From social media feeds and search engines to streaming platforms and subscription apps, users are increasingly noticing how digital services change over time. One unusual word has emerged to capture this growing frustration with the modern internet: enshittification.
Word of the Day: ENSHITTIFICATION
Pronunciation: UK /ɪnˌʃɪt.ɪ.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/ or US /ɛnˌʃɪt.ə.fəˈkeɪ.ʃən/
Meaning:
Enshittification is a term describing the gradual degradation of an online platform or digital service over time. It refers to a pattern where a service first operates to attract users, then shifts to extract value for corporate business customers, and finally degrades its product to extract maximum value for its shareholders, leaving a worse experience for everyone.
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Example for daily usage:
- "The social media platform used to show posts from friends, but after rounds of enshittification, my feed is just sponsored ads and suggested viral clips."
- "Users are switching to open-source alternatives to escape the inevitable enshittification of subscription-based software."
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Origin and history:
The term was coined in 2022 by the Canadian-British writer, blogger, and internet activist Cory Doctorow. He formally outlined the concept in a blog post and a widely read 2023 article for Wired magazine.
Doctorow defined a precise three-stage decay cycle:
- To users: Platforms start by offering great, loss-leading services to build a captive user base.
- To business customers: Once users are locked in, platforms change their rules to favor business partners (such as advertisers or third-party sellers).
- To shareholders: Once business clients are also locked in, the platform clawbacks value from both sides to maximize profit for its owners, turning the service into a degraded, monetised shell of its former self.
The American Dialect Society voted "enshittification" as its 2023 Word of the Year, cementing its place in modern economic and tech vocabulary.
Cultural significance and modern usage:
While born as vulgar internet slang, "enshittification" quickly gained formal traction among economists, tech journalists, and policy makers to describe algorithmic platform capitalism. It fills a specific gap in the English language, capturing the frustration of modern digital life—where streaming services add advertisements, search engines prioritize paid links over organic results, and apps lock basic features behind paywalls.
Interesting facts:
Formal Vulgarity: Despite containing a profane root, the term has been used in parliamentary debates, corporate law journals, and academic papers because no clean synonym quite captures the specific economic mechanism Doctorow described.
Cory’s Alternative: For formal settings where profanity isn't permitted, Doctorow proposed the polite synonym "platform decay."
Examples from literature & journalism:
- "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their corporate customers; finally, they abuse those corporate customers to claw back all the value for themselves. It is enshittification." — Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic (2022).
- "The enshittification of search engines has made finding reliable, non-sponsored information a surprisingly tedious task." — The Financial Times (2024)
- "Subscribers are facing the steady enshittification of streaming apps as prices rise while content libraries shrink." — The Guardian (2025)
Synonyms:
Platform decay
Monetisation decay
Quality degradation
Commercial erosion
Antonyms:
Optimization
Value addition
Refinement
User-centric improvement
Read more Word of the day here.
Published: 06 Sept 2026, 08:00 am IST
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