The Great Enshittening: How Social Media Lost Its Soul and What Comes Next

Introduction: The Feeling of a Fallen Internet

There is a pervasive, almost palpable feeling that the internet has become a worse place. What was once a thrilling frontier, a space of near-magical utility and boundless connection, now often feels like a digital dumpster fire. The landscape is saturated with what one user aptly described as "pointless mind-melting slop," a far cry from the utopian dreams of its early architects. Each failed Google search that forces us to wade through an ocean of SEO-fueled garbage, each glance at a social feed clogged with irrelevant ads and algorithmically promoted rage-bait, reinforces this sense of decay. We are living through a great enshittening, a process where the digital services we rely on are systematically degrading before our eyes.

This decline is not an accident. It is not the result of a few bad decisions or the unfortunate side effects of scale. The downfall of social media is the predictable, systemic outcome of a predatory business model that has reached its logical conclusion. This decay can be precisely diagnosed and understood through the lens of author and activist Cory Doctorow's theory of "enshittification". This blog will dissect this process, charting its devastating consequences for our mental health, privacy, and public discourse. It will then explore the user-led rebellion—the mass disengagement, ad-ignoring, and flight to smaller, more authentic spaces—that signals a profound shift in our digital lives. Finally, it will look toward the horizon, to the new frontiers of niche communities and decentralized networks that offer a glimpse of what might come after the fall of the social media giants.

Part I: The Anatomy of Decay: Deconstructing "Enshittification"

The slow, creeping degradation of the platforms that mediate our digital lives has a name: "enshittification." Coined by Cory Doctorow, the term describes the seemingly inevitable lifecycle of platform decay. In this process, online services gradually deteriorate as they shift from prioritizing user experience to extracting profit for shareholders. It is not merely a pejorative but a precise diagnosis of a systemic failure, a consequence of the unique dynamics of digital monopolies operating in "two-sided markets".

Defining the Disease

At its core, enshittification is the process by which a platform, having established itself as a critical intermediary between two groups (e.g., users and advertisers, or riders and drivers), begins to exploit both to capture all the value for itself. Doctorow defines it as a consequence of combining the ease with which digital platforms can change how they allocate value with the nature of a market where they can hold "buyers and sellers, hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share". This process unfolds across a predictable, three-stage lifecycle.

1. ‍Stage 1: Be Good to Users. Initially, platforms are good to their users. They offer a valuable, often heavily subsidized or loss-making service to attract a critical mass of people. The goal is to build powerful network effects, where the value of the service increases as more people join. This creates high switching costs; once your friends, family, or customers are on a platform, it becomes tough to leave, effectively locking you in.‍
2. Stage 2: Abuse Users to Benefit Business Customers. Once the users are captive, the platform pivots. It begins to abuse the user base to make things better for its business customers—the advertisers, creators, sellers, and developers who represent the other side of the market. The platform offers these business customers easy access to the locked-in user base, making them dependent on the platform for their audience and revenue.‍
3. Stage 3: Abuse Everyone for Shareholders. Finally, with both users and business customers locked in and dependent, the platform claws back all the value for itself. It abuses its business customers by charging exorbitant fees and making them pay for access to the very users they helped attract. It further abuses its users by degrading the service, filling it with ads, and prioritizing monetized content over organic connections. The platform becomes, in Doctorow's words, a "useless pile of shit," extracting every available penny for its shareholders while leaving just enough residual value to keep everyone from leaving.
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Case Studies in Collapse: The Theory in Practice

This three-stage lifecycle is not merely theoretical; it is the observable history of nearly every major digital platform.

