What is 'enshittification', the term for decay of online platforms? Is Facebook going through it?
Social media platforms | Representative image
If you were born in the 1990s or before, chances are that you are aware of major social media platforms that exist in the present day and the ones that were there in the days gone by during the early years of the internet. Remember the good old Orkut days? For the GenZs, that could be obsolete.
In real-time, there exist social media platforms that are slowly undergoing decay. They appear to have surpassed the zenith of their popularity and are now plateauing towards a period of contested popular appeal.
Canadian-British blogger and journalist Cory Doctorow in 2023 coined the term "enshittification" to describe the way that online platforms decay.
The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023.
What is ‘enshittification’ about?
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Doctorow, in an article published on Financial Times, theorised that we all are living through a period of "great enshittenning". The enshittification described how the internet was colonised by [online] platforms and why all those platforms are "degrading so quickly and thoroughly".
Doctorow presents enshittification as a three-stage process.
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"First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die," Doctorow writes while citing Facebook as a case study.
Doctorow further adds that towards the conclusive decay of a service, the difference between "I hate this service, but I can’t bring myself to quit," and "Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit?" is razor-thin.
"All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then Facebook discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword," Doctorow adds.
If users can’t leave the platformbecause everyone else is staying, when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go. That’s terminal enshittification, Cory Doctorowdescribes.
(With inputs from agencies)