What Does This Mean?
The gradual decline in quality of an online platform: it first serves users well, then shifts value to business customers, and finally squeezes both to extract profit for itself. Also called platform decay. The word is crude by design; it is widely used in tech journalism and has won word-of-the-year honours.
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
""Ads in the paid tier, the feed full of strangers: classic enshittification.""
LORE & ORIGIN
Canadian writer Cory Doctorow popularised the word, first using it for service degradation in a November 2022 blog post later republished in Locus in early 2023. The Oxford English Dictionary records earlier uses back to 2013. The American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year and Australia's Macquarie Dictionary chose it for 2024.
MENTIONS OVER TIME
Radar observation data not yet available for this term.
RELATED SEARCHES
TOP PLATFORMS
Not enough Radar data yet to show a platform breakdown.
WHEN DID YOU FIRST HEAR THIS?
CLICK AN OPTION BELOW TO CAST YOUR VOTE.
[ VOTE TO REVEAL COMMUNITY RESULTS ]