Facebook/Meta: The quintessential example of enshittification, Facebook began by being good to users, connecting them with the posts of people they knew and cared about. This created powerful network effects, making it socially costly to leave (Stage 1). Then, Facebook courted media companies and publishers, offering them incredible reach into this captive audience. Publishers became dependent on Facebook for traffic, abandoning their websites in favor of posting directly to the platform (Stage 2). Finally, the hammer fell. Facebook throttled the organic reach of publishers, forcing them to pay to "boost" their articles to the very people who had asked to see them. It filled user feeds with a homeopathic dose of content from friends, replacing it with ads, sponsored posts, and algorithmically promoted, low-quality content (Stage 3). This process culminated in the infamous "pivot to video" fraud, where Facebook knowingly inflated video metrics, causing publishers to fire their writing staff and invest in video teams, only to go bankrupt when the truth emerged. The desperate, money-bleeding pivot to the "metaverse" represents the terminal, panicked phase of a fully enshittified platform.

Amazon: The retail giant followed the same playbook. It started by offering a "hell of a good deal" to customers: subsidized products, cheap shipping, and a clean, proper search function. This, combined with Prime memberships and DRM-locked Kindle ebooks, created immense customer lock-in (Stage 1). Next, Amazon attracted a vast ecosystem of third-party sellers to its Marketplace, giving them access to its enormous customer base (Stage 2). Once these sellers were dependent, Amazon began the squeeze. It now extracts more than 45% of the sale price from sellers through a dizzying array of junk fees. Its advertising program has become a "payola scheme," forcing sellers to bid against each other just to appear at the top of a search for their brand name. The result is a degraded user experience where the entire first screen of a search for "cat beds" is ads, including ads for products Amazon has cloned from its sellers (Stage 3).

Google Search: Once a daily miracle of information retrieval, Google Search is now a case study in incremental enshittification. Its original mission to "organize the world's information" has been subverted by the relentless drive for profit. Search results are now an "ocean of affiliate shite, endless sponsored links, SEO-fueled garbage and the mutant faecal creatures of AI-powered link farms". This decay is the direct result of a corporate structure where every product manager is tasked with finding small ways to increase profitability in their corner of the "googleverse." Since Google already dominates the market, this increased profit can only come from making the service worse for users and publishers—by inserting more ads, prioritizing scammy results, or making it harder to find reliable information.

Twitter/X: The platform's recent history under Elon Musk provides a speed run of the enshittification process. Once considered the world's "digital town square," its transformation into X has turned it into a "ghost town". The mass firing of staff, including nearly all content moderation teams, led to a dramatic decline in content quality and a surge in hate speech and misinformation. This prompted an exodus of both users and advertisers, who raised brand safety concerns. The platform's valuation has plummeted by as much as 79%, and it is now reported to be "barely breaking even," suing former advertisers in an act of desperation.

Enshittification as a Universal Law of Digital Gravity

This destructive pattern is not confined to social media. It is visible in app stores, ride-sharing services like Uber, and even in sectors like US healthcare, where middlemen hold patients and providers hostage to each other. The phenomenon is a universal law of digital gravity, an inevitable outcome when three specific conditions converge. First is the extreme flexibility of digital platforms, which allows value to be reallocated between users and business customers with the flip of a switch, a process Doctorow calls "twiddling". Second is the economic structure of two-sided markets, which naturally creates the hostage-taking dynamics that enable this exploitation.

The final and most crucial condition is the systemic failure of governance. The universal concentration across all industries is a direct result of the non-enforcement of competition and antitrust laws. This has allowed a handful of tech giants to achieve monopoly status, insulating them from competitive pressure. Without the threat of users or business customers leaving for a viable alternative, these platforms are free to degrade their services for profit without consequence. The downfall of social media is not a bug in the system; it is a feature of late-stage platform capitalism. It is the logical endpoint when growth-at-all-costs is the only metric, and there are no competitive or regulatory forces to compel platforms to prioritize the welfare of the people who make them valuable.

Part II: The Human Cost of the Walled Garden

The systemic decay hardwired into the business model of social media platforms is not an abstract economic process. It exacts a profound and measurable human cost. The "walled gardens" built by companies like Meta, Google, and TikTok were marketed as vibrant playgrounds for connection and discovery. In reality, they have become algorithmic prisons, public health hazards, and engines of mass surveillance. The harm inflicted upon users is not an unfortunate side effect; it is the calculated price of a business model built on the extraction of attention and data.

