Two years ago, a Canadian writer named Cory Doctorow coined the phrase "enshittification" to describe the decay of online platforms. The word immediately set the Internet ablaze, as it captured the growing malaise regarding how almost everything about the web seemed to be getting worse.
"It’s my theory explaining how the Internet was colonized by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters, and what we can do about it," Doctorow explained in a follow-up article. "We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying."
Doctorow believes there are four basic forces that might constrain companies from getting worse: competition, regulation, self-help, and tech workers. One by one, he says, these constraints have been eroded as large corporations squeeze the Internet and its denizens for dollars.
If you want a real-world, literal example of enshittification, let's look at actual poop. When Diapers.com refused Amazon’s acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100 million on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until Diapers.com folded. With another competitor tossed aside, Amazon was then free to sell diapers at its price from wherever it wanted to source them.
Anyway, we at Ars have covered a lot of things that have been enshittified. Here are some of the worst examples we've come across. Hopefully, you'll share some of your own experiences in the comments. We might even do a follow-up story based on those.
Smart TVs have come a long way since Samsung released the first model readily available for the masses in 2008. While there have certainly been improvements in areas like image quality, sound capabilities, usability, size, and, critically, price, much of smart TVs’ evolution could be viewed as invasive and anti-consumer.
Today, smart TVs are essentially digital billboardsthat serve as tools for companies—from advertisers to TV OEMs—to extract user data. Corporate interest in understanding what people do with and watch on their TVs and in pushing ads has dramatically worsened the user experience. For example, the remotes for LG’s 2025 TVsdon’t have a dedicated input button but do have multiple ways for accessing LG webOS apps.
This is all likely to get worse as TV companies target software, tracking, and ad sales as ways to monetize customers after their TV purchases—even at the cost of customer convenience and privacy. When budget brands like Roku are selling TV sets at a loss, you know something’s up.
With this approach, TVs miss the opportunity to appeal to customers with more relevant and impressive upgrades. There's also a growing desire among users to disconnect their connected TVs, defeating their original purpose. Suddenly, buying a dumb TV seems smarter than buying a smart one. But smart TVs and the ongoing revenue opportunities they represent have made it extremely hard to find a TV that won't spy on you.
—Scharon Harding
[HEADING=1]Google’s voice assistant[/HEADING]
Doctorow has written a lotabout how Google, on the whole, fits the concept of enshittification. I want to mention one part of Google that suffers a kind of second-order enshittification, one that people might have seen coming but which was far from inevitable: the spoken-out-loud version of Google Assistant.
Every so often, an Ars reader will write in to ask why their Google Assistant devices—be they Nest Hubs or Nest Minis or just Android phones—seem to be worse than when they bought them. Someone on the r/GoogleHome subreddit will ask why something that worked for years suddenly stops working. Every so often, a reporter will try to quantifythis seemingly slow rot, only to fall for the same rhetorical traps I once did.
"Everybody’s setup is different," "Our expectations are different now," or "There is no real way to quantify it." And sometimes there are just outages, which get fixed but leave you with the sense that your Assistant is hard of hearing, takes a lot of days off, and knows it's due for retirement.
I’m fine just saying it now: Google Assistant is worse now than it was soon after it started.
Even if Google is turning its entire supertanker toward AI now, it’s not clear why "Start my morning routine," "Turn on the garage lights," and "Set an alarm for 8 pm" had to suffer. If Google's plan is to cut funding and remove features, make everybody regret surrendering their audio privacy and funds to speakers, and then wow them when its generative-AI-based stand-in shows up, I’m not sure how that plays out. After so many times repeating myself or yelling at Assistant to stop, I’ve muted my speakers, tried out open alternatives, and accepted that you can’t buy real help for $50–$100.
—Kevin Purdy
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I'm not entirely convinced the PDF was ever really good, but it certainly performed a useful purpose once upon a time: If you could print, you could make a PDF. And if you could turn your document into a PDF, anyone on any platform could read it. It also allowed for elaborate formatting, the sort that could be nightmarish to achieve in Word or some of the page layout software of the time. And finally, unlike an image, you could copy and paste text back out of it.
