I’ve noticed a pattern where platforms start out useful and user-friendly, then slowly shift toward more ads, worse search, higher fees, and features that seem built for shareholders instead of users. I’m trying to understand whether platform decline and enshittification are basically inevitable as companies grow, or if some platforms avoid it. I need help figuring out what causes this and whether there are warning signs users should watch for.
No. It’s common, but not automatic.
What you’re seeing is incentive drift. Early on, a platform needs users. Later, it needs revenue. Later than that, it needs growth on top of revenue. Each step pushes decisions away from your experience and toward extraction.
A few things make enshittification more likely.
-
Network effects.
If your friends, buyers, sellers, or audience are stuck there, the platform gets leverage. You put up with worse search, more ads, and higher fees because leaving costs you somthing. -
Weak competition.
If switching is hard, the platform has room to degrade. App stores, social networks, and marketplaces do this a lot. -
Ad-based business models.
When users are not the customer, attention gets sold. Then feeds get noisier, search gets polluted, and product choices tilt toward time-on-site. -
Public market pressure.
Quarterly targets push short-term extraction. You see more paywalls, upsells, and fee layering.
It is not inevitable, though. A few structures slow it down.
-
Strong competition and low switching costs.
Email is a decent example. Open standards stop one company from trapping everyone. -
User-owned or subscription models.
If you pay directly, incentives line up better. Not perfect, but better. -
Interoperability.
Open protocols like RSS, ActivityPub, and email reduce lock-in. Lock-in is the fuel. -
Regulation.
The EU has forced some gatekeepers to loosen control. Not enough, but it matters.
So the practical answer is this. Look at the business model, switching cost, and lock-in before you invest your time. If a platform depends on ads and traps your audience, expect decline. If it supports export, open standards, and direct payment, odds are better. Not gaurenteed. Better.
Not inevitable, but honestly way more likely than a lot of people want to admit.
I mostly agree with @himmelsjager, but I’d push it a bit further: sometimes the decline is not just “incentive drift,” it’s the business model finally revealing itself. A platform can look user-friendly early because it’s subsidized. Cheap rides, generous seller terms, clean feeds, great search. Then the investor money dries up and suddenly, wow, the “real” product appears. Kinda a bait-and-switch, even if nobody says it out loud.
Also, not every bad change is enshittification. Sometimes a platform gets worse because moderation got harder, spam exploded, or scale made the old experiance impossible to maintain. That’s different from deliberate extraction. Users usually don’t care which one it is, tho, because the result still sucks.
What seems to matter most to me is whether the platform can say no to endless growth. If it has to keep squeezing more from the same users every quarter, yeah, the rot starts. If it can stay boring, profitable enough, and not chase infinite expansion, it has a shot.
So no, not every platform. But any platform built on lock-in, VC subsidies, and “growth at all costs” is basically on a timer. The only real defense is being easy to leave. Once they know you can’t, it gets ugly fast.
I think @himmelsjager is right about incentives, but I’d add one wrinkle: sometimes users mistake maturation for betrayal.
A platform can get worse without becoming malicious. Early on, a small community self-polices, search works because the corpus is tiny, and support is manageable. At scale, every weakness gets amplified. The ugly part is when management uses those real scaling problems as cover for extraction. That is where enshittification starts feeling inevitable, not because entropy exists, but because leadership learns degradation is profitable enough.
The real dividing line for me is governance. Who can punish bad decisions? If users, creators, sellers, or developers have no leverage, decline accelerates. If there are strong substitutes, interoperability, regulation, or actual ownership by stakeholders, platforms stay healthier longer.
So no, not every platform is doomed. But any platform with captive users, opaque ranking, and no accountability is structurally tempted to decay.
Pros for ': can improve readability if it helps users compare alternatives cleanly. Cons for ': if it adds friction, lock-in, or monetized clutter, it becomes part of the problem.