The Algorithmic Prison: How Feeds Became Cages

The most significant experiential shift in the history of social media was the move from user-controlled, reverse-chronological timelines to opaque, engagement-driven algorithmic feeds. In the early days, your feed showed you what the people you chose to follow had posted, in the order they posted it. It was transparent and straightforward. As platforms grew, this was replaced by a system designed not to serve the user, but to maximize the time they spent on the platform.

Today's algorithms are the architects and gatekeepers of the user experience. They analyze vast troves of data—past interactions, content preferences, even search behavior—to curate a hyper-personalized feed designed to be as engaging, and often addictive, as possible. The problem is that "engagement" is usually a proxy for emotional arousal. Research has shown that these algorithms tend to favor content that is divisive, inflammatory, or provoking, simply because those posts generate the most likes, comments, and shares.

This has dire consequences for public discourse and individual well-being. By prioritizing content that aligns with a user's pre-existing beliefs, algorithms create "filter bubbles" and "echo chambers," shielding users from differing perspectives and reinforcing their biases. This process can accelerate political polarization and facilitate the spread of misinformation and toxic content. The user's experience is no longer their own; it is an engineered reality, carefully constructed to serve the platform's metrics, turning what was once a window to the world into a cage of mirrors.

The Mental Health Crisis: A Public Health Emergency

The psychological impact of these algorithmically curated environments is devastating, particularly for younger users. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a landmark advisory, declaring a national youth mental health crisis and highlighting the profound risks associated with social media use. The advisory is stark: Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety. This is deeply concerning, as surveys show the average teenager spends 3.5 hours per day on these platforms.

A mountain of research now supports the link between heavy social media use and poor mental health. Numerous studies have documented strong correlations with increased anxiety, depression, loneliness, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts. The mechanisms of harm are multifaceted and interlocking:

• ‍Addictive by Design: Platforms are engineered to be addictive. They use principles of variable reinforcement, where the unpredictable delivery of rewards (likes, comments, notifications) activates dopamine pathways in the brain similar to those involved in gambling and substance addiction.‍
• Upward Social Comparison: Users are constantly exposed to a stream of curated, idealized, and often digitally altered portrayals of others' lives. This creates a relentless pressure of "upward social comparison," which can erode self-esteem, foster feelings of inadequacy, and worsen body image issues. A staggering 46% of adolescent girls aged 13-17 report that social media makes them feel worse about their bodies.‍
• Cyberbullying and Harassment: The platforms provide a fertile ground for online abuse. The Surgeon General's report noted that nearly 60% of adolescent girls have felt uncomfortable due to an interaction with a stranger on social media. This constant threat of harassment has lasting emotional consequences.‍
• Sleep Disruption: Excessive use, particularly at night, interferes with sleep, which is a cornerstone of mental health. This disruption is linked to increased anxiety and depression.
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The Privacy Charade: You Are the Product

The engine that powers the algorithmic prison and fuels the mental health crisis is the business model of surveillance advertising. Social media platforms are not free; users pay with their data. These companies harvest vast quantities of sensitive information—not just what you explicitly share, but your location history, employment details, political views, purchasing habits, and your browsing activity across the entire web via tracking cookies and pixels. As former FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra wrote, this model "turns users into products, their activity into assets, their communities into targets, and social media platforms into weapons of mass manipulation".

This constant surveillance creates profound risks. The detailed profiles built by platforms are used for social engineering, making users more susceptible to hacking, identity theft, financial scams, and doxxing. Furthermore, the platforms have proven to be poor stewards of this data. A seemingly endless parade of massive data breaches has exposed the personal information of billions of users. Recent examples include a cybercriminal gang claiming to have scraped 1.2 billion Facebook records and a separate leak exposing 16 billion usernames and passwords across platforms like Google and Facebook. This demonstrates that once data is collected, it is perpetually at risk of falling into the wrong hands.

