The Coming De-Enshittification Boom  ## Metadata - Author: [[Don Marti]] - Full Title: The Coming De-Enshittification Boom - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #opensource - #community - #platformgovernance Author: Cory Doctorow Source: Zed's Personal Blog (blog.zgp.org) Reference: https://blog.zgp.org/de-enshittification/ date created: 2025-05-26 15:10 --- # Title: De-Enshittification: How to Take Back Online Platforms ## Table of Contents:  - 📝 Summary - 📖 Main Content - 🗒️ Notes - 📖 References - 🗣️ Paraphrase - 📰 Newsletter - ✅ Action Items - 🧪 Hypotheses - 📊 Methodology - ❓ Questions - 🔮 Future Research - 💡 Implications - 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment - 📊 Accessibility Assessment - 🌍 DEIB Assessment - ✅ Logical validity - 🔍 DARVO Analysis - 🔍 SEO Evaluation - 🎯 Conclusion ### References: - Doctorow, Cory. "De-Enshittification: How to Take Back Online Platforms," blog.zgp.org, 2023. https://blog.zgp.org/de-enshittification/ ## 📝 Summary: Cory Doctorow's essay "De-Enshittification" dissects the lifecycle of digital platforms as they move from user-centric to exploitative, often degrading user experience to maximize profit. He coins "enshittification" as the process where platforms initially serve users well, then gradually prioritize advertisers or other revenue streams at users' expense. Doctorow argues for structural and community-driven reforms that can reclaim platforms, proposing models of cooperative ownership, open standards, and accountable governance. His vision combines technical solutions with social and political activism to restore user agency and platform health. ## 📖 Main Content: The article begins by explaining the phenomenon of "enshittification," where platforms initially delight users to grow their base but eventually exploit those same users and content creators for profit, often harming the overall ecosystem. Doctorow outlines typical phases: onboarding users, maximizing engagement, then prioritizing rent extraction through ads or monopolistic practices. Doctorow emphasizes the need for multi-stakeholder governance models that empower users, creators, and workers alongside investors, contrasting this with current centralized, profit-driven platforms. He discusses cooperative ownership and open-source as vital countermeasures, enabling democratic control and transparency. The article further highlights the role of regulation, open standards, and interoperability in preventing platforms from entrenching monopolistic power and degrading services. Doctorow urges activism both in tech development and policy realms to demand platform accountability. By linking platform health with digital rights and community stewardship, the piece calls for a radical rethink of platform economics, advocating sustainable, user-centered models that prevent "enshittification." ### 🗒️ Notes - Definition of *enshittification*: gradual decline in platform quality due to prioritizing monetization over user experience. - Initial phase: platform serves user interests to build trust and grow. - Later phase: platform introduces friction, ads, and limits to extract rent. - Examples of enshittification: Facebook's newsfeed, YouTube's algorithm, Twitter's monetization shifts. - Core problem: conflict of interest between users/creators and shareholders/advertisers. - Solutions proposed: - Multi-stakeholder governance structures. - Cooperative and community ownership models. - Open standards enabling interoperability and competition. - Stronger regulation enforcing transparency and user rights. - Importance of user agency and empowerment: users must have real control over data and platform governance. - Role of activism: technology alone can't fix platforms; legal and political pressure is essential. - Risks of centralized power: unchecked platforms tend to monopolize, reduce innovation, and degrade experience. - Encourages experimentation with platform models emphasizing fairness, sustainability, and inclusivity. ## 📖 References: - Doctorow, Cory. "De-Enshittification," 2023. https://blog.zgp.org/de-enshittification/ - Tim Wu’s writings on platform monopolies and "The Attention Merchants." - Open Source governance models and cooperative platform theory. ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1. Original: "Enshittification is the lifecycle where platforms start out as wonderful places that respect users and creators, only to become places where users are exploited to enrich the platform owners." Paraphrased: Platforms often begin by delighting their users and content creators, fostering trust and growth. Over time, however, they shift towards exploiting those same users to boost profits for owners, resulting in degraded experiences. 2. Original: "The only way to fight back is through coordinated action that includes new laws, open standards, and collective ownership models that rebalance power and restore user agency." Paraphrased: To resist this decline, coordinated efforts involving legislative change, adoption of open protocols, and models of shared ownership are essential to redistribute control and empower users. ## 📰 Newsletter: 🚀 *Taking Back Control: The Fight Against Platform Enshittification* 🚀 Hey WordPress Community! This week, Cory Doctorow’s eye-opening essay on "enshittification" sheds light on the ugly truth behind many beloved online platforms. They start great but slowly prioritize ads and profit over people. But all is not lost! Doctorow advocates for democratic governance, open standards, and cooperative ownership — exactly the kind of innovation and transparency we champion here in open source. If you’re passionate about shaping the future of the web and protecting user rights, this is a must-read. Plus, it aligns perfectly with our mission to build sustainable, inclusive communities in WordPress and beyond. Dive in, and let’s keep the internet user-first! 🌐✨ Read it here: https://blog.zgp.org/de-enshittification/ ## ✅ Action Items: - Use this article to fuel talks and workshops on open governance in WordPress and open-source projects. - Advocate for stronger policies promoting multi-stakeholder models and user agency within GoDaddy’s OSPO initiatives. - Educate contributors about platform economics and risks of centralized control during onboarding sessions. - Integrate principles of transparency and community ownership into WordPress contributor advocacy and training. - Align messaging with industry trends pushing for interoperability and cooperative platform development. - Collaborate with regulatory bodies and community groups supporting digital rights and open standards. - Build campaigns promoting sustainable funding models to counter rent extraction in open source. ## 🧪 Hypotheses: - Introducing cooperative ownership in digital platforms reduces the rate of user alienation and platform decline. - Platforms adopting open standards demonstrate higher innovation and user retention over time. - Multi-stakeholder governance models increase transparency and reduce exploitative monetization strategies. - Regulatory frameworks that enforce interoperability correlate with reduced monopolistic behaviors. ### 📊 Methodology: - Comparative case studies of platforms before and after adopting cooperative governance. - Surveys measuring user satisfaction and trust across platforms with different ownership models. - Analysis of platform policies pre- and post-implementation of open standards and interoperability mandates. - Longitudinal studies tracking innovation and competitive dynamics in regulated vs. unregulated markets. ### ❓ Questions: - How can WordPress integrate multi-stakeholder governance principles to avoid enshittification? - What regulatory changes are most effective in promoting platform accountability? - Which cooperative ownership structures have proven successful in tech platforms? - How does user agency concretely impact platform sustainability? - What role can open-source communities play in resisting enshittification? ### 🔮 Future Research: - Empirical studies on the effectiveness of cooperative governance in open-source ecosystems. - Exploration of new economic models for platform sustainability beyond advertising revenue. - Investigations - Summary: David Gerard has a pretty good summary of today’s Internet business situation, in In 2025, venture capital can’t pretend everything is fine any more. This year, the investors are all-in on AI. - URL: https://blog.zgp.org/de-enshittification/ I was going to call this how to prosper in the coming de-enshittification boom but I’m still trying to figure that out. David Gerard has a pretty good summary of today’s Internet business situation, in [In 2025, venture capital can’t pretend everything is fine any more](https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/03/in-2025-venture-capital-cant-pretend-everything-is-fine-any-more/). This year, the investors are all-in on AI. Crypto’s still dead, quantum isn’t taking off—AI’s the last game in the casino. And the Big AI companies are having trouble making anything useful [even for stuff like customer support where corporate decision-makers are already willing to tolerate low quality](https://fortune.com/2025/05/09/klarna-ai-humans-return-on-investment/). So far, generative AI does have two winning use cases: slop and scams. Widely available generative AI tools are able to generate content that’s similar enough to real content to be plausible, but different enough that it can beat the algorithms used for detecting infringement and fraud. The AI/crime mess is most obvious at the Big Tech companies. * [Meta Battles an ‘Epidemic of Scams’ as Criminals Flood Instagram and Facebook](https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-fraud-facebook-instagram-813363c8) by Jeff Horwitz and Angel Au-Yeung at The Wall Street Journal * [Google Ads Shitshow Report 2024](https://blog.zgp.org/google-ads-shitshow-report-2024/) (You can almost stop reading this report at the release date. A report on the crime level of Google ads that got released on the same day as huge antitrust news isn’t going to be good.) And it’s not just those companies. Sometimes it looks like we’re in a doom spiral of [fake research](https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/17/how-to-make-a-splash-in-ai-economics-fake-your-data/), [bogus articles](https://balloon-juice.com/2025/05/17/chasing-the-electric-pangolin-open-thread/) and [legal briefs](https://substack.com/@garymarcus/p-164360492), [auto-generated accessibility problems](https://adrianroselli.com/2025/05/do-not-publish-your-designs-on-the-web-with-figma-sites.html), [AI slop in educational apps](https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/04/duolingo-replaces-its-contractors-with-ai-courses-with-slop/) [and even classrooms](https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2025/05/14/the-classroom-ai-doom-loop.html), and, worst of all, as Asma Derja covers in [The Weakest Link in AI](https://asmaderja.substack.com/p/the-weakest-link-in-ai), an enforcement of Big Tech points of view. Before AI can understand the world, someone has to tell it what the world means….Labelers in Kenya, the Philippines, and