Enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author of The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse:
“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.”
“Enshittification,” Cory Doctorow’s coinage describing the process by which internet media platforms become increasingly unusable and un-quittable, has been named 2023’s “Digital Word of the Year.” Here, we break down what the term means and Doctorow’s solution to the internet’s relentless enshittification.
I’m not sure about Doctorow’s conclusion that enshittified services die. They will go worse but then rise to the minimum level of shit people can stomach and also use all their capital and influence and power to maintain their position. Including things like lobbying for more regulations that they can afford but newcomers can’t.
The obvious answer is the fediverse where accounts are not owned by one service. But it still has a long way to go and could fail, could be sabotaged, could splinter, could be regulated into oblivion, or could just fail to get enough people on board.