These three costs—algorithmic manipulation, mental health decline, and privacy invasion—are not separate issues. They form a tightly integrated system of harm. The need for surveillance to power the advertising model necessitates the total loss of privacy. The data gathered from this surveillance fuels the engagement-maximizing algorithms. These algorithms, in turn, create the addictive and psychologically damaging feedback loops that constitute the modern social media experience. The mental health fallout, such as increased loneliness or low self-esteem, can make users even more vulnerable and drive them back to the platforms for validation, feeding the vicious cycle. The walled garden is not a playground; it is a panopticon designed for value extraction, and the human cost is its primary output.

Part III: The User Rebellion: Disengagement, Evasion, and Generational Divides

As platforms have become more enshittified, users have not remained passive victims. A quiet but powerful rebellion is underway, manifesting in mass disengagement, active technological evasion, and profound shifts in generational behavior. The platforms, insulated from market forces by their monopoly power, are now facing a different kind of correction. Users are withdrawing the one currency the platforms cannot survive without: their attention and authentic engagement. This user-led revolt is actively driving the downfall of the social media monoliths and creating the space for what comes next.

The Silent Exodus and The Rise of the Lurker

The decay in platform quality is triggering a user exodus. A striking Gartner report predicts that by 2025, a full 50% of consumers will either abandon or significantly limit their interactions with social media. The primary drivers of this dissatisfaction are the very symptoms of enshittification: the rampant spread of misinformation, the overwhelming presence of toxic users, and the plague of automated bots that degrade the user experience.

This exodus is accompanied by a fundamental shift in behavior among those who remain. The era of active, open sharing is giving way to an age of passive consumption, or "lurking." A Morning Consult report found that 61% of U.S. adults have become more selective about what they post, with many sharing less of their own lives. The reasons are clear: growing concerns about privacy, weariness of potential backlash for sharing opinions, and a general feeling that the platforms simply "aren't as fun as they used to be". Social media is transforming from a space for personal connection into a broadcast medium, where users primarily consume content from professional creators and influencers rather than engaging with friends. This retreat into passive consumption is a form of disengagement, a withdrawal of the personal data and authentic interaction that once fueled the platforms' growth.

The Psychology of Ad Blindness and The Ad-Blocking Arms Race

The most direct form of user rebellion is the war against advertising. Faced with an overwhelming barrage of ads—estimated at between 4,000 and 10,000 per day for the average American—users have developed powerful psychological defense mechanisms. "Banner blindness" is a phenomenon where the human brain, through processes of selective attention and pattern recognition, learns to subconsciously ignore any part of a webpage that looks like an advertisement. This is compounded by "ad fatigue," a desensitization that occurs from repeated exposure to the same ads, leading to boredom and annoyance.

The statistics are stark. A massive 74% of people report being tired of social media ads, with 91% of UK online shoppers feeling they see too many. This fatigue has tangible consequences, leading to lower engagement, declining return on investment for advertisers, and a negative perception of the brands being advertised.

This psychological resistance is now being augmented by technology. The use of ad-blocking software has exploded, representing a direct technological assault on the core business model of surveillance advertising. As of 2024, an estimated 42% of internet users worldwide employ ad blockers. Mobile ad blocking is growing particularly fast, with a 30% year-over-year increase, driven by user desires for faster page loads, lower data consumption, and better privacy. This ad-blocking arms race is an unambiguous rejection of the enshittified user experience.

Generational Fault Lines: The Digital Native's Dilemma

The user rebellion is not uniform; it is fractured along generational lines. While both Millennials and Gen Z are deeply enmeshed in the social media ecosystem, their usage patterns, platform preferences, and attitudes reveal a complex and often contradictory relationship with these technologies.

