“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.

Domain Registration Rip-off

The rip-offs and scams started straight after I registered my business when I received a letter from www.registry.com.au offering me a domain name for my business at the bargain price of $99. This organisation obviously relies on a new business owner not knowing that domain name registration costs only about $15 and is usually free when you sign up with a website hosting service.

Designer Spam

When I signed up with a hosting service for my website, I immediately received several phone calls and emails from website designers wanting to design my website. They hadn’t bothered to check out my website and see I was a website designer and then conclude that I would not want a website designed by someone else. When told I was a web designer, the more alert caller would immediately go into a spiel about the possibility of me contacting work out to them.

Contact/Product Review Spammers

A few of the websites I have constructed have contact forms that spammers use if I don’t put Captcha on them. I also construct e-commerce sites that often allow customers to comment on or review individual products; again, spammers use them.

Merchant Credit Card Scam

Just recently, I received an email from a potential client who said they were hard of hearing. They wanted to discuss the project only via email rather than Zoom or over the phone.

They said they wanted an ecommerce fashion website. They told me the products they were selling and they wanted customers to be able to buy them in different sizes and colours. After prompting, they gave me the URL of a fashion website they liked. I spent a few hours creating an example website based on that website. I then sent an email asking what they thought of the example with an initial quote of the cost.

She (?) emailed me back, saying she wanted to pay me immediately in full. This surprised as I had told her I operate on a 50% deposit and then 50% on completion basis. She said she only had a credit card and wanted to pay with that. I sent back an email saying PayPal accepts credit cards, so she could use them to pay me. She replied that she didn’t want to use PayPal or Square because they had ripped her off. She wanted me to set up a merchant credit card account.

I was starting to become suspicious. I ran a search on her gmail address and found nothing on the web. She had a rather unique name, so unique that when I searched on Google and Facebook it did not come up at all.

More in interest than anything else, I rang the banks about setting up a merchant credit card account. The banks thought my client’s behaviour was very suspicious. They told me merchant credit card facilities can be defrauded with stolen credit cards.  Is this what the client was up to? One bank suggested setting up a BPay account.

Just in case the client had just set up their email account, used a pseudonym online, were hard of hearing, and genuinely did not trust PayPal, I sent them an email. I said my business’ bank did not have merchant credit card accounts (which they didn’t) and suggested we use BPay. I also asked for more details about her business. It has been a week, and I haven’t heard back from them. I am still wondering how they planned to use the merchant credit card system to rip me off.

Refund Scam

Finally, last week I received a badly written message from a contact form on one of my example e-commerce websites. A person said they had paid for an unnamed product and not received it. They wanted their money back. The product was meant to be a birthday gift for their wife. As the site was not capable of accepting payments they could not have paid for it.

I am sure my business will be subject to more spam, attempted scams and rip-offs. I wish no one would fall for these scams so the scammers would give up and stop wasting our time.  As for spammers, at least do some research before you spam to see if someone could actually need your service. And don’t use the review sections of products and contact forms on websites because it just annoys people and gives you no chance of a positive response to your spam.