What exactly is enshittification? It’s a noun, and it’s defined in the Cambridge dictionary as

“the process of a product or service, especially one connected with the internet, social media, or technology, becoming or being made worse, more unpleasant, less useful, etc.”

So why am I interested in this word? Well, it all started during a conversation with someone about social media and fitness apps. We were talking about how social media apps that were all the rage a decade ago, such as Twitter and Facebook, have slowly become worse and worse over time. When revenue and profit maximisation are the priority - which they are for these free apps - then tech companies must play an attention economy game with their users.

The problem? The enshittification of services, predominately social media apps, is spilling over to enshittify our lives too.

What happened to the value proposition?

When a company, let’s say an app, is launched, they will have at least one value proposition, which is essentially the benefits or economic value that that product will provide to both current and future users. For example, if we take a sleeping bag making company, then the value proposition (broadly speaking), would be along the lines of providing a warm covering to the user so that they can stay warm and sleep better. When the service or product is not a material item, the value proposition may not be as obvious. However, when many current social media apps were rolled out, the value proposition was pretty clear. Facebook was created to allow people to share things with their friends and to stay connected with them online - effectively acting as a contact book but with some added features. When launched, most people were excited by it as they could clearly see the benefits of using the platform. LinkedIn was created to allow ‘professionals’ to connect with one another and to share their ideas and work, once again acting as a sort of contact book to allow people to stay ‘connected’ and build their networks. At first, these value propositions were rather apparent and few people would question this. However, the problem is, as many have said now, if you aren’t paying for the product then you are the product. For profit making companies, this means that, unless the service is paid for, then things must be added to allow revenue to keep being generated.

When a company creates an app or website, revenue can be generated in a few ways. They can charge a subscription fee to their subscribers to generate money, they can partner with companies to generate targeted ads, or they can collect our data (remember those T&Cs that we agree to when signing up to these services) and sell it on. For example, Facebook might collect information about our habits and interests and then sell this data to companies who can leverage this to sell us more of their product. In effect, even if there appears to be no actual cost to using the service, on average, users will collectively be adding money to these corporations big pots one way or another.

The process of enshittification

Initially, the company might be able to sustain itself due to venture capital (VC) funding, so the product that’s provided may remain relatively unchanged, however, after some time, once the initial audience has been captured, revenue would stagnate unless companies shift their tactics. There is a shift from the user experience and value provided being the priority to profit maximisation being the priority. How is this achieved? For a free service, this means shifting away from a user-centric business plan to a business-centric business plan, if that makes any sense at all. These platforms move from a service which is useful and free, to a service that captivates us and then begins enshittifying. The company providing the service turn to other businesses so that they can start providing adverts of other businesses’ products to their service’s users in order to indirectly generate revenue by taking a cut of the money made by the other business. This is why Facebook started to contain less and less of just what our friends were posting, and more and more targeted ads and algorithmically generated content; collecting as much data about the user as possible. It’s why LinkedIn has progressively started adding more and more advert like features in order to promote products and services. What eventually happens, as has been the case with Facebook, is that most of the product (the app in this case) is full of absolute junk - full of adverts, targeted posts and useless features. But this doesn’t happen overnight.

These companies slowly shift from providing value to the user, to the user providing them value. It happens subtly, in the hope that we don’t notice and, instead, slowly become slaves to these services. It then becomes a battle in the attention economy, where different services, take social media apps for example, are fighting for our time. The longer we stay on there, the more ads we are exposed to, which means more money for these big companies. But what happens once these companies have exhausted the amount of adverts they can show us? They push to regain power and authority by taking advantage of the businesses that now rely on the so heavily for their own revenue and sales. As they have monopoly over users’ attention, they can start cranking up the price of adverts, forcing businesses to start paying more and more to advertise on these platforms. I’ve tried to illustrate this progression over time in order to keep generating profits in the figure below. Notice how the overall trend seen is almost exponential in nature, showing diminishing returns over time. It’s why apps become progressively more enshittified until they are unrecognisable from their original form. Companies get desperate for our attention and use anything that they can to keep us hooked. The general progression is summarised as follows [1]:

Here is how platforms die: first, they 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, they die..

My illustration of enshittification. For visulisation purposes only - the actual trends are likely far messier!

