Enshittification

An economic lifecycle prevalent in platform capitalism, given its name by Cory Doctorow, where:

  1. The platform starts out very good to its users in order to drive adoption, by providing lots of value to users.
  2. It provides value to its business customers (e.g. advertising) to increase revenues, by abusing its users (e.g. selling their data).
  3. Abusing their business customers by taking back the value for itself.
  4. The platform becomes a useless pile of shit whose users and customers are locked into the platform as they slowly are drained dry by it.

See also: