Details: Written by: Manuel Häusler; Last Updated: 31 August 2026

The term Enshittification was coined by author and technology critic Cory Doctorow. It describes a process that many people have probably experienced intuitively already:

Digital platforms get worse over time.

Not suddenly. Not obviously. But gradually.

At first, platforms such as Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Netflix or Instagram seem attractive, user-friendly and often surprisingly cheap. They solve real problems, create new possibilities and offer obvious value to society.

But over time, the relationship between the platform, its users and its business customers begins to change.

The platform starts out serving its users, then increasingly serves its business customers and advertisers, and eventually mainly serves itself and its investors.

Along the way, the product often gets worse for everyone involved.

The three phases of Enshittification

The three phases according to Cory Doctorow, put into my own words, are as follows.

1. The platform serves its users

At the beginning, it’s all about growth. The platform needs to be attractive so it can reach a large number of people as quickly as possible. Services are cheap or free, advertising barely plays a role and the product often feels surprisingly good. Many platforms win over their users precisely because they solve existing problems more easily, cheaply or pleasantly than traditional providers.

2. The platform serves its business customers

Once enough people have signed up to the platform, the dynamic changes. The users’ attention and dependence now become the actual product. Advertisers, retailers and business partners gain increasing influence over the platform. Algorithms are adjusted, reach is controlled and visibility is sold. The product slowly begins to change. Not necessarily enough to make users leave immediately, but enough for the platform to start commercially exploiting its user base.

3. The platform only serves itself

Eventually, both users and business customers have become dependent on the platform. That’s when the real value extraction begins. Advertising increases, fees go up, search results get worse and processes that used to be simple somehow become more complicated. The platform takes advantage of the fact that switching away is no longer practical or realistic for many people or businesses. This is exactly the state Cory Doctorow describes as Enshittification.

Hyper-scaling as a structural problem

Cory Doctorow’s theory describes the progression of this process very precisely. From my point of view, though, the actual cause goes deeper. I think the process already begins with the decision to design a digital product for hyper-scaling.

Many modern platforms only work economically if they become extremely large and attract huge numbers of users. Infrastructure costs, competitive pressure and investors expecting high future returns all demand continuous growth. This almost automatically creates a system that first has to attract as many people as possible before it can generate sustainable profits.

That’s why these platforms can seem almost unrealistically attractive at the beginning. Prices are low, services feel generous and the user experience takes centre stage. But often this isn’t a sustainable long-term model at all. It’s an investment in future returns. Growth becomes more important than sustainability.

Once a platform has become large enough, the economic pressures change. Investors expect returns, operating costs continue to rise as the platform ages, and the platform finds itself under pressure to exploit the dependencies it has created. This is exactly where many of the negative effects we see today begin to appear: aggressive advertising, algorithmic manipulation, artificial restrictions and rising fees.

This becomes particularly annoying with advertising-funded services. Once attention becomes the actual product, there is automatically an economic incentive to keep people on the platform for as long as possible. Infinite scrolling, push notifications, algorithms designed to provoke emotional reactions and the psychological optimisation of user interfaces are the result. They are a direct consequence of a business model that needs to monetise attention. See also my article on Social Media, which has perfected this approach.

This development has been particularly visible in the American tech industry. Over several decades, an ecosystem emerged there built around venture capital, expectations of growth, weak regulation and global network effects. Cory Doctorow doesn’t explicitly identify America as the cause in his theory, and rightly so, because these mechanisms can emerge anywhere. Still, the US provides a particularly clear example of just how closely hyper-scaling can become linked to market power, platform dependence and wider consequences for society.

Perhaps this is exactly where the structural problem lies: if you build a platform that can only function economically through extreme scaling, you are implicitly accepting many of these later developments right from the start. In everyday language, you might call it a "deal with the devil".

The problem for society

The real problem isn’t simply that digital platforms get worse. What matters far more is that, over time, they begin to change entire structures within society.

Netflix didn’t simply replace video rental shops; in the long run, it changed the viewing habits of entire generations. Amazon didn’t just compete with individual shops; it transformed retail as a whole and put local shops around the world under pressure. Uber originally appeared as a more efficient alternative to traditional taxi companies, but went on to change entire models of work and displace existing structures in many places.

These platforms were often created with the genuine aim of providing something useful to society. They solved real problems, tried to simplify processes and made services more accessible. That foundation allowed them to become successful and popular.

But through hyper-scaling, they eventually reach a size where they are no longer simply participants in a market. They become part of society’s infrastructure. Communication, entertainment, mobility and commerce begin to organise themselves around a small number of dominant platforms.

At this point, power structures emerge that can become problematic for society. The more our everyday lives adapt to a platform, the harder it becomes to escape it again. The platform no longer influences just markets, but also behaviour, culture and even social norms.

The paradox is that many of these platforms genuinely set out to make something better. Yet it is precisely their success and extreme scaling that eventually create structures that become unhealthy for society.

The limits to growth

This brings me to what I think is one of the most interesting questions in this entire discussion.

These problems with digital platforms are surprisingly similar to other systemic problems caused by growth. In the 1970s, Donella Meadows and her team described in the book The Limits to Growth how exponential growth creates unstable systems in the long run. At the time, their analysis mainly focused on resource consumption, industrial production and environmental impact.

Now we may be seeing a similar pattern in the digital world.

Digital platforms often grow exponentially too. Network effects accelerate their expansion even further, and the more successful they become, the more power, capital and social influence become concentrated. The negative effects often become visible much faster than they do with traditional industrial growth problems. While climate change or resource scarcity build up over decades, digital platforms can transform entire markets and patterns of social behaviour within just a few years. That’s pretty impressive!

I’m convinced, though, that similar systemic mechanisms are at work here: systems optimised for unlimited growth eventually begin to destabilise their own environment and harm themselves, until they ultimately break down if nothing stops them.

That doesn’t mean growth is fundamentally bad. But perhaps there are natural limits to how large and dominant individual systems should become, including in the digital world.

So rather than only criticising individual platforms, we should also ask a more fundamental question: why does our society so often automatically equate growth with progress? And why do we constantly rely on KPIs that measure growth and treat it as a sign of success?

Perhaps not every form of scaling is healthy in the long run — even when it originally began with the best of intentions.

Interesting sources

Enshittification: How Digital Platforms Are Falling Apart