From Beloved to Bloated: The Slow, Deliberate Decay of Websites You Once Loved

Remember when Amazon's homepage was just... a place to buy books? When Reddit felt like a weird, scrappy corner of the internet that actually respected your time? When LinkedIn was a digital résumé you checked twice a year and forgot about? Those days are gone. Not because the internet aged poorly, but because the companies behind these platforms made a series of very deliberate, very lucrative decisions to make them worse — for you, at least.

Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe this process, and it has since become one of the most accurate words ever applied to the modern web. The cycle goes roughly like this: a platform is good to users, earns trust and scale, then slowly turns that trust into a commodity to sell to advertisers and third parties. By the time you notice the rot, you're already too embedded to leave. Congratulations. You've been monetized.

The Playbook Nobody Admits to Following

The enshittification playbook isn't a secret conspiracy. It's practically a business requirement when venture capital is involved. The logic is brutally simple: investors fund growth, growth requires users, users require a good product, but eventually growth plateaus. At that point, the only way to keep returns climbing is to squeeze more revenue out of the users you already have — even if that means degrading the experience that attracted them in the first place.

The first phase looks like generosity. Free services, clean interfaces, zero ads. Think early Facebook, early Twitter, early Spotify. The product is the hook. Your attention is the bait. Once you're in the habit — once the app is muscle memory — the second phase begins. Ads appear. They're small at first, almost apologetic. Then they multiply. The algorithm shifts. Organic reach drops. You start seeing content from accounts you don't follow and have never wanted to follow. The feed stops being yours.

Phase three is where it gets genuinely insulting. The platform now optimizes not for what you want, but for what keeps you scrolling longest. Outrage. Controversy. That weird video of a guy eating cereal that somehow got 2 million views. Engagement metrics and actual satisfaction are not the same thing, but the platform only measures one of them.

Social Media Did It First and Best

Facebook is the textbook example, mostly because it had the audacity to do it so openly. In 2012, it was a place where you saw posts from your friends. By 2018, it was a surveillance apparatus wearing a social network costume. Organic reach for pages collapsed from around 16% to somewhere under 6% — conveniently right around the time Facebook started selling paid reach as a product. The content you wanted to see was replaced by content Facebook was paid to show you, content designed to provoke a reaction, and an increasingly desperate stream of suggested groups, Marketplace listings, and Reels from strangers.

Twitter — now X, a rebrand that itself feels like a metaphor for deliberate self-sabotage — followed a similar arc, though with considerably more chaos and a billionaire at the helm willing to accelerate the process dramatically. What was once a reasonably functional public square is now a subscription-gated, algorithmically manipulated platform where verified status is sold rather than earned and the timeline is curated by factors nobody fully understands.

Instagram, which once felt like a genuine creative community, now serves more ads per scroll than editorial content. TikTok, the newest entrant, is already deep into phase two, flooding feeds with sponsored posts and creator fund drama that has soured the relationship between the platform and the people who built its audience.

Shopping Sites Pulled the Same Trick

It's not just social media. Amazon's search results are a masterclass in making useful information hard to find. Type in almost anything and you'll wade through sponsored listings, Amazon-branded alternatives, and products with suspiciously round star ratings before reaching something you might actually want. The company that once promised to surface the best product at the best price now surfaces the product whose seller paid most for placement.

Etsy, once a genuine marketplace for independent makers and small artisans, is now drowning in drop-shipped generic goods, print-on-demand resellers, and AI-generated listings. The platform's decision to raise seller fees while simultaneously flooding the marketplace with mass-produced items managed to alienate both the sellers who built its reputation and the buyers who came looking for something handmade.

Yelp, which started as a crowd-sourced antidote to bad restaurant recommendations, now stands accused — repeatedly, in lawsuits and investigative reporting — of suppressing reviews for businesses that don't advertise and boosting visibility for those that do. Whether or not every allegation holds up legally, the user experience speaks for itself: the reviews feel less trustworthy, the interface more cluttered, and the whole thing less useful than it was a decade ago.

Is Any of This Actually Inevitable?

Here's the uncomfortable question: is enshittification just the natural lifecycle of internet products, or is it a choice that companies keep making because nobody stops them?

The honest answer is both. The economic pressures are real. Advertising-based business models structurally incentivize platforms to prioritize engagement over satisfaction. Venture capital timelines demand returns that organic, sustainable growth can't always provide. The moment a company goes public, the quarterly earnings call becomes the most important meeting on the calendar, and no earnings call was ever won by saying "we made the product better but slightly less addictive."

But the choice is still a choice. Wikipedia has operated for over two decades without becoming an ad-laden engagement trap. Craigslist — janky, ancient, stubbornly ugly — still mostly does what it says it does without trying to upsell you a subscription. Bandcamp, before its acquisition by Songtradr and subsequent layoffs, was widely regarded as one of the few platforms that genuinely served both artists and listeners without gutting either.

The difference in those cases isn't magic. It's a deliberate rejection of the growth-at-all-costs model. Which is, in the current tech economy, practically a revolutionary act.

What You Can Actually Do (Spoiler: Not Much, But Something)

The frustrating reality is that individual users don't have a lot of leverage against platform decay. You can use ad blockers. You can pay for subscriptions that theoretically align the platform's interests with yours rather than with advertisers'. You can migrate to smaller, independent alternatives — Mastodon, Letterboxd, Bandcamp — and accept that they'll never have the network effects of the giants.

Or you can simply lower your expectations and stop being surprised when a company that once felt like it was on your side turns out to have been building a trap the whole time.

The web isn't broken by accident. It's broken by design, by spreadsheet, by board meeting, and by a business model that treats your attention as inventory. The least we can do is name it clearly.

Enshittification. Say it out loud. It's the most honest word the tech industry didn't coin for itself.