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This data reveals a fascinating paradox, especially within Gen Z. As true "digital natives," they are the most deeply integrated generation, pioneering the use of platforms like TikTok for everything from entertainment to commerce. They are driving the creator economy and are more trusting of influencers than any previous generation. Yet, they are also the most acutely aware of the system's harms. A majority of Gen Z users worry about the time they spend online and report that social media negatively impacts their lives. Their relationship with these platforms is one of dependent ambivalence—they are simultaneously the power users and the primary victims of the enshittified system.

Millennials, having experienced the transition from the "old internet," exhibit a different kind of fatigue. They remain tethered to legacy platforms like Facebook primarily for social connection and news, but report high levels of guilt and hopelessness associated with "doomscrolling". Their engagement is shifting towards the short-form video formats popularized by Gen Z. Still, their core usage remains rooted in the original promise of social networking, an increasingly unfulfilled promise.

These user behaviors—lurking, ad-blocking, and the complex generational dance of engagement and anxiety—are not merely symptoms of frustration. They represent a collective, albeit uncoordinated, market correction. In a monopolistic environment where platforms are unresponsive to consumer dissatisfaction, users are asserting their power in the only way they can: by withdrawing their attention. The enshittified platform is built on a foundation of sand, and the tide of user engagement is now receding. This rebellion is the primary force creating the cracks in the walled gardens, allowing new and different models of online community to take root.

Part IV: The Search for a Better Internet: Nostalgia and New Frontiers

The crumbling of the social media monoliths is not an endpoint but a transition. As users flee the enshittified walled gardens, they are not abandoning the internet itself. Instead, they are seeking out—and in some cases, building—alternatives that recapture the spirit of an earlier, more open web. This movement is characterized by a nostalgia for the authentic communities of the past and an embrace of new technologies that promise a more decentralized and user-controlled future. The "downfall" is creating fertile ground for a more diverse, resilient, and human-centric digital ecosystem to grow.

Remembering the Open Web: A Requiem for Forums and Blogs

Before the internet was consolidated into what Cory Doctorow acidly calls "five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four," it was a vibrant, chaotic, and decentralized mosaic of independent communities. Platforms like internet forums dominated the era of the late 1990s and early 2000s, bulletin board systems (BBSs), and blogs. These spaces were fundamentally different from modern social media in their structure, purpose, and quality of interaction.

Forums and blogs fostered long-form, persistent conversations. A single thread on a niche forum could remain active for years, accumulating a deep repository of community knowledge and evolving discussions. The content was primarily text-based, encouraging more thoughtful and nuanced engagement compared to the ephemeral, attention-grabbing, and often superficial interactions of today's social feeds. A crucial difference was discoverability: the content on these independent sites was indexed by search engines like Google, creating a vast, publicly accessible library of human knowledge and experience. Today, a considerable portion of online conversation is locked away in private Discord servers or Facebook Groups, invisible to search and lost to the broader world. The decline of these platforms, driven by the rise of attention-grabbing social media and a lack of innovation from volunteer forum owners, represents a significant loss of this collective digital heritage.

The Flight to Niche: Seeking Authenticity in Smaller Ponds

The user rebellion against the mainstream platforms is fueling a powerful counter-trend: the rise of niche online communities. Frustrated by the noisy, impersonal, and algorithmically-manipulated nature of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, users are seeking refuge in smaller, more focused digital spaces. These communities are forming around every conceivable interest, from specific hobbies and professional affiliations to shared lifestyles and values.

Examples of these thriving "digital cafes" are everywhere:

• ‍Hobby-based: Goodreads for book lovers, Strava for runners and cyclists, Ravelry for knitters, and countless subreddits and Discord servers for gamers, anime fans, and DIY enthusiasts.‍
• Professional/Creative: Behance and Dribbble for designers, Stack Overflow and GitHub for developers, and various communities for marketers and entrepreneurs.‍
• Brand-centered: Companies like Sephora (Beauty Insider Community) and Lego (Lego Ideas) have built thriving communities that foster deep customer loyalty by providing a space for authentic connection rather than just marketing.
  

