OurTerms
Defined
the word for it

enshittification

en·shit·if·i·ca·tion · /ɛnˌʃɪtɪfɪˈkeɪʃən/ · noun

What it means

1.The slow rot of a service once it has you locked in. Prices creep up, quality slides, the features you liked drift behind a higher tier. Not because it got more expensive to run, but because squeezing people who won't leave is easier than earning their stay.
2.The bet a company makes that the hassle of leaving is worth more to you than the thing itself. Usually a safe bet. That's the bet we're here to break.

"They reeled you in while they were still winning you over, then turned the screws once walking away felt like too much trouble. That's enshittification."

The arc

It's a sequence, not a single bad day, and the growth was the bait. First a service is genuinely good to you, to reel you in and lock you down. Then, once leaving is a hassle, it turns on you to please whoever's really paying the bills: advertisers, investors, its own margins. Prices climb, the good features get rationed, the deal quietly gets worse. Grow first, squeeze later. In Doctorow's original telling every platform ends the same way: it wrings out everyone in reach, and then it dies.

Where the word comes from

Coined by the writer Cory Doctorow around 2022, to put a name on a pattern much older than the name. It caught on fast, because everyone already knew the feeling. We just think it deserves a fight.

Look, I didn't invent the word, and I won't pretend the definition above came down from a dictionary. It's mine. But if you've ever paid the same or more for something that quietly got worse, you already understood the concept. Now you've got a name for it, and a place to push back. Draw your line →