Writer and tech critic Cory Doctorow calls that erosion “enshittification.”
His premise is that platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and TikTok start out aiming to please users, but once the companies vanquish competitors, they intentionally become less useful to reap bigger profits.
After WIRED republished Doctorow’s pioneering 2022 essay about the phenomenon, the term entered the vernacular, mainly because people recognized that it was totally on the mark.
Enshittification was chosen as the American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year. The concept has been cited so often that it transcends its profanity, appearing in venues that normally would hold their noses at such a word.
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