Is everything getting worse?
Cory Doctorow coined and popularized the term 'enshittification' to describe how internet platforms like Amazon, Facebook, and Google get progressively worse:
First, [the platform] is good to its users, then, it abuses its users to make things better for its business customers; finally, it abuses those business customers to claw back all the value for itself. Then, it dies.
Is enshittification really a thing, and is it a new thing?
To take Amazon's example, Amazon was extra kind to its customers when it was a budding business. To popularize online shopping, it needed to minimize the impact of shipping fees. So to prevent people from thinking about shipping costs every time they buy something on Amazon, it lumped the fees together into a yearly fee. And the fee was also much smaller than it is now. Amazon deliberately lost money on Prime memberships for a number of years while it was building a customer base and growing as a company. Once the growing is complete, it started doing things differently.
Prime membership fees went up. Search got worse. Instead of providing the best possible results for consumers, Amazon started collecting fees from sellers for good placement of their products in search results. (This is akin to good shelf placement in physical stores.) So, things have become worse for consumers. But will they keep getting worse? Not necessarily. Ultimately, what Amazon is doing is a balancing act. It's trying to keep things attractive enough for customers and sellers, while maximizing its own profits. It is the sort of thing that happens all the time in a free market system. For example, if things get too bad for customers, and if too many customers start leaving Amazon, then it stands to reason that Amazon would change its ways to stop or slow that. So, why then would Amazon die? How would the end result of enshittification come to pass?
If Amazon somehow has a stranglehold on both the customers and the sellers, then, of course, there's no negative feedback cycle. Nobody would be able to leave, and Amazon could continue to make things worse and worse for everyone else indefinitely, while maximizing its own profit. Even in this scenario, there's no dying. But does Amazon have a stranglehold? It doesn't seem to me like it does, at least not on consumers.
Similar observations hold for Facebook and Google. I don't use Facebook, but apparently, it forces its users to view certain "sponsored" stuff before they can look at what they want to look at. Leaving Facebook is painful for users because of the Network effects ("everybody else is on Facebook"), but if enough people start leaving, Facebook will have fewer eyeballs for its ads, and will start feeling the pinch. It is a balancing act for Facebook too - even though people don't pay Facebook with money, they pay it with their attention. The users are no less essential to Facebook than consumers are to Amazon.
I don't use Google Search routinely, but apparently, these days, Google is deliberately making its search results worse just to keep the users longer on the search results page (so that they spend more time looking at Google's ads). If the search results are really good, then the user would just click on the first or second result, and leave Google in a few seconds. If they are not so good, he would linger. Does this mean the search results will keep getting worse, though? Search is free, but again, people pay Google with their attention. So, it is in Google's interest to keep search results sufficiently good. It needs its Search users. Does Google have a stranglehold on its Search customers? No. It's easy enough to use Brave Search or Qwant or something else. If a lot of people are still using Google, then it means Google is good enough. (There could be other things pushing people to Google, like it using collaborations to install itself as the default search engine on some platforms. But if Google Search is not good enough, users will be motivated to look for alternatives. Whichever way Google got its dominance, it has to perform well enough to keep the dominance.)
Enshittification doesn't look like a thing. There's no reason why things will keep getting worse. I can see why Doctorow may think this is a real thing, though. Socialist types like Doctorow are good at spotting issues with companies, but ultimately, they suck at mutual consideration. They want to tilt things too much to the consumers' and workers' advantage. They want to limit companies' profits, or force them to pay a "living wage" for every little job position, or subject them to other unreasonable rules. So if companies are not suffering enough, things *are* getting worse, in Doctorow's eyes. That's how it looks to me, in any case.
Doctorow wrote quite a bit about enshittification on his blog. He speaks regularly about it, and he recently released a book on it.