The exploitation of power

Can you see what happens? It turns into an exploitation of power. Let’s look at LinkedIn, whose value proposition is something along the lines of “connect(ing) professionals to make them more productive and successful”. Before I came off the platform at the end of last year, I noticed that less and less of what I was seeing was from people that I was connected to. More and more of the content was simply there to increase the time spent on the app. If you scroll for long enough, you start to wonder if we’re just being connected to more ads, more noise, and more fake influencers. In my view, this completely undercuts the original intention of the platform, resulting in professionals being less productive and less successful. It seems as if it’s become a platform primarily for professionals to receive external validation, and I question the true efficacy of using it to broaden our professional network now. To add to this, I believe that this ‘online’ networking results in the displacement of face to face networking, as we can simply ‘connect’ with people online, resulting in far less genuine, authentic connections with others.

The difficulty is, how can we pre-empt or know that these things will turn from something that provides social value to something that takes away from society? I suspect that one of the main issues contributing to enshittification occurs once VC funding is received. Why? Well as soon VC funding is received, stakeholders become involved. And what do stakeholders want? More revenue to be generated. This means that irrespective of the initial value proposition of the product, stakeholder pressure likely pushes companies towards using sneakier, more desperate ways, of generating revenue.

If it’s free, you are the product

When I ultimately decided to get off the main social media platforms, one of the things that helped me make this decision was this truth. If something is free, then we are the product. At least this is true with all free social media platforms. I mentioned the term attention economy earlier. Wikipedia defines it as follows:

The attention economy refers to the incentives of advertising-driven companies, in particular, to maximize the time and attention their users give to their product.

Does this sound familiar? These big corporations who own these social media apps’ incentive is to maximise profits generated. But they generate profits from advertisements. By selling us things that we don’t need. How can they maximise the amount that we buy because of these adverts? By maximising the time that we spend looking at them. How do they maximise the time spent on their platforms? By tuning into the human psyche and grabbing as much of our attention as possible. That’s why it’s called the attention economy. It’s a new age economy, however, it’s still built on ideas in convention economics in a capitalist world. Our attention = their money. Its all a big show - a complex web - with the goal of making us buy and consume more than we need to. Everything is designed to make us feel like we have another void in our life that needs to be filled.

So why is this a problem? Maybe we are buying things that we do need. However, irrespective of this, we also pay a huge price in terms of our own time. In an age where the attention economy has succeeded in commoditising our time, we must start protecting it from these big tech giants.

The opportunity cost of social media

Despite sounding like I am completely against all of these platforms, I can see that there might be some benefit to using them for many people. So let’s assume that this is the case. This is the value provided by these services, which comes with a cost, this being the time that we spend on these platforms. One might jump to conclude that the more time we spend on a platform, then the more value it provides us. But we know that this is not true with many other things in life. Watching a film every once in a while can provide value, by allowing us to relax and to wind down. However, binge watching films every day likely results in value being removed from our life - we will start paying the price for such a sedentary, screen-based lifestyle.

Now, with a social media platform, we can apply similar logic. During the first few minutes of using the platform, it might provide a lot of value by letting us connect with friends and family and gain inspiration from others. This results in a quick increase in value in a short time. However, after some time - this being a short period for most of these apps, likely around 5-10 minutes - the value returned starts to diminish until, eventually, it stagnates. Now, what I believe happens next is interesting. If we continue to use the service for longer, it starts to provide negative value to our life, so all of the positive value we’ve just banked up starts to getting chipped away at. Eventually, the overall value provided becomes negative, meaning that the time spent on the social media platform has resulted in us being worse off than we were before we hopped on there.

Illustration of the opportunity cost of social media.

An interesting thing to ponder on is the question of whether both (or perhaps just the x axis) are logarithmic? I certainly think that the cost axis is - as I think that beyond a certain time spent on these platforms, the negative value starts to accumulate far more rapidly than any positive value that has been gained up to that point. If one thing is true, the relationship is certainly far from linear.

