Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a way to describe the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Examples of alleged enshittification have included Google Search, Amazon, Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, and Twitter. Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking.The term enshittification was coined by Cory Doctorow in January 2023 in a blog post, later republished as an article in Wired, in which he wrote:
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. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
The word gained traction...