Venezuela are handed instruction sets written in California, reviewed in Dublin, and told to mark what counts as toxic, hateful, threatening, or real. They don’t decide. They execute. [Rands](https://randsinrepose.com/archives/minimum-viable-curiousity/) writes, I am deeply suspicious of AI, especially after watching decades of social networks monetize our attention while teaching us to ignore facts and truth, minimizing our desire to understand….AI does an incredible job of confidently sounding like it knows what it’s talking about, so it’s easy to imagine what it will do in the hands of those who want to manipulate you. Soatok writes, in [Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI](https://soatok.blog/2025/05/04/tech-companies-apparently-do-not-understand-why-we-dislike-ai/). What concerns me about AI has very little to do with the technology in and of itself. I’m concerned about the kind of antisocial behaviors that AI will enable. The tech oligopoly is even more out of touch now than IBM or Microsoft ever got during their peak days. Big Tech companies have enough power to get away with being mean and dishonest and half-assing things. Most people don’t. The result is that the technologies that Big Tech builds, with the assumption that a certain level of meanness, dishonesty, and half-assing are acceptable, are less and less relevant to more and more people. Maybe we’re not in a doom spiral after all? What if we’re back to something more like the dismal Microsoft monopoly from which came the Internet and free software boom of the 1990s? The green shoots of de-enshittification are popping up in lots of places once you start to look for them. Here’s a de-enshittification sighting in a [toot from Hugo-award-winning author Charles Stross](https://wandering.shop/@cstross/114541747269406389)) explaining his switch from Microsoft Office 356 to [LibreOffice](https://www.libreoffice.org/): > CoPilot in Office would open me up to accusations of breach of contract—my book contracts warrant that they’re all my own work: CoPilot brings that into question. > > Generative AI slop has real consequences for [authors](https://www.404media.co/authors-are-accidentally-leaving-ai-prompts-in-their-novels/) because of reputation risks and contract terms. A Big Tech company’s AI service can output copyright-infringing slop for a user—what are they going to do about it? An individual author can’t turn in copyright-infringing slop to a big publishing company. More sightings… [12 years of Ghost](https://john.onolan.org/12/) by John O’Nolan. As ever, we’re competing with prominent, VC-funded platforms with tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of employees, playing zero-sum games to try and control the entire media industry. Now, though, it feels like there’s more appetite than ever for something different. [What makes a tech gadget calm? This certification firm has an 81-point checklist](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/what-makes-a-tech-gadget-calm-this-certification-firm-has-an-81-point-checklist/) by Scharon Harding. Currently, six products are Calm Tech-certified [How to Improve Your Site’s Typography](https://scottk.mba/how-to-improve-your-sites-typography/) by Scott Knight. (More people are making personal web sites again.) [Just a QR Code](http://blog.fnaard.com/2025/05/just-qr-code.html) by Gabriel M. Schuyler You type something, it makes a QR code. You can also set the size, error correction, and colors. And that’s it. Just a QR code. Slop, surveillance, and extreme right politics are all part of the same big movement, so political concerns are a big motivator to avoid the first two. [The networker: Microsoft shutting down email accounts of Trump’s foes should be worrying to us all](https://observer.co.uk/news/columnists/article/the-networker-microsoft-shutting-down-email-accounts-of-trumps-foes-should-be-worrying-to-us-all) by John Naughton on The Observer. Khan, who is a British subject, has already lost access to his bank accounts, which is what happens when you’re sanctioned. More interestingly, though, Microsoft has also blocked his email account….The reality is that it’s a global company based in the US. More: [Trump’s trade war risks splintering the Internet, experts warn](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/trumps-trade-war-risks-splintering-the-internet-experts-warn/) by Ashley Belanger. [the #Eurostack, so hot right now](https://blog.zgp.org/mlp-2025-02-08/) [Enterprise Policies for Firefox Customization: A Beginner’s Guide](https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/05/18/enterprise-policies-for-firefox-customization-a-beginners-guide.html) by Asif Youssuff. I wanted to post something to enable people who are currently using dodgy user.js files and forks without security teams to use the mainline version of Firefox, just tweaked in known safe ways. (See [Data and Firefox Suggest](https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2025/05/07/data-and-firefox-suggest/) for info from Mozilla on one of their ad features. Firefox is still good, but they do end up in [weird risky advertising rat holes](https://blog.zgp.org/why-turn-off-firefox-ad-tracking/) sometimes, so it helps to have an independent tool to fix the settings. Bonus link: [When Your Webcam Doesn’t Work: Solving Firefox and PipeWire Issues](https://jgrulich.cz/2024/12/13/when-your-webcam-doesnt-work-solving-firefox-and-pipewire-issues/) by Jan Grulich) [#](https://blog.zgp.org/de-enshittification/), The Coming De-Enshittification Boom, Don Marti, 01jw70h9hh5cy47g9z41twak6n.