As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders:
Two years ago, a Canadian writer named Cory Doctorow coined the phrase "enshittification" to describe the decay of online platforms. The word immediately set the Internet ablaze, as it captured the growing malaise regarding how almost everything about the web seemed to be getting worse.
"It's my theory explaining how the Internet was colonized by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters, and what we can do about it," Doctorow explained in a follow-up article. "We're all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying."
Doctorow believes there are four basic forces that might constrain companies from getting worse: competition, regulation, self-help, and tech workers. One by one, he says, these constraints have been eroded as large corporations squeeze the Internet and its denizens for dollars.
If you want a real-world, literal example of enshittification, let's look at actual poop. When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100 million on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until Diapers.com folded. With another competitor tossed aside, Amazon was then free to sell diapers at its price from wherever it wanted to source them.
Anyway, we at Ars have covered a lot of things that have been enshittified. Here are some of the worst examples we've come across. Hopefully, you'll share some of your own experiences in the comments. We might even do a follow-up story based on those.
Smart TVs have come a long way since Samsung released the first model readily available for the masses in 2008. While there have certainly been improvements in areas like image quality, sound capabilities, usability, size, and, critically, price, much of smart TVs' evolution could be viewed as invasive and anti-consumer.
Today, smart TVs are essentially digital billboards that serve as tools for companies—from advertisers to TV OEMs—to extract user data. Corporate interest in understanding what people do with and watch on their TVs and in pushing ads has dramatically worsened the user experience. For example, the remotes for LG's 2025 TVs don't have a dedicated input button but do have multiple ways for accessing LG webOS apps.
This is all likely to get worse as TV companies target software, tracking, and ad sales as ways to monetize customers after their TV purchases—even at the cost of customer convenience and privacy. When budget brands like Roku are selling TV sets at a loss, you know something's up.
With this approach, TVs miss the opportunity to appeal to customers with more relevant and impressive upgrades. There's also a growing desire among users to disconnect their connected TVs, defeating their original purpose. Suddenly, buying a dumb TV seems smarter than buying a smart one. But smart TVs and the ongoing revenue opportunities they represent have made it extremely hard to find a TV that won't spy on you.
Doctorow writes about so many different aspects of enshittification that is not possible to cover them all here, and it would be wrong to copy the entire source. However, he discusses Google, PDFs, Apple, TV Sports, AI, Windows, etc. I recommend that you read the original source, but you will probably spend much of the time nodding in agreement to his observations and comments.
Related Stories
The Norwegian Consumer Council has published a new report, Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, about countering big tech's growing abuse of its increasingly concentrated power. The 100-page PDF is accompanied by two cover letters, one in English to various EU/EEA/UK and US institutions, and one in Norwegian to Norwegian authorities. The report starts with the problem of platform decay now known colloquially as enshittification. One change is the demand for action to be taken proactively:
Traditional competition tools are ex-post and focused on the abuse of market dominance by individual companies. The drives of enshittification cannot always be linked to one dominant company's abuse of its dominance. When enforcement relies on established harms rather than potential market disruptions, it will often also be too late – either because the digital market has already been skewed in big tech companies' favor or because big tech can argue that the case is no longer relevant.
The New Competition Tool allows authorities to investigate more general market failures that could potentially lead to future lock-in effects and implement interim measures before any harms have materialised. It gives competition authorities more flexibility when it comes to which services and practices can be investigated, and would allow them to investigate some of the drivers of enshittification, such as lock-in effects. In Norway, Germany and the UK, competition authorities already have such powers. These powers should be extended to other authorities, including to the European Commission.
However, the keys to platform independence, open standards (to include file formats and protocols), only get mentioned in passing. Albeit the goal of open standards, interoperability (whether cooperative or adversarial), does get more coverage.
Via Louis Rossmann Norweigan Government comes out swinging on enshittification (also on Odysee) who discusses the Norwegian Consumer Council's 4-minute hard hitting video on the scope of the problem.
