Mid enshittification is the underwhelming, lukewarm variety of platform decay — not dramatic enough to spark a Twitter pile-on, not subtle enough to go unnoticed, just a steady parade of mediocre betrayals that make a product worse without being memorable about it.
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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.
The lifecycle of online platforms: first they're good to users, then they squeeze users to please advertisers, then they squeeze advertisers to please shareholders, and finally they're useless. Coined by Cory Doctorow, January 2023 WIRED.
Mid enshittification is the underwhelming, lukewarm variety of platform decay — not dramatic enough to spark a Twitter pile-on, not subtle enough to go unnoticed, just a steady parade of mediocre betrayals that make a product worse without being memorable about it. The 'mid' modifier, slang for average or disappointing, reframes enshittification as something that can fail to even be interesting. Users caught in mid enshittification are the most tired: they've lost enthusiasm even for complaining.
The app didn't do anything outrageous, it just keeps getting incrementally worse — total mid enshittification and somehow that's worse than a dramatic crash.
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Low key enshittification is the quiet, hard-to-pin-down version — the product doesn't crash, the company doesn't make headlines, but something has undeniably gotten worse. Slower load times, slightly smaller font sizes, a recommendation algorithm that now favors paid content just a little more than before. Low key enshittification is insidious precisely because it's deniable. Users feel it before they can articulate it, and companies count on that ambiguity to buy time.