Enshittification Is Not Inevitable

There's a pattern that keeps repeating in the life of many digital products that were once good.

They start sharp, fast, and attentive to detail. They're built around a concrete problem, with an almost obsessive respect for the user's time and attention. You can feel it immediately when you use them: the product makes sense, responds well, and builds trust right away.

And then the slow drift begins.

More surfaces to cover, more interruptions, more priorities competing for the same space. These are decisions that make perfect sense in a spreadsheet but feel off inside the product. Nothing breaks, but the experience starts wearing down bit by bit, almost without anyone noticing.

Cory Doctorow describes this pattern as enshittification: the gradual degradation of a product as value shifts away from the user and toward extraction, optimization, and the interests of other stakeholders. The term might sound a bit strong, but the dynamic is familiar to anyone who's watched a good product slowly lose its magic.

Enshittification puts a name to the problem, but naming the problem is only half the story. The more useful question is whether it can be avoided.

We believe it can. But we need to be honest about why it happens: most teams that degrade a product don't do it because they stopped caring about users. They do it because incentives push in a different direction and nobody stops to question them. OKRs are tied to short-term metrics, roadmaps fill up with commitments nobody quite remembers how they got there, and little by little the product starts working for the business instead of the person using it. Nobody woke up one day and decided to ruin the product. They simply stopped asking whether what they were doing still made sense.

This happens more often than it seems: processes and decisions age, and if nobody has the awareness to revisit them, they start occupying a space they don't deserve. What was once a reasonable decision turns into inertia disguised as strategy.

The healthiest products have something in common: they maintain an almost irrational fixation on the problem that justified their existence. They didn't lose sight of growing, launching new features, or adding monetization layers to sustain the business (which is extremely important), but they never let go of the original tension that gave them meaning.

The best product teams do something surprisingly simple: they keep asking the original question.

What tension made this product necessary? What friction were we trying to eliminate? What cognitive load were we responsible for reducing?

Over time, without that conscious focus, the product stops being a solution to a problem and becomes a salad of business decisions that end up reflecting the team's experience more than the user's.

Obviously, this doesn't mean resisting change, especially in times when everything moves fast, and speed is fundamental. But we can't lose sight of how important it is to protect the original vision and the product's gravity.

One of the ways this manifests is through subtraction, and it's perhaps the most counterintuitive sign of a team doing its job well. Healthy products remove features just as aggressively as they add new ones. They treat simplicity as a constraint that requires active maintenance. Adding is easy. Knowing what doesn't make the cut is the hard part.

Another signal lies in how teams interpret metrics. Numbers are essential: they reveal behavior, show performance, and provide a ton of valuable information. But without context, those metrics sometimes fail to describe the real quality of the experience.

Teams that avoid this decline learn to listen to what the numbers don't capture: the small irritations, the confusion, those weak signals that the product is becoming harder to use. That's product management too, even if there's no formula for it.

Enshittification often doesn't start when products fail, but when friction becomes an everyday thing and the user ends up adapting to the product instead of the product adapting to them.

Strong products tend to be very clear about what they are, what they're not, and why they exist. That narrative works like the goalposts on a field: it limits arbitrary expansion, resists incoherent feature creep, and helps teams evaluate decisions beyond short-term metrics.

Enshittification is not a law of nature. It is the outcome of unattended incentives and unchallenged decisions. Products decay when teams stop defending the logic that made them good.

The counterforce is not stasis. It is intentionality.

• Staying in love with the problem.
• Protecting simplicity as the product scales.
• Measuring not only activity, but ease.
• Reconnecting with real users, repeatedly.

Good products are preserved by taste, judgment, and the quiet, continuous act of asking: Are we still solving the right problem, in the best possible way?