When we published our piece titled “The ‘Enshittification’ of Online Platforms: A Dystopian Descent” on January 4, 2024, the term seemed — at best — a provocative label. But in the months since, the creeping decay of digital platforms has turned into an unmissable phenomenon.
It wasn’t just about algorithms going sideways or ads running rampant. It was about the entire architecture of attention, search, and discovery failing. We saw it in our own analytics: once ranking in the top 100, now buried. Our old article? Hard to find via search. We didn’t “hit the critical point,” as Doctorow warned — but we are moving in that direction.
How “Enshittification” Took Over the Internet
You’ve felt it. That creeping sense that the online services you use every day — from search engines and social media to shopping sites — are getting worse.
Search results don’t make sense. Feeds are clogged with ads. What once felt exciting now feels like a chore.
This isn’t just your imagination — it’s a documented phenomenon with a very real name: enshittification.
What Is Enshittification?
Author and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term to describe the slow, predictable decay of digital platforms. It caught on fast — so fast that it became Word of the Year for both the American Dialect Society (2023) and Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary (2024).
Doctorow’s idea is simple but powerful: online platforms don’t fall apart by accident. They’re designed to.
A Three-Phase Meltdown
According to Doctorow, every major platform follows the same destructive pattern — a business strategy that trades long-term trust for short-term profit.
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Phase One: The Honeymoon
Platforms start by offering something amazing — a clean, free, and user-friendly service. They build trust and attract a massive audience. -
Phase Two: The Shift
Once users are hooked, the platform starts prioritizing business customers — advertisers, sellers, or vendors. The user experience declines as ads and data tracking take over. -
Phase Three: The Extraction
Finally, both users and businesses are trapped. The platform stops pretending to care about either group and focuses entirely on maximizing shareholder profit.
Service quality collapses, innovation dies, and the platform starts to eat itself from the inside out.
Doctorow’s point: this isn’t a glitch. It’s the business model.
The Vanishing Act: When Content Becomes Invisible
One of the clearest signs of enshittification in 2025 is the collapse of visibility — especially in search and social media.
We’ve seen it firsthand. An article that once ranked on page one of Google suddenly vanished, despite being just as relevant and timely.
This isn’t coincidence — it’s a symptom. The rules of discovery and ranking are changing constantly and without transparency.
The problem gets worse with the flood of AI-generated “slop” — endless low-quality content created to game engagement algorithms. As these machine-made posts dominate feeds, thoughtful, human-made work gets buried.
The result: users lose trust, creators lose visibility, and the web itself becomes less useful.
Beyond Social Media: Enshittification as a Global Weapon
At first, this seemed like a tech annoyance — social media sites going bad. But the pattern has spread much farther.
A recent WIRED article, “The Enshittification of American Power,” showed how this same logic now infects national infrastructure — cloud platforms, satellites, even payment systems.
These aren’t just apps anymore. They’re essential services — and when they’re controlled by corporations that exploit dependency, the results are dangerous.
Enshittification has become a geopolitical risk, not just a digital inconvenience.
The Meltdown Metaphor: A Digital Nuclear Reaction
Doctorow often compares this decay to a nuclear reactor meltdown — a perfect metaphor for our time.
Every digital platform starts as a controlled reaction: creativity, connection, community. But when the stabilizers — fair algorithms, transparency, user trust — are removed, the reaction goes critical.
Corporate greed overheats the system, and the result is fission — the violent split of communities, the spread of misinformation, and the sense that the internet itself is falling apart.
And just like a real meltdown, once it starts, it’s almost impossible to stop.
It’s Not Hopeless: Fighting Back Against Platform Decay
This may sound bleak, but it’s not without hope. The same systems that feel untouchable are actually brittle. They can break suddenly — and users still have power.
Doctorow and other technologists suggest a few practical steps:
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Own Your Channel
Don’t depend entirely on algorithms. Build your own newsletter, community, or website — your “safe harbor” that no platform can bury overnight. -
Demand Interoperability
Support tools and laws that let you take your data and audience with you. Use open standards like RSS. Make it easy to leave — and others will follow. -
Prioritize Trust and Authority
In a world flooded with AI slop, credibility is your currency. Create work that’s verifiable, sourced, and valuable. That’s how humans outlast algorithms.
Doctorow puts it simply:
“The platform is brittle; one scandal could collapse it.”
Building in the Ruins
The era of “write once and rank high” is over. Enshittification isn’t a temporary glitch — it’s the endgame of the old internet.
The platforms that once promised to connect us have become machines for extraction — squeezing attention, creativity, and even democracy for profit.
But collapse also creates opportunity.
If the old system is falling apart, we can build something better — an internet built on independence, transparency, and trust.
Core Meltdown:
Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” isn’t just a catchy description of platform decay — it’s the core meltdown of the digital reactor. Every tech ecosystem, from social media to e-commerce, begins with a burst of creative energy, attracting users and creators like atoms in a controlled reaction. But over time, corporate greed pulls out the stabilizing rods — transparency, fair algorithms, and user trust — leading to runaway heat. The result is a self-destructive reaction where the very forces that once powered innovation now consume it.
Fission:
We are now watching fission in slow motion — the point where platforms no longer hold together under their own contradictions. Advertising overreach, data hoarding, and algorithmic manipulation have split the digital atom. The energy released is immense but chaotic: users fragment into smaller, decentralized communities, creators flee walled gardens, and regulators scramble to contain the fallout. Like a nuclear chain reaction, once enshittification begins, it becomes nearly impossible to stop without a full structural reset.
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In Closing
We are not yet at the moment when users revolt en masse — Doctorow says: “the platform is brittle; one scandal could collapse it.” We may not reach that point ourselves, but the damage is real: falling visibility, decaying value, increasing dependency.
For TreeVine Life, the shift is clear: the era of “Organic Ranking” is over. The era of “own your ecosystem, distribute widely, stay authoritative” is here. Position yourself as part of the solution, not just a critic.
If the platforms are going to degrade anyway, you must build your own durable lane. Because if we don’t, we risk disappearing quietly into the enshittified void.