enshittification energy

Something is enshittification coded when its design choices, business model, or UX patterns carry all the hallmarks of a product on the path to decay — even if it hasn't fully arrived there yet. The '-coded' suffix signals vibes-based diagnosis: you're reading the signs, not waiting for the autopsy. Dark patterns, aggressive upsells, and gratuitous data harvesting are prime enshittification-coded behaviors that clue in a savvy user immediately.

Enshittification szn is the tongue-in-cheek declaration that a particular window of time has been collectively claimed by corporate decay — when platform after platform seems to drop quality updates, add paywalls, or slash features in the same news cycle. Borrowed from the sports-calendar 'szn' (season) shorthand, it frames product degradation as a recurring seasonal event rather than a one-off disaster, giving the online class a shared calendar for their collective despair.

An enshittification fail is the rare moment of public schadenfreude when a company's attempt to degrade its product backfires spectacularly — users revolt, the stock drops, the CEO issues a non-apology, and the feature gets quietly rolled back. It's the universe providing a small corrective to the usual one-way flow of platform decay. Tech Twitter lives for an enshittification fail, and the documentation of each one serves as thin hope that users retain some power.

When a platform, company, or person has officially switched on enshittification mode, the gloves are off and the race to the bottom is fully underway. The 'mode' modifier signals an intentional, active state rather than a slow drift — like flipping a switch from 'we care about users' to 'extract maximum value, consequences be damned.' It implies awareness: someone looked at their roadmap and consciously chose chaos over quality.

An enshittification check is a critical audit of a platform, product, or service to assess how far along the degradation cycle it has progressed — the deliberate process of measuring how much a once-useful digital experience has been hollowed out in the service of extracting value from its users and third parties. It borrows the community-validation format of 'X check' and applies it to Cory Doctorow's enshittification framework, inviting collective diagnosis: are the feeds worse? Is the algorithm more hostile? Is the free tier being strangled? Comes out positive far too often.