Previously:
(2026) A Post-American, Enshittification-Resistant Internet
(2025) As Internet Enshittification Marches On, Here are Some of the Worst Offenders
(2024) Cory Doctorow Has a Plan to Wipe Away the Enshittification of Tech
(2023) Enshittification Everywhere. Your Car, Your Phone, Your Tractor, Your Computer...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday February 07 2025, @04:27PM
Worst mutilation of PDF that already happened was adding a JavaScript to the format standard.
Now we have DOOM and full RISC-V emulator running plain rv Linux... in a PDF in a conformant viewer.
So, the article mentioning Academist's funny problem with select/copy on PDF text seems to me a mere washout of catastrophic situation.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday February 07 2025, @04:32PM (1 child)
It would? Why? Doctorow is known for releasing things under CC licenses.
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Friday February 07 2025, @04:39PM
The source is Ars Technica - who have not released it under CC. Their source is paywalled so I cannot see what it was originally released under. We therefore have to respect Ars Technica's publication.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Friday February 07 2025, @04:38PM
I remember when SaaS products were actual services.
Now if you use QuickBooks the screen real estate is about 50% advertising for related services.
Google Workspace is not that bad (yet) but imagine if 50% of your word processor screen was advertising.
On a related note, I have noticed that back in the 80s we had little 10 inch monitors and we liked it and we used 100% of the screen for our purposes. Now we have giant monitors which are almost entirely unused either filler or ads and at best you get maybe 10 inches of actual "content" the rest is filler, GUI, ads, unused toolbars, etc.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Barenflimski on Friday February 07 2025, @04:59PM (12 children)
I got a Roku back in the day because I needed an interface for Plex. It used to work like a charm. Simple interface, my favorites were at the top. Nice and neat.
Then, Enshittification.
Roku is now pushing ads. They're pushing streaming services, some their own, others paid by whomever wants their tile at the top. They're collecting gobs of data.
Today the Roku's I have hardly function as they are now ad servers with bloatware. They crash all the time. When not crashing, they are slow, laggy. My "favorite" tiles are rarely on the first page anymore.
Sometimes at night I stand in the window, fists raised at the sky and I yell, "Ma Roku!"
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday February 07 2025, @05:29PM (3 children)
Almost a decade ago, I got a Vizio smart TV, just a 24", mostly to check them out. It became so crappy no one uses it any more. No longer connects to YouTube. Frequently forgets Netflix user id and password, and tapping that in on a remote control is annoying. Anyway, I canceled Netflix. Several other commercial services it was programmed to access have gone under. Now it just sits there gathering dust. I only turn it on for weather reporting on broadcast TV, when there is severe weather.
I thought, hmm, is this how we get family to stop watching TV? But no, everyone uses laptops with ad blocking, and some endure ads on tablets.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 07 2025, @06:02PM (2 children)
If you block the Vizio's Internet connection, will it function as a simple monitor, like HDMI or whatever input?
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Friday February 07 2025, @06:11PM
Yes, it can still do that. It has had a few forced "upgrades" which I do not think have disabled the HDMI input.
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Saturday February 08 2025, @05:51AM
That's the solution for "smart" TVs, just hellban them. VLAN them off or block them at the firewall or whatever it takes, let them run in their own private universe where they're perfectly happy but can't do anything.
In fact I'm surprised someone hasn't made a $20 box any nontechnical person can buy and use for this and plastered it all over the usual crapvendors (Amazon, Temu, etc).
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Friday February 07 2025, @08:04PM
I shelled out the money for Emby; support your local(ish) software developers, etc. Its "basically the same thing" if you're unfamiliar with Emby. You're paying money for them to pay attention to bug reports on the forums more or less. Also they give free OTA listings which has a cost and I feel they deserve the small amount of cash.
There are options in the settings to remove most of the shit and bloatware from Roku, to the point that it works pretty good.
I find it aesthetically annoying that they change the background image/decor. I'd be happy with light gray.
