From Useful to Unusable: The Depressing but Predictable Lifecycle of Every Website You've Ever Liked

There's a peculiar grief that comes with revisiting a website you used to love. You remember it fondly — the way it loaded fast, showed you what you came for, and then got out of your way. Now you return, and it's like walking back into your favorite childhood diner only to find it's been converted into a casino. The menu is technically still there. You just have to agree to seventeen terms of service and close four overlapping banners before you can read it.

This is not an accident. It is, in fact, a process. A well-documented, boringly predictable process that tech writer Cory Doctorow famously named "enshittification" — and if that word makes you wince, just wait until you finish reading about what it describes.

Phase One: The Honeymoon (While It Lasts)

Every website begins with a pitch. The pitch is always the same: we're building this for you. Early Twitter was genuinely thrilling — a real-time stream of information, jokes, and breaking news with almost no friction. Early Facebook helped you reconnect with people you actually wanted to find. Early Reddit felt like a bulletin board run by weirdos who cared deeply about their niche topics, which was charming in the way that only genuinely weird things can be.

In these early days, the product is the user experience. The site is fast because it has to be to attract people. It's clean because clutter costs money the company doesn't yet have. It's useful because usefulness is the only currency a startup possesses before it has real currency.

This phase doesn't last. It never lasts. And the forces that end it are almost always the same.

Phase Two: The Investors Show Up

At some point, the site needs money to survive. Sometimes that money comes from ads. Sometimes it comes from venture capital. Sometimes it comes from going public. But the source doesn't matter as much as what the money demands in return: growth.

Growth, in Silicon Valley terms, is a religion. It must be continuous, exponential, and demonstrated every quarter. And here's where the first cracks appear in your favorite website's foundation — because growth eventually stops being about getting more users and starts being about extracting more value from the users already there.

The ads multiply. The algorithm shifts. Content that made you feel good gets quietly deprioritized in favor of content that keeps you angry and scrolling, because angry and scrolling is measurably more profitable than satisfied and done. The interface starts nudging you toward premium features. Notifications — once sparse and meaningful — become relentless, because every notification is a tiny lever pulling you back into the engagement machine.

You probably noticed this happening. You almost certainly said nothing, because what were you going to do, go back to MySpace?

Phase Three: The UX Hostage Situation

Once the revenue imperative takes hold, the design of the website stops being about helping you do what you came to do. It becomes about preventing you from leaving before the site has gotten what it needs from you.

This is when the dark patterns arrive. The "close" button on the pop-up that's actually a subscription prompt. The "no thanks, I don't want to save money" opt-out language designed to make you feel vaguely ashamed for saying no. The autoplay video in the corner of the article you were trying to read. The infinite scroll that removes any natural stopping point from your browsing session.

News websites are perhaps the most egregious offenders in this phase. The American news industry, gutted by the collapse of print advertising, has turned its websites into something approaching a psychological endurance test. Try reading a single article on a major outlet's site without encountering a paywall prompt, a newsletter signup, a video ad that autoplays at full volume, a cookie consent banner, a notification permission request, and a "you've read three free articles this month" warning — all before you've gotten to the second paragraph.

The content is still technically there. It's just buried under layers of monetization like a fossil under sediment.

Phase Four: The Bloat Settles In

By the time a website reaches full enshittification, it has usually become slower than it was five years ago despite running on hardware that is objectively faster. This is not a paradox — it's the weight of accumulated compromise.

Every third-party ad network adds a script. Every tracking pixel adds a request. Every A/B test running in the background adds latency. Every feature the product team added to justify their existence adds kilobytes to the page load. The site that once loaded in under a second now takes four, five, six seconds on a decent connection — and on a mobile network, it's a small miracle if it loads at all.

Google's own research has shown for years that page load speed directly affects whether users stay or leave. Websites know this. They have access to the same research. They just decided that the revenue from all those scripts and ads outweighs the cost of the users who bounce in frustration. You, the frustrated user, are a line item in someone's spreadsheet. You came out on the losing side of the calculation.

Is There Any Way Out?

The honest answer is: not really, at least not at scale. The economic incentives that drive enshittification are structural. As long as websites depend on advertising revenue and engagement metrics to survive, they will optimize for those things — even at the direct expense of the experience that made them worth visiting in the first place.

There are small rebellions. RSS readers still exist. Browser extensions like uBlock Origin can strip away some of the worst offenses. A handful of independent publishers have managed to build sustainable models around subscriptions and reader support without completely selling out their interface to the ad-tech industrial complex. Some of them are even good.

But these are niche solutions for technically literate users who already know they're being exploited. For everyone else — the hundreds of millions of people who just want to read an article, check their social feed, or find a recipe — the enshittified web is simply the web. Slow, cluttered, manipulative, and getting worse by the quarter.

The Pattern Always Wins

What makes web decay genuinely depressing isn't that it happens. It's that it happens the same way, every single time, with almost no variation. A useful site attracts users. Users attract investors. Investors demand growth. Growth demands monetization. Monetization demands your attention, your data, and your patience. Your patience runs out. The site doesn't care.

Then a new site launches, clean and fast, built to serve you. And you think: this time it'll be different.

It won't be different. But hey — enjoy the honeymoon.