“The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

The word was first coined by science fiction writer Cory Doctorow. According to the Guardian news site,  Doctorow says it involves:

“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.”

And ultimately, he says it should involve the demise of the platform.

I would like to nominate Facebook as a champion of enshittification. It used to be an excellent site where you found out what was happening in your “friends” lives and told them what was happening in yours, including how you felt and what concerned or amused you about the world. But then, Facebook did the following:

• It introduced algorithms that limit whose posts you see and who sees your posts. So you now have to go to each individual friend’s page to see what they have been up to, and your posts only come up in a small percentage of friend’s feeds.
• Facebook decided to lower the priority of posts that have links to outside websites, especially news sites, so they now are rarely seen by the poster’s friends. This has had many effects. It stops people from linking to the sources of information in a post, so it is much harder to check out whether a post’s information is correct, meaning there is now a greater chance of misinformation being spread by Facebook posts. This lowering of the priority of posts with links also makes it harder for writers like myself to plug their writing on Facebook.
• Facebook flooded feeds with advertising. Now, a Facebook feed has to be extensively scrolled to catch up with friends’ posts.
• Much of that advertising on Facebook is for scams. According to a series of recent articles in The Age newspaper, scammers love Facebook, and Facebook doesn’t care about stopping them: Social Media Scams and Psychopaths are the Best; Confessions from Inside the Scam Industry. Fortunately ads in feeds can be eliminated by installing the FB Purity extension in your browser. I have been using it for the past month.

I hereby declare Facebook a champion of enshittification. If there was alternative to Facebook, like Bluesky is to X, I would have little hesitation in leaving Facebook.