Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?

"It's not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They're all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Ask any Facebook user who has to scroll past 10 screens of engagement-bait, AI slop and surveillance ads just to get to one post by the people they are on the service to communicate with. This is infuriating. Frustrating. And, depending on how important those services are to you, terrifying."

"In 2022, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: enshittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity. It isn't just a way to say something got worse. It's an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that's causing everything to get worse, all at once."

"This moment we're living through, this Great Enshittening, is a material phenomenon, much like a disease, with symptoms, a mechanism and an epidemiology. When doctors observe patients who are sick with a novel pathogen, their first order of business is creating a natural history of the disease. This natural history is an ordered catalogue of the disease's progress: what symptoms do patients exhibit, and in which order?"

Online platforms undergo a predictable degradation called enshittification, where services evolve from user-friendly to monetized and degraded. The process resembles a disease with symptoms, a mechanism and an epidemiology. Platforms initially provide strong value to users, then shift to favor business customers at users' expense, and finally extract value from those business customers to enrich the platform itself. This three-stage trajectory explains widespread declines in user experience, growing engagement-bait, surveillance advertising, and the consolidation of market power. Major platforms exemplify this pattern, producing frustration, anger and dependency as core services become worse over time.

Read at www.theguardian.com