“Enshittification” - the slow, sometimes imperceptible degradation of online platforms - has been named Word of the Year by the Oxford English Dictionary. The recognition marks a cultural milestone: we’ve finally named the phenomenon we’ve all experienced but struggled to articulate.
The Origin
Cory Doctorow coined the term to describe a pattern he’s observed across multiple platforms. The core insight is that platforms degrade in predictable stages once they achieve market dominance.
The term combines “enshittify” (to make shoddy due to profit motives) with the common suffix indicating a process. It’s become so popular that it’s now appearing in mainstream news articles, academic papers, and everyday conversations about technology.
The Pattern
The enshittification pattern follows a recognizable trajectory. In the first stage, platforms court users with great experiences. Everything works wonderfully, the interface is clean, and the service seems designed purely for user benefit.
Once users are locked in, the platform begins prioritizing advertisers and partners. The user experience slowly degrades as more ads appear, algorithms favor paid content, and features that don’t generate revenue are neglected or removed.
Quality drops for everyone, but particularly for free users who are now the product being sold to advertisers. The platform has no incentive to please these users - they’re not paying, and they’ve got nowhere else to go.
By the final stage, users have no alternative but to accept degraded service or abandon the platform entirely. This is the “you can’t quit, you’re fired” moment that perfectly captures the frustration of being locked into a service you’ve outgrown.
The Examples
The pattern applies to Google, where search quality has declined as SEO-optimized content displaces genuine results. It applies to Amazon, where the marketplace is increasingly flooded with low-quality products and sponsored results. It applies to Twitter/X, where the experience has degraded as Blue subscribers receive preferential treatment.
The common thread is monopoly power. These platforms became so dominant that users had no alternatives, enabling the slow degradation that enshittification describes.
The Significance
Naming it “Word of the Year” acknowledges we’ve noticed the pattern. More importantly, it gives us language to describe a frustrating phenomenon we’ve all experienced. Naming is the first step toward resistance.
The term also serves as a warning. Platforms know we know about enshittification, and that awareness might push back against the worst practices. It’s harder to degrade a service when users can articulate exactly what’s happening.