Platforms degrade service quality over time as they prioritize their own profits

Evidence

Former Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle in which platforms initially offer users value to attract massive audiences, then shift focus to advertisers and suppliers, and finally prioritize their own profits at the expense of everyone else. Amazon drew in third-party sellers, copied their successful products, and then forced them to pay for ad placement to remain visible. According to Doctorow, this process would inevitably lead to users abandoning the platform—but only if there were any viable alternatives. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 707

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘enshittification’ — an increasingly canonical term for platform decay, worth keeping as a precise definition with its three-stage mechanism.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the reader’s interest in mechanism analysis — the enshittification cycle is a concrete instance of distribution collapsing into centralized control, parallel to Marx’s distribution-mechanism claims.
• XREF: connects to: Platforms treat content corruption as a problem only when it threatens surplus extraction — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1609; Cloud platforms exploit nearly everyone rather than only their employees — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 873; AOL’s shift to flat-rate pricing caused capacity crashes and regulatory trouble — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 725