Table of Contents
Introduction
Something has changed about the internet. Not all at once, but gradually, until one day you open an app you’ve used for years and feel… exhausted. Like it wants something from you before you’ve even done anything.
For a long time, I brushed that feeling off as nostalgia. But it kept showing up, in too many places, in the same way.
This change didn’t just happen. It was designed.
It used to feel different
As a Gen-Xer, I remember the early internet feeling genuinely fun.
Dancing babies. GeoCities chaos. Getting unexpectedly Rickrolled. You were able to fall down rabbit holes and discover new websites. It didn’t feel like something carefully engineered to keep you clicking. The web was messy and imperfect, but it had a kind of lightness to it.
It didn’t feel like everything was trying to capture your attention, optimize your behavior, or turn every interaction into a transaction.
Now it feels like work. Every app wants something from you before you’ve even done anything: an upsell, a notification, a feature that used to be free but now sits behind a paywall. Simple tasks take more steps than they should.
Sometimes it feels like the internet hasn’t really gotten better at anything except treating us as the product.
The quiet pivot
The early internet was built on a simple premise: be useful, earn trust, grow. And for a while, that worked.
But “useful” doesn’t scale the way investors expect. Growth targets rise. Monetization matures. And the priorities shift. Success stops being measured by how well something works …and starts being measured by how long you stay. That’s when things began to change.
Features that once felt helpful start nudging you toward something else. Notifications get more persistent. Interfaces more crowded. The goal quietly moves from serving you to keeping you. Algorithms accelerate the shift. Instead of showing what’s most relevant, they optimize for engagement – whatever keeps you scrolling, clicking, and reacting.
At the same time, everything gets repriced. Features move behind paywalls. Free becomes freemium. Freemium becomes paid.
From the business’s point of view, the numbers look fine. Revenue grows. Engagement stays high. But the experience starts to hollow out.
The early internet was built on a simple premise: be useful, earn trust, grow. And for a while, that worked... But "useful" doesn’t scale the way investors expect.
There’s actually a name for this
Writer and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow first coined the term “enshittification” in a November 2022 post on his blog, Pluralistic, a concept he later expanded into his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. It describes a predictable three-stage lifecycle where platforms sacrifice user experience to maximize shareholder value:
Stage 1: Be good to users. Win people over through usefulness and simplicity. Build an audience worth having.
Stage 2: Monetize the audience. Revenue pressures grow. Ads increase. Product decisions start serving business goals alongside users.
Stage 3: Extract and lock in. Free features become paid ones. Prices creep up. The experience degrades while switching away becomes harder than staying.
This framework is compelling because it’s recognizable. Most of us have lived through all three stages without having words for what was happening. Until now.
Note: For a deeper dive, Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu discuss enshittification (and what could actually be done about it) in the episode “We Didn’t Ask for This Internet” on The Ezra Klein Show.
It's a small thing. But it's a clean illustration of Stage 3 in action: take something useful, remove it from the free tier, charge for it. LinkedIn is far from the only platform doing this.
Note: As of this writing, the link is inexplicably working again with my Premium plan.
The cost of staying
None of this would work if leaving were easy. But it isn’t. Platforms are designed to be sticky. Starting over somewhere else means rebuilding everything: your contacts, your history, and your content.
So you stay.
And over time, you adjust. The product gets a little worse, and you absorb it. You click past the extra prompts. You accept the new limits. You pay for what used to be free.
By the time you notice how much has changed, you’re already too embedded to leave without friction. That’s the model.
The platform doesn’t need to be good. It just needs to make leaving feel harder than staying.
So what can actually be done?
Doctorow and Wu don’t just point out the problem. They’ve also spent time thinking about what might actually fix it. Two ideas come up again and again.
Data portability. If you could take your contacts, content, and history with you when you leave a platform, switching wouldn’t feel so costly. And if leaving were easier, the whole “extract as much as possible” model gets a lot harder to sustain.
Real competition. Platforms have been allowed to get so large that they don’t really have to compete anymore. In many cases, they bought their competitors before they became a threat. Wu’s argument is simple: companies behave differently when users have real alternatives.
None of this is easy. But it’s probably more realistic than expecting platforms to suddenly start putting users first again.
Conclusion
The internet didn’t get worse by accident. It changed because of a series of deliberate choices: engagement over experience, revenue over trust, retention over value. Each decision made sense on its own. Together, they reshaped something that used to work for us into something that works on us.
This pattern will keep repeating on new platforms with new audiences. It already has. But now we can see it. The platforms will keep doing this until it costs them something.
So far, it hasn’t.
Resources
Cory Doctorow — Pluralistic: How Monopoly En-Shittified Amazon: The original November 2022 post where Doctorow first coined the term enshittification, using Amazon as a case study in platform degradation.
The Ezra Klein Show — We Didn’t Ask for This Internet: Doctorow and Tim Wu discuss enshittification, how platforms extract value from users, and what structural solutions might actually work.
Cory Doctorow — Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It: Doctorow’s full-length expansion of the enshittification framework, including the policy and regulatory arguments referenced in this article.