My current only annoyance with Emby is theres no "logical" way to handle transcode vs direct play for different files. Obviously direct play doesn't work or looks awful for some file formats so I can't set it and forget it to direct play, although it works beautifully with most files. Obviously transcoding is trash for some formats and it would be better to just "do your best" rather than trying to convert to a format that doesn't look any better or chokes out the CPU making it unwatchable anyway due to occasional timeouts, so I can't set it and forget it to transcode always.
"Obviously" in my infinite spare time I need to write a script for HandBrake or maybe directly mess with ffmpeg to slowly and methodically transcode any file I have encoded with trash into something that looks really good on Direct Play. Or I could throw infinite CPU at the problem using infinite money so transcoding always "works".
It would be nice if Emby had a ruleset for playing based on characteristics rather than just directplay or attempt to transcode and hope for the best.
Live TV recordings work perfectly; videos downloaded from YouTube work perfectly; my problem is entirely movies and tv shows downloaded from ... the usual sources ... sometimes very old now, (10, 15 years old) and having what would now be considered odd video encodings.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Friday February 07 2025, @09:07PM (3 children)
Go into settings and you are able to turn off a bunch of ads (you can turn off 'seasonal' and 'ad' backgrounds, etc.
I find the Roku bounds better than the firestick, but yes, shit is spilling over the septic tank.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 3, Touché) by Ox0000 on Friday February 07 2025, @09:35PM (2 children)
Why are the ads even on to begin with? Is this another MBA fishing for a promotion who convinced people that "Oh yes, people LOVE seeing ads, they totally want this turned on and will love your product for it"?
(Score: 5, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday February 07 2025, @11:46PM
[Ivanova rants about EarthGov's decision to sell B5 merchandise.]
Susan Ivanova: Welcome to Babylon 5, the last, best hope for a quick buck!
John Sheridan: Commander—
Ivanova: Oh, this is demeaning! I mean, we're not some…some deep-space franchise! This station is about something.
Londo Mollari: It's a mockery! It doesn't even have any, uh…attributes.
Sheridan: Attributes?
Londo: Do I have to spell it out for you?
[Londo gestures downward. Ivanova and Sheridan stare at Londo, then at each other.]
Sheridan, Ivanova: Ohh!
Ivanova: I see. So you feel like you're being symbolically cast... in a bad light.
Sheridan: Well put.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 3, Touché) by Freeman on Monday February 10 2025, @05:42PM
It's called money.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday February 13 2025, @09:30PM (2 children)
Just got this pop-up notice:
Have to see how this goes..... :/
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Thursday February 13 2025, @10:19PM (1 child)
Damn. These guys...
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday February 13 2025, @10:54PM
I might look into Jellyfin or Kodi; but right now I'm having motherboard or gpu issues. My system will work for a while, then start slowing and then freezing or just almost immediately freezing. :/
Still narrowing it down before i buy something to replace something....
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 5, Informative) by Freeman on Friday February 07 2025, @05:13PM (5 children)
Article about "enshittification of absolutely everything" is paywalled on a site that may/may not still exist in 20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification [wikipedia.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Friday February 07 2025, @05:17PM
I like the Doctorow's dark humor there; "enshittocene"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 07 2025, @06:08PM (1 child)
I would swear I have been hearing "enshittification" since long before 2023. Maybe it's just the concept that reaches back decades and as soon as I heard the word it applied itself to all those old memories.
In any event, you can download and host offline snapshots of Wikipedia and many other things through: https://kiwix.org/en/the-new-kiwix-library-is-available/ [kiwix.org]
The "big" Wikipedia download took me about 7 hours, now I can read over 6 million articles without an internet connection - though the references still need internet.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Deep Blue on Saturday February 08 2025, @12:27PM
I as well. I do not believe that date.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 07 2025, @06:13PM
The Wikipedia article really should also present concrete examples of projects actively working to:
"the right of exit, which holds that users of a platform can easily go elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with it. For social media, this requires interoperability, countering the network effects that "lock in" users and prevent market competition between platforms."
