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.
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.
Add your own interpretation of "enshittification fail".
Viral internet speak — memes, ratios, main-character moments, and the algospeak of every platform from Twitter to Reddit to TikTok comment sections.
See all Internet & Memes slang on Slangora.
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.
Enshittification maxxing is when a company stops pretending to care and goes absolutely full send on the decay process — cutting support teams, piling on ads, introducing paywalls for features that used to be free, all at once. The '-maxxing' suffix, borrowed from optimization culture, is used sarcastically here: these companies are 'maximizing' their strategy, just one aimed entirely at short-term extraction at the expense of literally every user. The word implies both intensity and absurdity.
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.
The subscription paywall for basic search was such a monumental enshittification fail that they reversed it within 48 hours.
Browse all slang words starting with E.