Enshittification

In Doctorow's original post, he discussed the practices of Amazon. First, Amazon started selling goods below cost to build up a user base. Amazon then introduced the Prime subscription which would encourage users to shop more exclusively at Amazon. Second, now having many clients who used Amazon exclusively, this incentivised sellers to set up on Amazon, as Prime users were only searching Amazon for goods. Finally, Doctorow indicated that Amazon then began to focus on its shareholders by increasing profits and introducing fees. In 2023, 45% of the sale price of items went to Amazon in the form of various fees. He described advertisement within Amazon as a payola scheme, in which sellers are bidding against one another for search ranking preference, and identified that the first five pages of a search for "cat beds" were 50% advertisements.[2]

This term was used retroactively to describe the 2022 sale of Bandcamp to Epic Games, and later when Epic Games sold Bandcamp to music licensing firm Songtradr in September 2023.[6] In October 2023, it was revealed that almost half of Bandcamp's staff were laid off, including many key members of the executive team who apparently "vanished", according to former employees. Following this acquisition, there was a large outpouring of grief and rage on social media from many former employees, users and artists who viewed Bandcamp as an essential service for niche and independent artists to release music while retaining profits from the sale of their work.[7] Bandcamp had also unionized in March of 2023, and Songtradr laid off most of the staff involved in forming the unionization, as well as those who were helping to negotiate fair terms. As of October 2023, Songtradr still has yet to formally recognize their union.[8] According to music journalist Philip Sherburne, writing for Pitchfork, by specifically targeting both the customer-support department and the editorial department for layoffs, Songtradr was signaling either ignorance or apathy for the reason Bandcamp had been successful.[6]

According to Doctorow, Facebook offered a good service until it had reached a "critical mass" of users, and it became difficult for people to leave because they would need to convince their friends to go with them. Facebook then began to add posts from media companies into feeds until the media companies too were dependent on traffic from Facebook, and then adjusted the algorithm to prioritise paid "boosted" posts. Business Insider agreed with the view that Facebook was being enshittified, adding that it "constantly floods users' feeds with sponsored (or "recommended") content, and seems to bury the things people want to see under what Facebook decides is relevant".[9] Doctorow pointed at the Facebook metrics controversy, in which video statistics were inflated on the site, which led to media companies over-investing in Facebook and collapsing. He described Facebook as "terminally enshittified".[2]

In 2023, Reddit announced that it would begin charging for API access, a move that would effectively shut down many third-party apps. The CEO, Steve Huffman, stated that it was in response to AI firms scraping data, though The Verge pointed out that the move was intended to increase revenue ahead of the platform's Initial Public Offering. This resulted in a blackout protest by moderators, though the changes ultimately went ahead.[10][11][12]

The term was applied to the changes to Twitter in the wake of its 2022 acquisition by Elon Musk.[13][14] This included the closure of the service's API to stop interoperable software from being used, suspending users for posting (rival service) Mastodon handles in their profiles, and placing restrictions on the ability to view the site without logging in. Other changes included temporary rate limits for the number of tweets that could be viewed per day, the introduction of paid subscriptions to the service in the form of Twitter Blue,[13] and the reduction of moderation.[15]