A few years ago, an ad on a search results page was clearly labeled and easy to ignore; that sponsor‑heavy layout used to be something you saw mostly on Chinese search engine Baidu, but now the same slick, indistinguishable promotions appear across global search engines, forcing extra scrolling and turning quick answers into guesswork.
Enshittification describes a three‑stage pattern in which a platform first wins users by offering clear value, then privileges paying partners and advertisers to monetize that scale, and finally degrades the product so much that it harms both users and the businesses that rely on the platform. The phrase emerged in tech conversations as a blunt way to name the predictable harms that follow unchecked scale, extractive monetization, and weak competitive pressure.
This post traces how platforms move from delight to monetization to destructive extraction, why concentration and lock‑in make that arc likely, and what could plausibly halt or reverse the process.
The Three‑Stage Cycle Explained
Platforms solve a clear user problem with speed, simplicity, or a novel feature, prioritizing the user experience to drive rapid adoption and network effects.
Platforms begin to generate predictable revenue by introducing clear commercial levers: paid placements in dedicated ad slots, premium APIs or developer tiers, and prioritized partnerships. These changes are often explicit and segmented from the organic user experience rather than visually blended into it. The tradeoff is rising revenue and partner dependence, while user value starts to erode through increased pay‑to‑play friction.
Monetization intensifies, and product decisions prioritize short‑term rent extraction. At this stage, platforms often start to blur the line between paid and organic content: promoted results are styled to resemble organic results, ad labels become weaker, and native‑style promotions appear inline with genuine content. The result is a broader decline: users face worse experiences, creators and publishers lose margins and trust, and advertisers see falling returns.
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Enshittification cycle — Delight builds users, Monetize raises revenue (partners benefit but customers start losing out), Extract collapses value for everyone. Illustration generated with Copilot.
Why Concentration and Monopoly Enable It |
Large platforms become more valuable as more people use them, producing strong
network effects that favor incumbents. Data, social graphs, integrations, and habitual workflows accumulate on the dominant service and raise the cost of leaving. Those switching costs are often invisible until a user or partner tries to move: rebuilding audiences, redoing integrations, or re-establishing reach is time‑consuming and expensive. With lock‑in in place, platforms can tolerate slow declines in user experience because users and partners have limited practical alternatives.
When rivals are small, fragmented, or confined to niches, the dominant platform faces weak market discipline. That lack of credible competition allows monetization experiments and governance changes that prioritize short‑term revenue with little immediate backlash. Product and policy choices skew toward extractive tactics because user flight or partner defection are unlikely to impose meaningful costs.
Control over de facto standards, formats, or distribution norms gives a platform monopoly‑like power even when multiple players exist. If one service defines how identity, content packaging, or ad delivery must work to reach audiences, competitors and partners must conform to those rules. Example: modern laptops have trended toward tightly integrated unibody designs and proprietary connectors that make self‑servicing or component upgrades difficult. Replacing a single part often requires professional repair or a full device swap, increasing friction and keeping customers tied to a single ecosystem that can charge premiums and control upgrade paths.
Aggregating cross‑service signals and detailed behavioral data improves targeting, churn prediction, and pricing precision, creating a clear commercial incentive to surveil. Those surveillance capabilities shape product design and ranking systems toward measurable short‑term engagement and monetizable placements, accelerating the shift from benign monetization to aggressive extraction.
Pursuit of access to large or strategically important markets can push platforms to adapt product, policy, or enforcement choices to local demands. Insider accounts described in the book "
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism" recount episodes where
Mark Zuckerberg explored cooperation with Chinese authorities that would have required surveillance‑friendly or censorship‑compliant arrangements, during those discussions he reportedly told
Minister Lu Wei, “We must stick to the bottom line and exercise governance in accordance with the law, and Liberty means order. The two are closely linked. Liberty cannot exist without order.” Ironically, Lu Wei was later sentenced for corruption, highlighting the gap between rhetoric and practice. Such strategic compromises can normalize weaker protections and surveillance practices across a company’s global product lines, shifting corporate norms and lowering resistance to extractive features.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. ― Fourth Amendment of US Constitution
Constitutional safeguards such as the US Fourth Amendment restrict government searches and seizures without probable cause, but private platforms operate under different incentives and legal regimes. Companies routinely collect, store, and analyze vast amounts of user data under commercial terms that lack the procedural protections required of state action. That asymmetry lets platforms build surveillance and monetization systems that would be unacceptable if performed by public authorities.
