Meaning
The steady decay of an online platform or service, which first courts users, then degrades their experience to benefit business customers, and finally squeezes both sides to hoard value for itself - more ads, worse features, and higher fees once everyone is locked in. Informal because of its four-letter root, yet increasingly matter-of-fact in business and policy writing; also called platform decay. Informal and profane-adjacent; bluntly critical of tech companies though increasingly used matter-of-factly. Regional use: Internet English gone mainstream; strongest in tech commentary and economics writing.
Origin
Popularised by the Canadian-British writer Cory Doctorow, who set out the mechanism in a 15 November 2022 blog post titled Social Quitting, reprinted in Locus in January 2023 and expanded in a Wired column that month about TikTok's decline: platforms are first good to users, then abuse users to favor business customers, then abuse those customers to claw back value for themselves, all protected by lock-in. The word itself is older - the Oxford English Dictionary has traced uses back to 2013 - so Doctorow is the populariser of the modern sense rather than the first-ever user. The American Dialect Society voted it Word of the Year for 2023, announced on 5 January 2024, and Australia's Macquarie Dictionary made it 2024 Word of the Year; Doctorow's 2025 book extends the concept to the wider economy.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- enshittified
- enshittify
- platform decay
Usage Examples
- Longtime users blame the enshittification of the app on its ad-driven redesign.
- His column traced the enshittification of search results back to a single business decision.
- Once the marketplace had locked in its sellers, enshittification set in: higher fees, worse rankings.