Enshitification / race to the bottom

Enshittification is the tragic decay of online platforms under capitalism, where corporations lure users with promises of connection and convenience, only to betray them by prioritizing profit, stripping away value, and exploiting their dependence for maximum greed.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification.

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.

Writer Cory Doctorow coined the neologism “enshittification” in November 2022,[1] though he was not the first to describe and label the concept.[2][3] The American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year[4] and Macquarie Dictionary in 2024.

Doctorow advocates for two ways to reduce enshittification: upholding the end-to-end principle, which asserts that platforms should transmit data in response to user requests rather than algorithm-driven decisions; and guaranteeing the right of exit—that is, enabling a user to leave a platform without data loss, which requires interoperability. These moves aim to uphold the standards and trustworthiness of online platforms, emphasize user satisfaction, and encourage market competition.