Technology

It happens when there’s no meaningful competition, and when the friction of switching to a competing product is too high. Companies want to make more money with less. If you can get away with doing less without losing a significant amount of customers, then you will do it.

For example, the problem with switching social media is that you have to rebuild all your connections. They can make it worse, because customers aren’t willing to switch.

Another example is Windows. If you’re dependent on a program that only works on Windows it’s hard to make to jump to Linux.

Keeping it brief but drilling down a level deeper, enshittification results in an increase in short-term profits which is a positive for publicly traded companies who are legally obligated to increase profits or risk litigation by shareholders. The vast majority of consumers, once in an "ecosystem" of a product (social media is a great example here) will not leave the ecosystem due to the mild inconvenience of leaving. The profit lost by the very few who have the wherewithal to leave the ecosystem is made up for by those short term profit gains.

It's a cycle that continues on and on, sometimes saved by vast changes by the company to reel in those "lost" consumers. Or sometimes the company messes up so bad that they never return to their pre-enshittification days.

As long as companies have a duty to shareholders to increase profits at all costs, we will always see enshittification. This is a feature, not a bug, of capitalism.