Intro — why once-great products feel broken
Why do once-great platforms start to feel broken? One moment a marketplace or social app delights customers; the next it’s slow, crowded with ads, and hostile to the very people who made it valuable. This pattern has a name — enshittification — coined and explored by Cory Doctorow and since widely discussed alongside the so-called Rot Economy. The question for product leaders is not whether platforms decay, but how to build products and organisations that resist that decay.
What enshittification looks like — three tell-tale signs
Understanding the mechanics is the first defence. Look for these signals:
- Value extraction shifts: the platform gradually prioritises monetisation for intermediaries or advertisers over user experience. Think of marketplaces where sellers suddenly pay for visibility, or feeds prioritised for ad revenue.
- Incentives misaligned: measures that once tracked user value are replaced by short-term business metrics. Quality signals decline and noise grows.
- Governance and scarcity collapse: tolerant moderation and curated discovery give way to scale-at-all-costs — which amplifies fraud, spam, and churn.
Real-world evidence (and what to learn from it)
Cory Doctorow’s original essays on platforms’ decline describe these stages in stark terms; read the analysis on Pluralistic. The idea has resonated across tech criticism and journalism — from the Financial Times to the New Yorker. Ed Zitron’s piece on the Rot Economy frames the same decay as a capital‑allocation problem: incentives from investors and markets favour rent extraction over product quality.
Recent platform examples help make this concrete. Debate around TikTok’s changing creator economics is part of Doctorow’s catalogue of mechanisms. In gaming, commentators have described the rot in subscription curation — a service that once grew value for players now risks diluting it as catalogues prioritise rent-seeking deals. And marketplaces such as Amazon have recurrent tensions between user experience, seller economics and platform fees. These are industry patterns, not isolated bugs.
A playbook for product leaders: three practical levers
There is no single magic bullet. Resist decay by applying governance, design and organisational levers in combination.
1. Design governance into the product
- Define and protect core user outcomes (retention, trust, discovery) as immutable product constraints — not negotiable KPIs that yield to short‑term revenue.
- Run experiments that surface long-term value, not only immediate uplift. Use holdout cohorts and lifetime metrics.
2. Make incentives visible and auditable
- Map who gets value at each step: users, creators, advertisers, platform. If any one party’s share grows at the expense of another without compensating benefit, flag it for review.
- Introduce cross-functional guardrails: pricing/product changes must pass a user‑impact review and a seller/partner impact review.
3. Organise for the long game
- Embed product teams with commercial and trust responsibilities — not a single metric obsession. Give teams time horizons that reward sustained health.
- Protect new ideas from cannibalisation: introduce an internal ‘safe space’ for experiments with different commercial models, and give them independent success criteria.
Operational diagnostics every CPO should run
Before a board approves the next growth lever, run this short audit:
- Are we increasing monetisation in ways that reduce user value? (Yes/No + examples)
- Who benefits from the last three pricing or ranking changes? Map outcomes for each stakeholder.
- Do we have holdout experiments measuring lifetime user value, not just conversion or revenue per session?
These simple checks expose many early-stage decays. They force conversations that often stop enshittification before it begins.
A long view that matters
Technology cycles teach that short-term optimisation often creates long-term liabilities. From the dotcom era to the two waves of mobile, the businesses that lasted were those that accepted slower, steadier returns and invested in durable user trust. If your platform’s roadmap is dominated by tactics that extract margin from users or partners today, you are placing a bet that the reputation and network effects will hold. Often they don’t.
Where to start tomorrow
Pick one visible product change due in the next quarter and run it through the three levers above. Make the stakeholders map public inside your organisation. Set a three‑month experiment with holdouts that measures lifetime value. If the change survives that scrutiny, you’ve got a robust signal; if not, you’ve avoided a small rot before it became structural.
Platforms don’t have to decay by default. They rot because incentives drift and governance is weak. Product leaders who bring the long view, clear incentives and deliberate governance will not only slow enshittification — they will create the resilient products and teams that customers prefer over the long haul.
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