Comment by Tim Harford

Perhaps this is just nostalgia and such complaints are the disaffected grumbling of an out-of-touch cohort of early adopters. Or it could be the “headwinds” effect, familiar to any cyclist, which is that you always notice headwinds but take tailwinds for granted. Similarly, whenever a platform changes, we obsess over what is worse and quickly forget what is better. This negativity makes evolutionary sense: the secret of happiness may be to focus on what’s going well, but the secret of survival is to pay attention to what’s going badly. Nevertheless, I’m quite sure enshittification is real. The basic idea was sketched out in economic literature in the 1980s, before the world wide web existed. Economic theorists lack Doctorow’s gift for a potent neologism, but they certainly understand how to make a formal model of a product going to the dogs. There are two interrelated issues at play. The first is that internet platforms exhibit network effects: people use Facebook because their friends use Facebook; sellers use Amazon because it’s where the buyers are, while buyers use Amazon because it’s where the sellers are. Second, people using these platforms experience switching costs if they wish to move from one to another. [...] Both switching costs and network effects tend to lead to enshittification because platform providers see early adopters as an investment in future profits.