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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.
(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.