Cory Doctorow named it. You have lived it. Three times this week, probably.
The word entered the English language in November 2022, was crowned Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society in 2023, collected a second title from the Macquarie Dictionary in 2024, and became a book in 2025. A word that ugly does not win two dictionary awards by accident. It wins them because nothing else describes the experience as precisely.
The Promise
Every platform begins the same way: by being genuinely useful. Google found what you searched for. Amazon delivered what you ordered. Facebook showed you what your friends posted. The product was the product. No tricks required.
Users arrived because the thing worked. Businesses followed because the users were there. The flywheel turned. Marvellous, really.
The Decay
Then the platform matured. Shareholders wanted growth. Growth required monetisation. Monetisation required degradation. In that order. Every time.
Facebook. Organic reach for business pages was 16% in 2012. By 2014: 6.5%. By 2020: 5.2%. By 2024: 1.37%. You built an audience on their platform. They throttled it until you paid to reach your own followers. Rather generous of them.
Amazon. Sellers paid a third of revenue in fees in 2016. By 2022: over half. Fee revenue in 2024: $150 billion. Search for a product. The first results are whoever paid most. The best result is somewhere on page two, next to your will to continue scrolling.
Google. A longitudinal study by Bevendorff et al. confirmed what you already suspected. Top-ranking pages are simplified, repetitive, and saturated with affiliate content. The search engine fights the spam. The spam wins. The trend line goes one way.
Twitter became X. Verification went from identity to subscription. Blue checks: once a trust signal, now a payment receipt. Daily usage dropped 23%. Quite the rebranding.
The Mechanism
Doctorow's three-phase model is elegant in its inevitability.
This is not greed. It is structure. Venture capital demands growth. Growth demands monetisation. Monetisation degrades the product. Degradation is not a bug in the business model. It is the business model. The only variable is speed.
The Signal
You are inside the cycle when the free tier shrinks quarterly. When features move behind paywalls that did not exist at launch. When search results prioritise who paid, not what you searched. When the platform shows you what it wants, not what you asked for. When leaving costs more than staying, despite the decay.
The signals are not subtle. They are simply difficult to act on, because the network you built is the lock that keeps you.
The Pattern
Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter. Four platforms, four trajectories, one direction. Spotify throttled artist payouts while adding podcasts nobody asked for. LinkedIn adopted algorithmic reach throttling while selling premium tiers. Yes, this platform too. Rather self-aware, posting it here.
The pattern is not new. Doctorow merely named the mechanism that everyone recognised but nobody had a word for. The word is enshittification, and the reason it stuck is that no euphemism does the phenomenon justice.
"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."
The cycle is not new. The speed is.