In his witty article for Wired called “The ‘Enshittification’ of Tiktok” Cory Doctorow talks about how platforms die:
First, they 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. Then, they die.
He calls this process “enshittification” and sees it as an inevitable, natural lifecycle process.
We all know this process due to recent developments of Twitter and Meta (paid verification, I am talking about you). And we hate that.
As a UX designer, I became interested in how and if we can stop or slow down this process.
Why now
I pretty much agree with the author of the Wired article that enshittification is a natural lifecycle process. Everything is bound to die. It allows new companies to emerge and replace the incumbents.
But while reading the article, I was wondering why almost all digital products out there feel rotten now. With all their data leaks, an insane amount of ads, subscriptions that feels like a scam, unfair algorithms and so on. (Or is it only me…