Of course, none of them have significant traction, but the Fediverse is somewhat beyond trivial these days, and even Miss Binding Chaos has at least laid a decent outline of goals: https://georgiebc.wordpress.com/category/code-will-rule/ [wordpress.com]
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Saturday February 08 2025, @05:56AM
The original BoingBoing post, not paywalled, is years old. The FT one is a recent update.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 07 2025, @05:14PM (6 children)
The company I work for is putting in a bot to answer calls for customers. I had one small part in the project. We ran through the beta in prod just the other day. It was not exactly a rousing success. Most of the calls just immediately hung up. Some of the responses were NSFW. In fact, of all the interactions, only one led to a successful result. This did not surprise anyone on the team -- but management is going ahead with it and just wanting to make some tweaks to the bot. I finished the day, saying to myself, "Well, I've done my part to further enshittification of the internet... hooray."
(Score: 5, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 07 2025, @06:09PM (1 child)
Did you get paid? Don't keep turning tricks unless the money is better than your other alternatives.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 07 2025, @06:58PM
Oh yeah, don't get me wrong. I work for a pretty good company and make a great salary and have been able to build a nice bit of wealth. I pretty much just do what I'm told, because, as you say, it's a lot better than the alternative :-)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday February 07 2025, @08:09PM (3 children)
Customers see value in customer service. Companies see expense in customer service.
The problem is a company only has to do better than the competition. If you'd like to see a non-competitive marketplace's customer services, call a cable company or Social Security for support.
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Saturday February 08 2025, @06:01AM (2 children)
China is eating our lunch there too. Been interacting with a company in Shenzhen that makes electronic control devices and they have an online forum where you'll get a reply within 12-24 hours, even to totally dumb questions, and actual support and help, not just platitudes and buck-passing. And they have online manuals, circuit diagrams, video tutorials... fsck, their US competitors won't even open a ticket without a 5-figure support contract in place, and then it's usually just "we have passed this on to our engineers", a polite way of saying FOAD.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday February 08 2025, @03:00PM (1 child)
In some fairness thats just Adafruit or Sparkfun or similar performance in the USA.
Oh well thats a little different.
My experience with aliexpress purchased products has been mixed.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday February 09 2025, @04:56AM
Ah, good point, and they are probably more towards the Adafruit end than the usual Aliexpress crapvendor end of the scale.
Another example, where I had a direct A/B comparison, was getting technical details of the modbus control system for a large electrical device. The local distributors went through multiple rounds of "you can't do that" to "you can probably do that but we don't have the docs" to "we have the docs but you can't have them", and so on. Found the original manufacturer in China and they were quite happy to send some rando on the Internet that emailed them their technical docs. OK, they were pretty awful, but then they are for most non-Chinese vendors as well.
It was very contrary to expectations, the official support channel in this country was more or less FOAD while the manufacturer, with no commercial relationship with me, was happy to help. Will be interesting to see the local lot's faces when they see modbus controllers hooked up to their stuff.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 07 2025, @06:28PM (2 children)
Reading through tfa and the comments up to now, the common theme I see is an old one -- follow the money. When websites/services/companies are new and funded by venture capital or other big startup money, they can offer their services without ads and/or at no/low cost. Once the honeymoon is over, the initial funding runs out and now the company must make money somehow to survive. Sometimes the model is pretty transparent, for example, Uber was pretty clearly a successful attack on taxicabs by big capital, and now that they have mostly destroyed their competition, the prices have gone up.
So, I'm going to blame enshittification on the business model of high initial growth with outside funding. If more services grew "organically" (for lack of a better word), starting small and growing with money from profit or other drip feeding, I think we'd see a lot less of this.
An example I can think of is Craigslist -- started local, grew slowly and (to my knowledge) has never had funding problems. Of course they also are not making anyone rich...but is that really a problem?
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Friday February 07 2025, @06:41PM
Of course they also are not making anyone rich...but is that really a problem?
No ... It is the solution.