Concrete Examples of Enshittification
Platforms progressively reduce the visual and functional gap between paid and organic results. Ads are restyled to match fonts, thumbnails, metadata, and snippet length used by organic listings so users struggle to tell them apart. Placement strategies shift paid links into the same positions users expect unbiased answers, while ad labels become smaller, more ambiguous, or buried. The measurable effect is higher click‑through for advertisers and lower signal quality for users who can no longer quickly identify impartial results.
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| A visual history of Google ad labeling in search results from 2007 to 2019. Search Engine Land. https://searchengineland.com/. Click to view the full image. |
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The following screenshots show Google search results for the term “Kayak” in 2020 and 2025. In 2020, Google still displayed a small “Ad” label next to paid advertisements, whereas in 2025, the paid results are almost indistinguishable from the organic ones.
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| Over time, Google’s paid search ads have become less distinguishable from organic results — as seen in the “Kayak” search comparison between 2020 and 2025. Click to view the full image. |
YouTube pushes ad density and format changes that prioritize immediate revenue over viewer and creator experience. Trends include longer ads, more frequent midrolls, and
bundling multiple short unskippable ads into a single break of 50–60 seconds. Creators face explicit tradeoffs: adopting platform monetization features can raise income but often requires sacrificing viewer experience, promoting watch‑time hacks, or pushing branded content that erodes trust. Smaller creators lose negotiating power as preferred ad products and revenue splits flow to high‑profile channels, concentrating rewards and forcing others to chase attention with lower margins. If this trend continues unchecked, viewers may be pushed into paying ever higher fees simply to avoid an escalating torrent of ads, a dynamic reminiscent of dystopian fiction such as
Black Mirror’s “Common People,” where subscription tiers and invasive monetization impose extreme costs on users.
News organizations are squeezed between platforms that capture audience attention and advertising revenue and the subscription models publishers adopt to survive. Platforms control distribution, referral traffic, and search visibility while monetizing attention with promoted placements and native advertising formats. Publishers react with more paywalls, paywalls behind soft gates, or experimental pay models that fragment access and reduce public information commons. The result is higher reader costs, thinner ad markets for independent outlets, and a feedback loop where platform control amplifies winner‑take‑most economics.
On‑demand labor platforms iterate fee structures, algorithmic rules, and access tiers that shift risks and costs onto workers while preserving or increasing consumer convenience. Examples include shifting the balance of customer tips versus platform fees, introducing opaque deactivation algorithms, or gating access to high‑earning shifts behind subscription or commission layers. These changes reduce worker bargaining power, fragment earnings, and create a two‑tier labor market where those who accept unfavorable terms remain visible and those who push back are marginalized.
Across sectors, the same mechanics repeat: visual blending of paid and organic content, higher ad density, and product design choices that increase fragility and dependency. Short‑term revenue gains from these tactics come at the cost of eroded trust, concentrated economic power, and reduced consumer surplus. The systemic effect is less innovation at the edges, fewer robust competitors, and public goods—reliable information, durable hardware, fair labor markets—becoming more expensive or lower quality.
Politics and Enshittification
Concentration of power — whether in the form of corporate monopolies or centralized political authority — is the primary engine of enshittification. When control over rules, access, or standards is tightly held, incentives shift from serving broad constituencies to extracting predictable rents from those who must rely on the gatekeeper. That reorientation shows up as product designs and policies that favor short‑term monetization or elite advantage over long‑term public value.
