Remember when your favorite app was fast, free, and genuinely useful — and then one day it was full of ads, paywalls, and features you never asked for? There is now a word for exactly that slow-motion betrayal, and it has won multiple Word of the Year awards. The word is enshittification. Here’s what it means, where it came from, and how to use it without embarrassing yourself.
Enshittification: The Short Answer
Enshittification is the gradual decay of an online platform’s quality as it chases profit — usually by flooding users with ads and sponsored content while making the service worse. Wiktionary defines enshittification (uncountable) as a “neologism, Internet, vulgar” term for “the phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits.” Note the “vulgar” tag: this is a profane, informal word — use it with an audience that can handle it.
What Does “Enshittification” Mean Exactly?
Break the word apart and it explains itself: en- (to make or become) + shit + -ification (the process of becoming). The literal sense is “the process of becoming shitty” — and it describes a recognizable pattern. A platform starts out great for users. Then, under pressure to grow revenue, it quietly shifts: the feed fills with ads, the algorithm promotes sponsored posts, features get locked behind subscriptions, customer support vanishes. The service you loved is still technically there, but using it feels like wading through a junkyard.
The term is most often aimed at big tech platforms — social networks, search engines, marketplaces, streaming services — but the Macquarie Dictionary’s 2024 definition widens it: “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.” Any service that gets worse because someone is squeezing it for money can be called enshittified.
Where Did the Word Come From?
The word was popularized by Cory Doctorow — the author, journalist, and digital-rights activist — in 2022–2023, through a widely shared essay and subsequent writing on platform decay. It took off because it gave a name to something everyone was feeling but couldn’t quite articulate. By 2023 it had jumped from tech blogs into mainstream newspapers.
The etymology is deliberately crude. Doctorow picked a vulgar coinage precisely because polite words like “monetization” and “optimization” disguise what’s happening. Enshittification refuses to be polite about it.
Doctorow’s Three Stages of Enshittification
Doctorow didn’t just coin the word — he described the mechanism behind it. This is his formulation, not a dictionary definition, and it’s worth understanding because people invoke it whenever they use the word. The three stages, as he lays them out:
- First, platforms are good to their users. A new platform offers a great, often free experience to attract users and lock them in — no ads, generous features, everything designed to delight.
- Then, they abuse their users to make things better for business customers. Once the audience is captive, the platform shifts value to advertisers, sellers, and publishers — more ads, promoted content, algorithmic feeds that serve sponsors first.
- Finally, they abuse everyone to claw back all the value for themselves. In the last stage, the platform squeezes users, business customers, and partners alike — raising fees, cutting reach, degrading quality — to maximize returns for shareholders.
The pattern is a claim about incentives, not a law of nature. Not every platform follows all three stages. But once you know the pattern, you’ll see people citing it everywhere — from streaming price hikes to app redesigns nobody asked for.
Enshittification’s Word-of-the-Year History
Few slang coinages earn this kind of institutional recognition. The American Dialect Society named enshittification its 2023 Word of the Year. Then Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary named it its 2024 Word of the Year — both the committee’s choice and the people’s choice, a rare double. In 2025, Doctorow published a full book on the concept: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
That’s an unusually fast journey from internet coinage to dictionary-adjacent respectability — though it remains a vulgar colloquialism, not standard formal vocabulary.
How to Use “Enshittification” in a Sentence
- “The enshittification of that streaming service is complete — ads on the paid tier now.”
- “Every app I love seems to be undergoing enshittification.”
- “Doctorow’s point is that enshittification follows a predictable three-stage pattern.”
- “First the algorithm changed, then came the paywall — classic enshittification.”
- “He wrote that the platform’s enshittification was inevitable once shareholders took over.”
Register matters: this word belongs in opinion pieces, casual conversation, and tech criticism — not in a job application or a formal report. If you’ve been doomscrolling through complaints about your apps, you’ve already been reading enshittification discourse; it’s the same frustration that fuels brain rot debates about declining feed quality.
Frequently Asked Questions
It means the gradual decay of an online platform’s quality as it pursues profit — more ads and sponsored content, worse service. Wiktionary marks it as a vulgar internet neologism. It was popularized by writer Cory Doctorow in 2022–2023.
Cory Doctorow, the author and digital-rights activist, popularized it through his 2022–2023 essays on platform decay, and he expanded the concept in his 2025 book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
It has a Wiktionary entry and was named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society (2023) and the Macquarie Dictionary (2024, both committee’s and people’s choice). It’s a real coinage — but it’s marked vulgar, so treat it as informal slang, not formal vocabulary.
Doctorow’s formulation: (1) platforms are good to users to attract them; (2) they abuse users to benefit business customers; (3) they abuse everyone — users and business customers alike — to maximize shareholder returns. This is Doctorow’s model, not a dictionary definition.
Mostly, but not exclusively. Macquarie’s definition covers “a service or product” generally — any offering whose quality deteriorates as a consequence of profit-seeking can be described this way, though the term is overwhelmingly used about online platforms.
You shouldn’t. Wiktionary labels it vulgar, and the crude coinage is the point of the word — it refuses polite euphemism. Use it in casual, critical, or opinion writing; choose a neutral term like “platform decay” or “service degradation” for formal contexts.
