Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers (such as advertisers), and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders… More here.

It’s everywhere isn’t it. Uber, X, Facebook, many jobs for young people, utilities, Amazon, Netflix and on and on and…

To me, it feels like so many aspects of our lives have been enshittified and curiously so many of them did not exist until a few years ago. The internet has been driven downwards, social networks are genuinely harmful and so many industries have fallen apart because of their own choices.

Just to check I popper onto X earlier last week and, oh my god!, it is terrible now. Graphic videos, racism and people literally screaming at each other all the time. I was there for 10 minutes- never again. Facebook was not much better when I checked- AI slop dominating so much of the content which is a complete waste of time.

It’s strange that the great tech revolution has already turned in on itself and has so many of us running away from it. Whether it’s listening to vinyl records, reading real paper books or just popping online for only a few minutes a day, it’s helping me navigate things.

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