Enshittification

“Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers (such as advertisers), and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.” – Wikipedia

It’s refreshing to be able to swear online without being censored, that’s the beauty of owning the website I’m posting on.

Enshittification is a very real problem in 2025. I’m currently writing this post on my Windows 11 desktop, and for all intents and purposes it’s absolutely awful. I have to run an additional manual firewall just to block the absolute stream of my private data trying to leave my machine. The UI is disjointed, half in the trusty control panel and half in the awful settings “app”. Without additional configuration the taskbar and start menu are riddled with advertisements, the system regularly installs applications I don’t want or need and troubleshooting and repairing the system has been reduced to either a full reset or a completely useful blue screen with a sad face emoji. How did things go so wrong?

Let’s backtrack a little, just today I was at work and had a fault on one of our legacy servers. When I say legacy I mean it could legally drink alcohol anywhere in the world. Don’t worry it’s not web facing and it’s all backed up, but it’s a Dell Poweredge 2950 and it’s running a 32 bit installation of Server 2003. This server has been running in my business for 20 years and is still going strong. It gets replacement HDD’s when it needs them and gets an annual dusting, we also periodically run a defrag and disk cleanup but aside from that it runs without a hitch. The fault was software based and finding the source of it was a breeze. With minimal background processes and an actually useful event viewer I got to the bottom of the issue in about 5 minutes. Interestingly enough the problem was caused by a Windows 11 machine on the local network interacting with it. On a side note, I took the opportunity to clean up it’s boot options. All I had to do was edit the boot.ini file that was hidden on the root of the C: drive. Nowadays I’d have to mess with UEFI settings, worry about wrecking the EFI partition and pray to the IT gods that the system would boot again. Not with an old system, just edit the file, save and reboot.

This doesn’t just apply to PC’s and servers though. Smartphones, games consoles, food, restaurants, cars, services, everything that has a shareholder behind it eventually falls victim to it. We are in what I like to call late stage capitalism now. Companies have done nearly everything they can to increase their customer bases, increase profits, reduce costs and increase efficiencies. However, shareholders don’t care. They demand constant growth. The companies, desperate to appease them turn to their only other options which are making their products worse and/or giving you less for your money.

Now more than ever I think it’s time that we begin voting with our wallets that we won’t stand for enshittification. Move away from products that are getting worse, if it’s a digital product look to an open source alternative, if it’s an online store (Amazon and eBay are getting notably worse) close your account and look for a smaller alternative, or go back to shopping at a brick and mortar store. If it’s a tech product actively delay your replacement and hold out for as long as you can.

If these giants need to fall so that better alternatives can rise from their ashes, so be it.