Enshittification

2023catchphraseclassic

Enshittification is a term coined by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow in January 2023 to describe how online platforms rot over time, first serving users, then business customers, and finally squeezing both to pad shareholder pockets. The word went from a niche tech blog post to the American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year, applied to Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, and Twitter under Elon Musk.

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Overview

Enshittification is Cory Doctorow's term for the way digital platforms rot as they age, growing worse for the people who use them while extracting more value for shareholders1. Doctorow argued that platforms move through three stages: first they are good to users, then they abuse users to please business customers, then they abuse business customers to claw back the value for themselves, and then they die1.

The word caught on because it named something users had felt for years but lacked a label for, the slow decay of Google search results, Amazon product pages, and social feeds crowded out by sponsored slots and algorithm chasing3. Doctorow tied the decay to the two sided nature of platforms, where a company sits between buyers and sellers and can quietly rebalance how much value each side gets by tweaking rankings, fees, and defaults2. Coverage in Wired, The Guardian, and the Financial Times pushed the term out of tech circles and into general vocabulary within months of the original post23.

How It Spread

Within weeks of the Pluralistic post, Wired republished the essay under a cleaner headline about TikTok and platform decay, giving the term a much larger audience2. In March 2023, The Guardian's John Naughton wrote a column arguing that enshittification finally gave readers the vocabulary for 25 years of quiet internet degradation, from Google search to Instagram to Facebook feeds3.

Elon Musk's Twitter turned into the everyday case study people used to explain the word. The $7 blue checkmarks, the shutdown of free API access, and the timeline reshuffles were cited as textbook enshittification4. Twitter user @SethAbrams argued in April 2023 that the word deserved a spot in the Oxford English Dictionary, quote tweeting @tithenai's post about the API paywall as the classic example4. Both posts spread widely inside the tech Twitter community.

On January 5, 2024, the American Dialect Society voted enshittification both the Digital Word of the Year and the overall Word of the Year for 20234. That vote pushed the word out of tech blogs and into mainstream news roundups, dictionary shortlists, and boardroom slide decks about product strategy.

How to Use This Meme

People typically use enshittification as a noun ('this is peak enshittification') or as a verb ('Reddit got enshittified after the API changes'). It is most often deployed to call out a specific platform decision that hurts users to boost margins: ads inside organic search results, forced subscriptions, worse recommendation feeds, or paywalls around features that used to be free3. On Urban Dictionary, definitions describe it as the pattern in which products decline in quality to line shareholder pockets, with examples covering YouTube ads, PlayStation Plus price hikes, and predatory game design5.

Frequently Asked Questions

Enshittification

2023catchphraseclassic

Enshittification is a term coined by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow in January 2023 to describe how online platforms rot over time, first serving users, then business customers, and finally squeezing both to pad shareholder pockets. The word went from a niche tech blog post to the American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year, applied to Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, and Twitter under Elon Musk.

slang memes word of the year memes silicon valley satire memes tech humor memes internet slang origin memes

Overview

Enshittification is Cory Doctorow's term for the way digital platforms rot as they age, growing worse for the people who use them while extracting more value for shareholders1. Doctorow argued that platforms move through three stages: first they are good to users, then they abuse users to please business customers, then they abuse business customers to claw back the value for themselves, and then they die1.

The word caught on because it named something users had felt for years but lacked a label for, the slow decay of Google search results, Amazon product pages, and social feeds crowded out by sponsored slots and algorithm chasing3. Doctorow tied the decay to the two sided nature of platforms, where a company sits between buyers and sellers and can quietly rebalance how much value each side gets by tweaking rankings, fees, and defaults2. Coverage in Wired, The Guardian, and the Financial Times pushed the term out of tech circles and into general vocabulary within months of the original post23.

How It Spread

Within weeks of the Pluralistic post, Wired republished the essay under a cleaner headline about TikTok and platform decay, giving the term a much larger audience2. In March 2023, The Guardian's John Naughton wrote a column arguing that enshittification finally gave readers the vocabulary for 25 years of quiet internet degradation, from Google search to Instagram to Facebook feeds3.

Elon Musk's Twitter turned into the everyday case study people used to explain the word. The $7 blue checkmarks, the shutdown of free API access, and the timeline reshuffles were cited as textbook enshittification4. Twitter user @SethAbrams argued in April 2023 that the word deserved a spot in the Oxford English Dictionary, quote tweeting @tithenai's post about the API paywall as the classic example4. Both posts spread widely inside the tech Twitter community.

On January 5, 2024, the American Dialect Society voted enshittification both the Digital Word of the Year and the overall Word of the Year for 20234. That vote pushed the word out of tech blogs and into mainstream news roundups, dictionary shortlists, and boardroom slide decks about product strategy.

How to Use This Meme

People typically use enshittification as a noun ('this is peak enshittification') or as a verb ('Reddit got enshittified after the API changes'). It is most often deployed to call out a specific platform decision that hurts users to boost margins: ads inside organic search results, forced subscriptions, worse recommendation feeds, or paywalls around features that used to be free3. On Urban Dictionary, definitions describe it as the pattern in which products decline in quality to line shareholder pockets, with examples covering YouTube ads, PlayStation Plus price hikes, and predatory game design5.

Frequently Asked Questions