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Enshittification

How online services get worse, and what Technis does differently.

What Is Enshittification?

Cory Doctorow uses "enshittification" for a familiar sequence. A platform wins users with a good product, locks them in, then makes the product worse to extract more money from users and business customers.

The ugly word is useful because it points at incentives, not cartoon villains. Once leaving is painful, a platform can raise prices, add ads, cut quality, and rewrite old promises without losing everyone at once.

Users usually notice the pattern one annoyance at a time. A new fee appears. A useful setting disappears. Paid content moves to another app. Eventually the service no longer resembles the one people signed up for.

Two Clear Examples

Netflix: The Catalog Split Apart

Netflix made streaming attractive by putting a large catalog in one place, including shows like Friends and Seinfeld. Studios later pulled titles into their own services as licensing costs rose. Netflix answered with more originals and exclusives.

Users got a rotating catalog and another stack of subscriptions. Streaming had promised to be simpler than cable. It rebuilt the bundle with separate apps and bills.

Mozilla and Firefox: Promises Can Change

Firefox has long sold itself as the trustworthy alternative browser. That makes its privacy language part of the product, not a footnote.

In February 2025, a Mozilla Bedrock commit called "ToS copy updates" removed or gated several direct statements about not selling personal data. The deleted FAQ markup included this answer:

"Does Firefox sell your personal data?" "Nope. Never have, never will. ... That's a promise."
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).

In December 2025, Mozilla's new CEO said Firefox would become "a modern AI browser." The same announcement said AI should remain optional and described plans for "transparent monetization" and more varied revenue. Mozilla's next chapter (Dec 16, 2025).

I do not read this as proof that Mozilla is bad. I read it as a warning that a mission does not erase financial pressure. A hard guarantee can become softer copy when revenue plans change.

Other Cases

  • Facebook and Meta. The feed ranks posts for ad engagement instead of showing a simple chronology of people you chose to follow.
  • Twitter and X. Frequent policy changes and paid features made the service less predictable for the people using it.
  • YouTube. More ads and recommendation incentives shape what creators make and what viewers see.

Smaller Examples That Add Up

Most decline is too small to make a headline. It arrives as another ad, another account requirement, or one more setting needed to restore yesterday's behavior.

  • Smart TVs. The home screen gains ads and tracking defaults after the television is already in your house.
  • Voice assistants. Commands that once worked become less reliable even though the hardware has not changed.
  • PDFs. Copying text or searching a document can fail badly enough that a screenshot and OCR work better than the source file.
  • Sports streaming. Rights split across services, so following one team can require several subscriptions.
  • Search. AI summaries and answer boxes can bury primary sources and place confident errors above the links.
  • Email AI. Assistants appear in core workflows, resist being disabled, and can invent details in summaries.
  • Operating systems. Telemetry, account prompts, and promoted features add settings just to get back to a plain computer.
  • Web discourse. Feeds reward repeated trends and slogans. Cheap AI-generated posts increase the volume without adding much thought.

What This Means for Technis

Technis has no investors, ad business, or growth target. I run it for people I know, so the incentive is simple. Keep the services useful and keep their data private.

Privacy Without an Ad Business

Data lives on infrastructure I operate and maintain. Technis does not sell ads, broker data, or depend on tracking to pay its bills.

No Monthly Fee

Technis is a personal project, not a subscription company. There is no revenue target pushing me to add ads, paid tiers, or usage tricks.

Invite-Only Access

I limit access to people I know because I can support that group personally. Growth is not the goal.

Personal Responsibility

Users do not own the server hardware. They trust me to protect their accounts, monitor failures, maintain backups, and tell them when something goes wrong. That obligation is personal, which is the point.

Promises Backed by the System

Marketing copy is easy to rewrite. Technis backs its privacy claims with concrete choices: self-hosting, no analytics, encrypted backups, and no advertising model.

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