Before someone starts using these platforms for a couple of minutes at a time every handful of minutes, I’d like to add that this ‘value provided’ illustration cannot be generalised too much. That is, we can’t just keep hopping on these platforms every half an hour or so for a couple of minutes to reap the rewards of using them. This causes even greater problems with our attention span due to the constant context switching involved. I believe that if these platforms are to provide us any value at all, then we must use them intentionally, no more than once or twice a day, if not once or twice a week with platforms such as LinkedIn. Only then can we ride a bit of the first part of this curve that provides positive value to our life. In my view, at least during a given day, we continue accumulating any positive or negative value from a platform as shown in the illustration, meaning that beyond a given cumulative time spent on a platform during any given day, these apps start winning the game.

Scepticism about the future

So, having expressed my views on enshittification, while hopefully explaining a little about the concept itself, what does this mean for the future? To be honest, I am not full of hope, for so long as the ‘playing field’ is dominated my big tech giants fighting for our attention, I cannot see how more morally sound models and platforms can compete at the top. I’m aware that there are platforms that are trying to shift the narrative, like BlueSky. However, even though ad-free at present, they might well just be in the early stages, before enshittification becomes a necessity to keep generating profit.

The last man standing?

More recently, I’ve started to pay closer attention to the development of the only remaining social media app that I use, this being Strava. When I joined Strava around 9 years ago, it was great. I’d go on a bike or run, then the data would be transferred from my GPS to the app where I could ‘analyse’ it in more detail and keep a log of my training to look back at. I liked how I could see the progress that I was making, as well as seeing what my friends were doing too. In essence, it was a social media app for sharing your exercise with friends. However, nearly a decade down the line, as well as questioning the effect of gamifying our activities on our overall wellbeing, I’m also starting to question whether Strava is slowly being enshittified. What’s interesting though, is that Strava’s business model relies on making some revenue from subscription paying users. So one may think that there is no need to enshittify the platform as so long as they keep slowly increasing their subscriber base, then profit can still be generated. But I have a sneaky suspicion that less revenue is brought in through fee paying subscribers than we think, and that they are slowly having to shift towards generating revenue through targeted ads. You see, with a subscription based platform, if more people join, then profits will continue to rise. On the flip side, if the rate of people joining as subscribers starts to reduce, then the subscription fee can be increase to keep generating profit. However, at a certain point, we arrive at a situation where users are not willing to pay any more, so hiking up prices even further would start disincentivising users to subscribe. Now, I hope that Strava never reaches this point and that they can keep increasing profits simply because more users are choosing to subscribe. But, sadly, I think that this is me being an optimist…

Like myself, many Strava users are now questioning the value of a premium membership, partly due to other apps providing similar features for free - usually linked to their GPS watch - and partly due to the enshittification of the apps features. This is only my personal opinion, but what were once useful features seem to now be overloaded with AI-related things - AI telling us how well we ran, how we should train, how we are comparing to others etc. Perhaps more obviously is the introduction of targeted adverts on Strava and the progressive increase in the amount of these shown to a user. I can’t think back to a time where I wasn’t on there and didn’t see an advert telling me to subscribe, pay for an AI generated training plan, or join a challenge in collaboration with another company (aka. targeted ads). However, I remain a little confused as what’s happening doesn’t seem to be quite the same as what happened to other social media apps, and a part of me wants to trust Strava not to fall for the traps that big tech companies fall into. Despite this, the fact that their new CEO has previously held technology leadership positions at Nike, YouTube and Google makes me slightly apprehensive about what the future holds. To add to this, Strava are also trying to kill off any competition [2], which might seem reasonable, however, this is a step usually taken to gain monopoly over a certain market. And when a company has monopoly, there is little competition, so enshittification can occur without users knowing any better and moving to an alternative platform.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think Strava’s value proposition is fairly clear, however, I’ve started to think about how they are making money off non-subscribers. It’s very hard to do this if a company doesn’t show us ads, get us to buy things, or sell on our data - of which Strava has a lot of…

