"I was halfway through doing the dishes while listening to a podcast when an ad cut through and interrupted one of the most interesting bits. My phone was a few meters away in the living room and I rushed over like I had forgotten a burning turkey in the oven to make sure that I got to the phone before the second ad started playing. I tapped that lower-right hand skip button and the tension in my body temporarily melted away as I made my way back to the chore and continued listening to my podcast, ironically about the slow decay of once useful apps, that was so rudely interrupted by a Nissan ad."
"As I pondered how possible it would be to find an ad blocker for my phone, the answer was slapped in my face in the form of a glorious popup! Try YouTube premium and you'll be ad free... something that only a few years ago was standard had become a premium and I asked myself why? The term I happened to be learning about that day from Cory Doctorow was enshittification, which can be loosely defined as the process by which platforms decay as they shift value away from users and toward themselves and their business customers."
"In other words, things start out good for us, then get worse as the companies optimize for profit. While we all have a collective intuitive sense of platforms decaying over the last few years, I wanted to look closer from a design perspective, specifically, at how that decay unfolds through the deliberate, incremental rollout of ads. The key players in this enshittification race are the four major tech companies that dominate our digital lives: Google, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, and YouTube."
A user experienced an intrusive ad interrupting a podcast, rushed to skip it, and noticed a prominent prompt to try YouTube Premium to avoid ads. What used to be standard ad-free listening has become a premium offering. The term enshittification describes platforms decaying as they shift value away from users toward themselves and business customers. Enshittification unfolds through deliberate, incremental ad rollouts that gradually worsen user experience. Major platforms implicated include Google, Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, with particular focus on YouTube due to heavy personal use. Carcinisation, a related theory, was mentioned as a humorous analogy.
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