: the platform can afford to make things worse for you precisely because it is hard for you to leave. The decay is the rational result of an ad-or-marketplace funding model meeting a captured audience. It is the business model ageing in public.
This is also why the pattern is so consistent across otherwise different companies. They are not making the same mistakes; they are following the same incentives.
Can platforms avoid it?
In principle, the antidotes are the inverse of the causes: do not lock users in (make leaving easy, support data export), and do not make your money from a customer whose interests conflict with the users’. Some structures resist enshittification better than others, donation-funded nonprofits, open protocols, and businesses paid directly by the people they serve, because in those models there is no second customer to favour at the users’ expense. We discuss the funding-model logic in our guide to social media without ads.
The honest caveat is that no structure is immune to bad decisions, and a subscription business can still degrade if it gets greedy or complacent. Structure reduces the incentive to enshittify; it does not abolish the possibility. The claim is about which way the gravity points, not a guarantee.
Where 142 fits
142 is built against the mechanism of enshittification. There is no second customer: 142 is paid by its users and only its users, with no advertisers or sellers whose interests could be favoured at your expense, so stage two, the degradation of the user experience to please someone else, has no one to please. And we build for the opposite of lock-in: European data law obliges proper export, and our whole pitch is that you stay because the product is good, not because leaving is hard. Our only revenue depends on you continuing to find 142 worth paying for, which points the incentive at keeping it good. That is not a promise of perfection; it is a structure where getting worse is against our own interest. The fuller argument is in why 142.
Summary
Enshittification, Cory Doctorow’s Word-of-the-Year term, names the predictable decay of platforms: good to users first, then degraded to favour paying business customers, then extracting from everyone until only a husk remains. The cause is structural, the gap between who uses a platform and who pays it, combined with lock-in that makes leaving costly. The antidotes are the inverse: no conflicted second customer, and easy exit instead of lock-in. No model is immune to bad decisions, but a service paid directly by the people it serves, with no advertiser to please and no lock-in to exploit, points its incentives towards staying good rather than getting worse.
frequently asked questions
What does enshittification mean?
It is a term coined by Cory Doctorow for the way platforms predictably decay: first they are good to users to attract them, then they degrade the user experience to favour paying business customers, then they extract value from those customers too, until the platform serves only itself. It names the common pattern of apps getting worse over time.
Who coined the word enshittification?
The writer and activist Cory Doctorow, around 2022, in essays describing platform decay. The term spread rapidly and was named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society in 2023, and added to major dictionaries, because it captured a pattern people recognised instantly.
Why do apps get worse over time?
Usually because of the gap between who uses them and who pays. When users do not pay, the platform's real customers are advertisers or sellers, so when user experience conflicts with their revenue, revenue wins. Lock-in lets the platform degrade the experience without losing users. The decay is the funding model ageing.
Can a platform avoid enshittification?
It can reduce the risk by not locking users in and by not relying on a paying customer whose interests conflict with users', for example through donations, open protocols or direct subscriptions. No structure is fully immune to bad decisions, but some point the incentives towards keeping the product good rather than extracting from it.
Is enshittification inevitable?
For platforms built on advertising or marketplace fees with captured users, the pressures towards it are strong and consistent, which is why the pattern recurs. It is not a law of nature, though: different funding structures and a genuine commitment to easy exit can resist it. The model shapes how likely it is.
How does 142 avoid enshittification?
By removing its mechanism: there is no second customer to favour, since 142 is paid only by its users, and it builds for easy exit rather than lock-in, with proper data export. Its revenue depends on the product staying worth paying for, which aligns the incentive with quality. This reduces the pressure to enshittify; it is structure, not a guarantee of perfection.