A note on the rise and use of AI

Before I discuss the steps that I’m taking to try to avoid the enshittification of these platforms enshittifying my own life, I’d like to touch on the rise and use of AI in online platforms, particularly social media. In my opinion, other than a few edge cases where AI provides genuine value to a user, I think that it’s an additional tool used to maximise profits, and perhaps the next step in the enshittification of a platform. After the recent boom in AI, some people have become quite excited by this alien like thing that supposedly makes things far more convenient for us and some people have remained weary all along. I myself fall in the second group of people. I’m not against AI or automation or machine learning - whatever you want to call it - but I think that in many cases, companies that are integrating AI into their platforms are just making their products worse. For me, a good product is one that is specific, useful, and easy to use. What I’ve found with AI appearing everywhere is that platforms like Strava are becoming more and more information clogged. Companies want us to believe that this information is shown to us for our own benefit, but they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t rake in more money for them, right? AI is being used to collect more and more data about users and used to create features that are put behind pay walls to entice users to subscribe to a platform. My concern is that AI doesn’t always do logical things, especially when designing a running plan for example, which can result in the enshittification of a platform and a user’s life at the same time. Just like AI taking over search engines, if AI is overused in social media platforms (or even used at all), it no longer allows us to organically find content and stories and instead we are fed things from the spoon of the algorithm.

Reverting back to analogue

So how do I see a brighter, better future? I believe that it lies in reverting back to more analogue forms of doing things. Reading the news in a newspaper or on an online news platform. Listening to music on a CD or record player. Watching films where we pay for each film separately. Connecting with our friends in person or over the phone. Networking with other professionals in person. Sharing our adventures and experiences in person. Putting time and effort into creating and writing content to be shared with others. For me, there is something beautiful and pure about the simplicity of doing things in a more analogue style. However, I also see potential for digital tools to be used too, just in a more stripped back manner. A move away from an attention economy, towards a more morally sound economy, where we knowingly pay for a service that provides genuine value to our lives.

Personally, being off social media is a protest against the commoditisation of time. It’s to protect me and also where my morals lie. Even if it can be used as a force for good, I don’t want to be involved with it. I have said it once and will say it again: I still think word of mouth is the best way to spread things and I have no interest in being hyperconnected online at the expense of being disconnected in real life.

A move towards paid services

Enshittification is a cycle and is what’s responsible for the appearing and disappearing of platforms. But, this is perhaps one of the reasons as to why I choose not to use many of these platforms anymore - I don’t want to be on this roller-coaster ride and to sell my time over and over again to these big corporations. Yes, some newer platforms are perhaps doing a better job, even doing good, however, so long as the rules of the game remain centred around the attention economy - which they will provided that the model remains the same - then I cannot see a way of avoiding the enshittification of something without getting users to pay for the service. You might wonder, who would pay to use such a service? Well, I think far many people than you might think. But it requires one to be aware of the true value proposition of a service, before it started enshittifying, and to compare the opportunity cost of using such a platform now and then. If removing algorithmically generated content and adverts from social media platforms saved an hour of your time each day - which it would in many cases - then it makes sense that one pays a subscription fee, maybe £5 per month for the service. Why? Well saving 1 hour a day over a month means regaining around 30 hours of your time back every month. If we then think about the ‘work’ that we could be doing during this time, even at the minimum wage, then the balance is a no brainer. But even if one doesn’t have a side hustle that can bring money in, and is perhaps working a 9-5 job, then I have no doubt that apps that aren’t yet enshittified, but are paid, will allow us to work far more effectively and happily than if we remain to be the product.

The death of these platforms

Platforms are meant to die at the end of the enshittification. However, I feel like we are dying along with them - or at least our brains are - otherwise, why do we still see so many people doom scrolling on these apps whenever they have a spare moment on their commute or even around the dinner table. We’re becoming dumber and dumber because of these apps and I hold particular concern for the younger generation, who’s brains are developing in conjunction with the enshittification of many popular platforms, which will only lead to the enshittification of human brains…

Malcom Gladwell’s excellent book, Tipping Point, talks about moments in history where tipping points have been reached and caused great change. Take, for example, the reduction in crime in New York after the graffiti on the subways was painted over. It’s happened time and time again during history and now we can collectively decide to shift the narrative and to try to regain power and time. If we keep playing their game, being ignorant to the deterioration that these platforms is causing to humans and society as a whole, then I fear that the whole world will continue to enshittify too. Some resistance will be felt and it will be challenging at first as, I believe, we have been becoming more and more disconnected in person. But social media was never meant to replace in person connection and interaction, only complement it. However, I suspect that it has now started to replace much in person connection.

I propose that we think deeply about our use of services that once served us, but perhaps now only take from us.

[1] Cory Doctorow on the enshittification of social platforms

[2] Monymazepodcast Strava blog