A couple years ago, Cory Doctorow observed a phenomenon in online products and platforms that he dubbed “enshittification”:
“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.”
From Amazon to Facebook to Google Search to TikTok, Cory mapped how online products and services tend to decline over time. And yet also how locked in people are to use them.
His colorful term struck a chord. The American Dialect Society selected “enshittification” as their word of the year in 2023. In a later Financial Times op-ed, he argued that “‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything.”
There are characteristics unique to online products and platforms (like network effects and switching costs), but some of this dynamic is a cautionary tale for any type of product innovation.
In 2007, I drew a cartoon on the “natural evolution of products” that parodied the end result of continuous margin improvement and value capture. In the cartoon, a cereal brand starts using cheaper ingredients and packaging and eventually loses the box altogether. It then wonders why private label is gaining.
Here’s what I wrote at the time:
“Most product evolutions have to do with margin improvement rather than better performance. Consumers may not notice one round of cost-cuts, but over time, the reduced product quality can get really obvious. Why is it that cereal boxes never close properly after you open them once? My guess is that that little “advance” caused a 0.4 point margin gain at some point. But, oh how irritating to consumers.
“Of course, continuous margin improvement taken to an extreme gets hit by Darwinism too. Not from a pack of hyena. From a pack of private label – which actually seems to be getting better over time.”
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
