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Enshittification

A predictable pattern of platform decay — and why Technis is designed to resist it.

What is Enshittification?

“Enshittification” is Cory Doctorow’s term for how many online platforms degrade over time: they start out excellent for users, then gradually shift incentives until the user experience is no longer the top priority.

The dynamic is less about “bad people” and more about incentive gradients: once a platform becomes the choke point between users and what they want, the platform can extract value by raising prices, reducing quality, adding friction, or changing promises — all while users have fewer practical alternatives.

At a high level, it often moves through phases: be great for users → be great for the business model (ads, partnerships, lock-in) → be great for extraction.

Prime Examples

Netflix: From Content Library to Content Creator

Netflix helped make streaming feel magical because a huge catalog “just worked,” including comfort-watch staples like Friends and Seinfeld. Over time, studios reclaimed content for their own streaming services and licensing got more expensive. Netflix responded by leaning harder into originals and exclusivity.

From a user’s perspective, the experience degraded: more churn, more subscriptions, more “where did my show go?” — and less of the original promise that streaming was simpler than cable.

Mozilla/Firefox: When Trust Promises Become Editable

Firefox has long positioned itself as the “trustworthy” alternative browser. That’s exactly why small shifts in language matter: the words are part of the product.

In February 2025, a Mozilla Bedrock commit (“ToS copy updates”) removed or gated several strong, user-facing statements about not selling personal data — including an FAQ entry and structured FAQ markup that previously said:

“Does Firefox sell your personal data?” → “Nope. Never have, never will. … That’s a promise.”
Visual diff (excerpt): FAQ structured data question removed
@@ bedrock/firefox/templates/firefox/includes/structured-data-firefox-faq.html @@
...
- {{
- "@type": "Question",
- "name": "Does Firefox sell your personal data?",
- "acceptedAnswer": {{
- "@type": "Answer",
- "text": "Nope. Never have, never will. ... That’s a promise."
- }}
- }},
...

You can see the specific removals/rewrites in the public commit: d459addab (mozilla/bedrock).

Then in December 2025, Mozilla’s new CEO described Firefox’s direction as evolving “into a modern AI browser,” while also emphasizing that “AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off,” and that Mozilla will grow via “transparent monetization” and continued revenue diversification. Mozilla’s next chapter (Dec 16, 2025).

The important takeaway isn’t “Mozilla is bad.” It’s that even mission-driven organizations can face pressure to soften hard guarantees and reframe priorities as the economic environment changes. That incentive pressure is the engine of enshittification.

Other Notable Cases

  • Facebook/Meta: The feed became an optimization surface for engagement and ads, not primarily for your relationships.
  • Twitter/X: Policy/feature volatility plus monetization pressure changed the experience from “public square” to “product surface.”
  • YouTube: Ad load and algorithm incentives increasingly shape creator behavior and what gets surfaced.

Everyday Enshittification (The Stuff You Feel)

These are the kinds of degradations that don’t make headlines as “major scandals,” but quietly reshape daily life: more friction, more ads, more lock-in, less reliability.

  • Smart TVs: TVs morph into ad surfaces with aggressive tracking defaults. Convenience features give way to “engagement” and upsell.
  • Voice assistants: Commands that used to work become less reliable as priorities shift. The same hardware starts feeling “dumber” over time.
  • PDFs: A format meant for faithful documents becomes hostile to basic tasks like copying text, searching, and accessibility — sometimes a screenshot + OCR works better than the source.
  • Sports streaming: Rights fragmentation drives price inflation and forces fans into bundles. The product isn’t “sports,” it’s “sports + a maze of subscriptions.”
  • Search: AI summaries and “answer boxes” can bury primary sources and add confident-sounding errors on top of results.
  • Email AI: “Helpful” assistants appear in core workflows, are hard to fully disable, and introduce new failure modes (hallucinated summaries, unwanted prompts).
  • Operating systems: More telemetry, more nags, more forced features, and a growing checklist of settings to get back to “just a computer.”
  • Web discourse: Viral mechanics reward sameness: trends, jargon, and meme repetition can drown out original thought — and “AI content” amplifies the noise.

Why This Drives What We Do at Technis

Technis is built around a simple idea: if incentives are wrong, the product will eventually become wrong. We are driven by the incentive of providing for our own and for ourselves.

Privacy-First by Design

Technis is designed so we don’t need to water down privacy promises later. Your data lives on infrastructure I operate and maintain. There’s no ad business, no data brokerage, and no “surprise monetization” path that depends on redefining privacy after the fact.

Zero Monthly Fees, No Hidden Agendas

This pattern thrives when revenue must grow forever. By keeping Technis small, close-to-home, and not subscription-extraction-driven, we reduce pressure to ship changes that “work for the business” but harm the user.

Invite-Only Access and Community Focus

Invite-only isn’t about exclusivity — it’s about aligning the system with the only community that matters. We optimize for trust and reliability, not for growth at any cost.

Accountable Stewardship

Users don’t “own the servers” here — they trust us to run them responsibly. That means secure by default, available when you need it, and respectful of the fact that your data is yours. The pledge is simple: do what big corporations can’t and won’t do — care about users.

Long-Term Vision Over Short-Term Gains

When a platform’s promises are treated as marketing copy, they’ll be rewritten. We aim to make our promises true by architecture, not by press release.

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