A colleague recently introduced me to a term: Enshittification.
This is how its defined on Wikipedia:
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
It’s a great way to describe what we see online these days.
As platforms scale up, their quality goes down.
It becomes all about economics. The race to faster and cheaper.
The user becomes less important, especially when a platform holds a monopoly in their field.
Google Ads and Google Analytics are two popular examples of platforms that went down in UX quality over the years.
Users are stuck because there are no viable alternatives.
It’s a ticking time bomb. Either the platform improves, or it dies.
Don’t do that to your users.