"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."
"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."
"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. These companies' slow decay into ad infested dystopian nightmares reminded me of a conversation I had with my good friend and cofounder Charlie Gedeon."
Platforms often begin by prioritizing user value but then shift toward extracting revenue from advertisers and business partners. This shift, called enshittification, unfolds through deliberate, incremental ad rollouts, paywalls, and feature degradations that favor platform profits over user experience. Major companies such as Google, Meta, TikTok, and YouTube exemplify this pattern. YouTube's introduction of unskippable ads and promotions for paid, ad-free tiers illustrate the move from default functionality to premium gating. The cumulative effect increases friction, diminishes utility, and incentivizes addictive attention mechanics, accelerating a cycle where user benefits erode as platforms optimize for monetization.
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