The mechanisms that drive this in politics closely mirror those in platforms: capture, insulation, and enclosure. Capture occurs when rule‑making and enforcement bend to incumbent interests; insulation follows as users or voters face high switching costs and muted feedback; enclosure converts commons — from information channels to infrastructure — into conditional, monetized access. Together these dynamics erode accountability, reduce competition, and make degradation incremental and hard to reverse.
A couple of short examples make the analogy concrete without overstating it. A dominant platform that controls discovery can prioritize paid placements and gated integrations, starving independent publishers and narrowing the public information commons. Likewise, a captured public institution can deliver lower‑quality services while elites capture the benefits, leaving ordinary people with fewer choices and worse outcomes. Addressing both problems requires structural remedies that disperse control, restore interoperability and repairability, and strengthen institutions that protect competitive pressure and the commons.
Sadly, in recent years we have seen the simultaneous rise of monopolistic enterprises and a resurgence of authoritarian tendencies, which reinforces the same dynamics of capture and enclosure at greater scale; concentrated corporate power enables surveillance, market control, and norm‑setting, while authoritarian governance narrows civic space and weakens institutions that could check abuses, and together they make it far easier for extraction to become entrenched and harder for communities to push back.
Are We Doomed and What Breaks the Cycle
Technology markets have swung between concentrated dominance and periods of disruption before. Past eras of apparent inevitability—mainframe monopolies, browser wars, early‑2000s portal stacks—gave way to new architectures, standards, and regulatory responses that redistributed power. Those shifts were driven by combinations of technological innovation, changing user preferences, legal pressure, and new business models. The lesson is not that concentration will automatically reverse, but that market and institutional dynamics can change incentives when alternatives become viable or when the cost of maintaining extraction rises. If you want a deeper dive into how platforms flip from dominance to disruption, read my post '
The Knee of the S‑Curve: How Tipping Points Drive Platform Shifts'.
Several levers can individually weaken extraction, and their force multiplies when they act together. Interoperability and open standards reduce lock‑in by letting newcomers and rivals plug into existing networks. Antitrust and targeted regulation can remove exclusionary tactics, mandate portability, and require repairability or transparency that raises the cost of enclosure. Platform shifts and credible competitive threats—whether from startup innovation, cooperative platforms, or public infrastructure—force incumbents to choose between improving products or ceding attention. Alternative business models such as subscriptions, federated systems, platform cooperatives, and public‑funded services change the incentives that make surveillance and ad–density profitable. Coordinated user migration or buyer pressure can be decisive when it’s visible and sustained.
History offers grim chapters — the Middle Ages among them — yet those eras were followed by reopenings of pluralism, innovation, and renewed civic institutions. Politics has swung between centralization and dispersion many times, and the long view suggests centralism is not permanent; cultural shifts, institutional reforms, and technological changes have repeatedly reopened space for local autonomy and accountable governance. That historical resilience means it is plausible to reverse the current trend toward concentrated authority if citizens, movements, and institutions commit to rebuilding checks, fostering local capacities, and defending open commons.
Conclusion
Het doel van de staat is de vrijheid.(The goal of the state is freedom.) — Baruch Spinoza
That maxim — that institutions exist to secure and expand collective freedom — makes plain why centralism or private monopolies that enclose commons and hollow out public goods are not merely inconvenient, they weaken the conditions of liberty by concentrating decision‑making, restricting participation, and turning shared resources into extractive chokepoints. Restoring freedom therefore requires rebuilding checks and interoperable systems that preserve space for collective action and local autonomy.
To summarize tersely: enshittification is driven by concentrated power that switches incentives toward extraction; the same dynamics show up in platforms and politics through capture, enclosure, and weakened accountability; and the cycle can be broken only by structural remedies that disperse control, enforce interoperability, and rebuild resilient commons. History offers precedents for reversal, and practical levers — standards, regulation, alternative business models, and collective user action — can move incentives away from short‑term extraction toward long‑term public value.
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