The psychology behind this shift is clear. Niche communities provide a profound sense of belonging, safety, and exclusivity that is absent on massive platforms. Within these groups, members feel understood and valued, allowing for deeper, more authentic connections built on shared passion, free from the constant pressure of self-performance and the whims of an opaque algorithm.

The Decentralized Dream: Rebuilding the Internet's Foundation

While niche communities offer a refuge from the mainstream, a more radical alternative seeks to rebuild the internet's very foundation. Decentralized social media, often referred to as the "fediverse," leverages blockchain and federated protocols to create platforms that are not owned or controlled by any single corporation. This represents a fundamental paradigm shift in power, moving it from the platform owner to the users and community operators.

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Platforms like Mastodon exemplify the federated model. It is not a single website but a network of thousands of independent servers (called "instances"), each with its own rules and moderation policies. Users can join an instance that aligns with their values but can still communicate with users on any other instance, much like email. The feed is chronological, and there is no corporate entity mining data for ads.

Other platforms like Minds, Steemit, and Hive are built on blockchain technology. They often incorporate native cryptocurrencies that allow users to be rewarded directly for creating and curating high-quality content, completely bypassing the ad-based revenue model.

These decentralized alternatives are not without challenges. They often face hurdles with user experience, scalability, content moderation, and attracting a mainstream audience. However, they serve as a crucial proof-of-concept, demonstrating that a more equitable, user-owned, and privacy-respecting social internet is technologically possible.

The Future is a Mosaic, Not a Monolith

The history of the Internet can be seen as a cycle. The early web was a vibrant, decentralized mosaic of countless small communities. The social media era attempted to bulldoze this landscape and force everyone into a few centrally planned, monolithic walled gardens. The enshittification of these monoliths is now triggering a "great re-fragmentation." Users are fleeing the decaying city centers for digital suburbs, exurbs, and off-grid homesteads.

The future of online communities is not a single, better platform that will replace Facebook. It is a return to the mosaic, but with the benefit of modern tools and technologies. This future will be a diverse ecosystem of many different kinds of spaces—some large, some small; some niche, some broad; some private, some public; some federated, some centralized. The downfall of the social media giants is not an end, but a beginning. It is creating the space for a thousand different flowers to bloom, allowing users to finally choose the communities, rules, and economic models that best serve their needs, rather than the needs of distant shareholders.

Conclusion: Life After Enshittification

The decline of social media, a phenomenon felt by millions as a slow poisoning of their digital lives, is not a mystery. It is the predictable and inevitable result of enshittification—a systemic process baked into the DNA of monopolistic, surveillance-based platforms. The degradation of user experience, the escalating mental health crisis, and the wholesale erosion of personal privacy were not bugs in the system; they were features, the necessary human cost of a business model designed to extract all available value for shareholders. For over a decade, these platforms operated with impunity, insulated by network effects and a lack of regulatory oversight. But the balance of power is shifting.

The primary catalyst for change is not a regulator or a new technology, but the user. The mass rebellion—waged through the quiet acts of withdrawing engagement, installing ad-blockers, and seeking out smaller, more authentic communities—is a powerful market correction that monopolies cannot ignore. The platforms are fundamentally brittle because their entire valuation is predicated on a single, finite resource: user attention. As that attention is actively and deliberately withdrawn, the foundations of the walled gardens begin to crumble.

This does not herald the end of online connection. Instead, it signals the beginning of a new, more fragmented, and potentially healthier digital era. The future is not another monolith but a vibrant mosaic of alternatives. We are witnessing a flight to quality, as users gravitate toward niche communities built on shared passion and mutual respect, and experiment with decentralized platforms that offer actual user ownership and control. This emerging ecosystem points toward a de-shittified future, one defined not by surveillance advertising but by more direct and ethical monetization models, such as subscriptions, memberships, and direct creator support. The "pointless mind-melting slop" was the product of a broken, extractive system. As that system falters under the weight of its greed, the opportunity arises to build something better, more resilient, and more human in its place.

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