People sell their souls for big money - not for scraps from the waste bin.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Friday February 07 2025, @08:18PM
Something interesting to think about is I (and probably other SN peeps) go back to the old days of using multiple $50K Sun SunOS workstations to host DNS servers and webservers.
Now you can do all that and more for like $1 on AWS.
Naturally you'd assume if expenses in a market dropped by a factor of 100K, advertising would decrease by a factor of 100K. However, its the reciprocal. How... interesting.
My point being something like if a company only makes money off the internet by advertising, it probably shouldn't exist... so I find no moral dilemma with ad blockers. If a fool and his money are soon parted, I may as well help the process along a bit.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday February 07 2025, @07:36PM
1. If you don't have the source code for the software running on your machine, you don't control your machine.
2. If you don't have access to accurate specs for the hardware running on your machine, you don't control your machine.
3. If you don't have the ability to run whatever code you choose on your machine, you don't control your machine.
4. If you don't control your machine, it doesn't work for you, it works for whoever does control it.
5. As computers control more of our lives, the importance of this problem increases.
Systems that are unequivocably Free Software are necessary if we want to retain any kind of hope for the future of computer systems.
At least some of the other scenarios Doctorow describes are cartels doing stuff that was made illegal during the Teddy Roosevelt administration for a reason, but they've learned how to get away with it.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by ShovelOperator1 on Friday February 07 2025, @08:02PM
The problem is that a whole modern Internet is already enshittified beyond its original form.
I found a new phrase in my local media (EU country here), which is now massively parroted by newspapers, IT magazines or even tech blogs. To translate this from my language to English: "European Union tries to protect the internet for the business.".
I don't know what AI came to this, I don't exclude an AI running on a meat-based platform. However, this is frequently quoted when it comes to motivate EU's GDPR or the latest AI act, and while it looks like this is swallowed smoothly by most Internet users, I can't stop finding bad assumptions, worse intentions or just plain bovinexcrement in this single sentence, or reasoning leading to it. This is not why the Web in its world-wide version has been invented for. Passing of the Internet from universities to the market was in early 90s, and changing from people exchanging knowledge and ideas (as users) to the corporations oligopoly pushing ads to the eyes of masses became fact a little more than a decade and half later. While a few years ago the artificial scarcity of means of publishing was introduced, but still acceptable (and possible to workaround), now it looks like the attack on users came from another side - from erosion of the Internet communities.
No, social networks are not communities. When posts in social media are read, the author is rarely looked at, and if it is, it's usually for overly heavy "banhammering" purposes. So it's not even properly read, without knowing who made that and by what opinions or experience - it crosses the subtle difference between the community and the echo chamber, meanwhile making people vulnerable to manipulation by advertisers. Yes, it's disinformation too - as this big bad "disinformation" is suddenly totally OK if someone paid for ads. As a consequence of conditioning such users... no... useds? (English isn't my primary language), it leads to the wrong assumption that the medium is a community, leading to global advocating for censorship.
Of course, it's a censorship of things that are not in line of those who advocate it, but it ends with advertisers holding scissors, as it already happens in many platforms.
The problem is that these things cannot be undone. We already dumped the knowledge as "everything is in the Internet" while more and more things in the net turns to ad-ridden stream of excrement.
And don't even start about the need of financing by ads - not too long ago the small hosting was in the ISP's tariff, and the ads were pictures, not malicious programs running on client machines. So it's all over like it was with the cable TV, which some time ago was paid because it had no ads.
And as cable TV damaged itself with this approach to a degree that people started pirating movies using modem-grade network, waiting a few days for transferring DivX rips over their poor connections instead of paying to watch ads, the Internet can end the same way.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 07 2025, @11:27PM (1 child)
I guess the thing that annoys me is that the government - not just ours, all of them - is pouring public money into AI which in turn is chewing up the public space and turning into an enshittified, misinformation-ridden, for-profit corporate dystopia.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 10 2025, @05:53PM
This has been going on for decades. AI is just the latest thing to help accelerate the process.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"