But Acrobat was ultimately an Adobe product, with all that came with it. It was expensive, it was prone to bloat and poor performance, and there was no end to its security issues. Features were added that greatly expanded its scope but were largely useless for most people. Eventually, you couldn't install it without also installing what felt like half a dozen seemingly unrelated Adobe products.
By building PDF capabilities into its OS, Apple allowed me to go Adobe-free and avoid some of this enshittification on my computers. But the PDF has still gotten ever less useful. The vast majority of PDFs I deal with now come from academic journals, and whatever witchcraft is needed to put footnotes, formulas, and embargo details into the text wrecks the thing I care most about: copying and pasting details that I need to write articles. Instead, I often get garbled, shortened pieces of other parts of the document intermingled with the text I want—assuming I can even select it in the first place.
Apple, which had given the PDF a reprieve, has now killed its main selling point. Because Apple has added OCR to the MacOS image display system, I can get more reliable results by screenshotting the PDF and then copying the text out of that. This is the true mark of its enshittification: I now wish the journals would just give me a giant PNG.
—John Timmer
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In some ways, the development of technology has been a godsend for watching non-mainstream sports, like professional cycling, in the United States.
Back in the olden days at the turn of the century, the Outdoor Life Network carried the Tour de France on cable, and NBC Sports gradually started to cover more races. But their calendar was incomplete and riddled with commercials. To find all professional cycling races, one had to look far and wide, subscribe to some services, and maybe do a little pirating.
Nirvana arrived in 2020 when a media company called Global Cycling Network obtained the rights to stream virtually every professional cycling race in Europe. Anyone with a VPN in the United States could pay $40 a year and watch race coverage, from start to finish, without commercials. This was absolutely spectacular—until enshittification set in.
In 2023, the parent company of the cycling network, Warner Bros. Discovery, started the process of "consolidating" its services. Global Cycling Network, or GCN+, was toast. European viewers could watch most of the same races on Discovery+ for about $80 a year, so the deal wasn't terrible. US fans were hosed, however. You needed a UK credit card to sign up for Discovery+ cycling. To watch the majority of races in the United States, therefore, one needed to sign up for Max, Peacock, and a service called FloBikes. The total annual price, without ads, is about $550.
This year, it was Europe's turn. In many countries, fans must now subscribe to TNT Sports at a price of 30.99 pounds a month ($38.50). So many Europeans are now being asked to pay more than $450 a year. Even the Tour de France, which had long been broadcast on free television, is going away after next year. The bottom line? The new monthly price is the same as we used to pay for a year of the superior service, GCN+, only two years ago.
This is an incredibly stupid decision for the sport, which now has no chance of reaching new viewers under this model. And it takes advantage of fans who are left to pay outrageous sums of money or turn to dodgy pirated streams.
And it's not just cycling. Formula 1 racing has largely gone behind paywalls, and viewership is down significantly over the last 15 years. Major US sports such as professional and college football had largely been exempt, but even that is now changing, with NFL games being shown on Peacock, Amazon Prime, and Netflix. None of this helps viewers. It enshittifies the experience for us in the name of corporate greed.
—Eric Berger
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A screenshot of an AI Overview query, "How many rocks should I eat each day" that went viral on X. Credit: Tim Onion / X
Google's rapid spiral toward enshittification—where the "don't be evil company" went from altruistic avoider of adsthat its founders knew could ruin search to dominating ad markets by monopolizing search while users grew to hate its search engine—could finally be disrupted by potential court-ordered remedies coming this year. Required to release its iron grip on global search, the search giant could face more competition than ever as rivals potentially get broader access to Google data, ideally leading to search product innovations that actually benefit Internet users. Having to care about Google search users' preferences could even potentially slow down the current wave of AI-flavored enshittification, as Google is currently losing its fight to keep AI out of discussions of search trial remedies.
Plenty of people have griped about Google's AI overviews since their rollout. A Google search today might force you to scroll through more than 200 words of AI-generated guesswork before you get to a warning that everything you just read is "experimental." Only then can you finally start scrolling real results. Ars has pointed out that these AI overviews often misunderstand why people are even using Google.
As a journalist, I frequently try to locate official documents by searching quoted paragraphs of text, and that used to be a fast way to surface source material. But now Google's AI thinks I want an interpretation of the specific text I'm trying to locate, burying the document I'm seeking in even longer swaths of useless AI babble and seemingly willfully confusing the intention of the search to train me to search differently. Where sponsored posts were previously a mildly irritating roadblock to search results, AI has emerged as a forced detour you have to take before coming anywhere close to your destination.
