Why Every App is Getting Worse On Purpose

Platform decay isn't market failure—it's calculated extraction. The counterintuitive reality: today's worst user experiences represent optimized business models, not broken ones. Companies deliberately degrade products because friction generates more revenue than satisfaction. The enshittification cycle operates through four sequential stages: venture-subsidized user acquisition (Uber operating at loss to eliminate taxis), pivot to advertiser optimization (Amazon's search results prioritizing ad spend over relevance), reality manipulation through AI-generated content farms (Google ranking lower-complexity content higher for extended engagement), and monopolistic value extraction through deliberate incompatibility (Apple's iMessage degradation for Android). Each stage maximizes different stakeholder returns while systematically transferring surplus from users. The mechanism relies on switching costs and network effects creating quasi-utilities immune to quality-based competition. The strategic implication: enshittification signals terminal decline, not dominance. MySpace, Yahoo, and AOL demonstrated identical patterns before collapse. Regulatory interoperability mandates—EU charging port standardization, DOJ monopoly litigation—combined with user defection create the only viable exit from extraction economics. 5 Timestamps 00:01:47 Millennial lifestyle subsidy: venture capital funded below-cost services (Uber, Amazon, Netflix) to eliminate competition through predatory pricing, not efficiency 00:04:23 Stage two pivot: platforms abuse users to serve business customers—Amazon search results now prioritize advertiser payment over product quality or price 00:07:12 Leipzig University research confirms Google's inverse complexity-ranking relationship: simpler AI-generated content ranks higher because confusion extends session duration and ad exposure 00:09:47 Match Group lawsuit reveals dating app economics: successful matching destroys customer lifetime value, so platforms gamify loneliness through algorithmic match suppression 00:12:34 Enshittification indicates weakness not strength—companies extract maximum value when innovation exhausted, preceding collapse pattern seen in MySpace, Yahoo, AOL