Admittedly, some AI summaries may be useful, but they can just as easily provide false, misleading, and even dangerous answers. And in a search context, placing AI content ahead of any other results elevates an undoubtedly less trustworthy secondary source over primary sources at a time when social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) are increasingly relying on users to fact-check misinformation.
But Google, like many big tech companies, expects AI to revolutionize search and is seemingly intent on ignoring any criticism of that idea. The tech giant has urged the judge in the monopoly trial, Amit Mehta, to carefully weigh whether the AI remedies the US seeks could hobble Google's ability to innovate in AI search markets. The remedies include allowing publishers to opt out of web crawling for AI training without impacting search rankings or banning Google from exclusive deals that could block AI rivals from licensing Google-exclusive training data.
We'll know more this August, when Mehta is expected to rule on final remedies. However, in November, Mehta said that "AI and the integration of AI is only going to play a much larger role, it seems to me, in the remedy phase than it did in the liability phase."
—Ashley Belanger
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No, thank you. Credit: Dan Goodin
Gmail won't take no for an answer. It keeps asking me if I want to use Google's Gemini AI tool to summarize emails or draft responses. As the disclaimer at the bottom of the Gemini tool indicates, I can't count on the output being factual, so no, I definitely don't want it. The dialog box only allows me to decline by clicking the "not now" option. I still haven't found the "not ever" option, and I doubt I ever will.
I still haven't found a satisfactory way to turn Gemini off completely in Gmail. Discussions in forums on Reddit and Google support came up short, so I asked Gemini. It told me to turn off smart features in Gmail settings. I did, but I still have the Gemini icon at the top of my inbox and the top of each email I send or receive.
—Dan Goodin
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I usually try to moderate my criticism of Windows 11 because most of the things that people on the Internet really like to complain about (updates breaking things, attempts at mandatory Microsoft account sign-in, apps that auto-download to your computer when you set it up whether you want them or not, telemetry data being sent to Microsoft, forceful insistence that users switch to the Edge browser and Bing search engine) all actually started during the reign of Windows 10. Windows 10 is lodged in the popular imagination as one of the "good" versions of Windows partly because it retreated from most of the changes in Windows 8 (a "bad" version). But yeah, most of the Windows 11 stuff you hate has actually been happening for a while.
With that being said, it sure is easy to resent Windows 11 these days, between the well-documented annoyances, the constant drumbeat of AI stuff (some of it gated to pricey new PCs), and a batch of weird bugs that mostly seem to be related to the under-the-hood overhauls in October's Windows 11 24H2 update. That list includes broken updates for some users, inoperable scanners, and a few unplayable games. With every release, the list of things you need to do to get rid of and turn off the most annoying stuff gets a little longer.
Microsoft has proclaimed 2025 "the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh," partly because Windows 10 support is going away in October and there are a bunch of old PCs that can't easily be upgraded to the new version. But maybe Microsoft wouldn't need to poke people quite so hard if Windows 11 were a more streamlined version of itself, one without the unasked-for cruft that did a better job of respecting users' preferences.
—Andrew Cunningham
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Most media has never been that original—somebody creates something witty, clever, or popular, and others rush to mimic it; things have always been this way in my lifetime.
But I still bemoan how many people or companies rush to copy nearly anything that resembles a viral moment, whether it's a trope, an aesthetic, or a word that is subsequently beaten to death by overuse. Memes can be funny until they turn into a plague.
I physically cringe when "cringe" is used as a ubiquitous catch-all for anything that people don't like. Every job change posted to social media is prefaced by "personal news." I have asked colleagues what exactly is "quiet" about the verb in their headline. And the corporate jargon on LinkedIn causes me the most despair.
Look, this is mostly a rant from someone who's supposed to pick words apart, so I understand that language changes, not everyone is a professional writer, and workday constraints lead to some pet phrases. But the enshittifcation of social media, particularly due to its speed and virality, has led to millions vying for their moment in the sun, and all I see is a constant glare that makes everything look indistinguishable. No wonder some companies think AI is the future.
—Jacob May
Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/as-internet-enshittification-marches-on-here-are-some-of-the-worst-offenders/
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