This article was originally published in January 2025 and was last updated June 13, 2025.
- Tension: We build our lives and businesses on platforms that are quietly turning against their users.
- Noise: “Innovation” is often a euphemism for enshittification—where features grow but value erodes.
- Direct Message: A platform doesn’t fail when it breaks, it fails when it stops serving the people who made it powerful.
In 2025, billions of people still log into Meta’s platforms—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. But the experience feels different now.
Not in a “look how far we’ve come” way, but in a “why does this feel so much worse?” way.
Users are bombarded with content they didn’t ask for. Creators are squeezed for reach unless they pay. Advertisers spend more for less return.
Across the board, the sense of control is slipping.
There’s a name for this creeping decay: enshittification. Coined by author and activist Cory Doctorow in 2022, the term describes how platforms slowly deteriorate by prioritizing shareholders over users and business customers. In 2023, Doctorow wrote:
“First, they’re good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for business customers. Finally, they abuse business customers to claw back value for shareholders.”
By January 2025, Meta had become a textbook case.
What is enshittification—and why does it matter now?
“Enshittification” isn’t just internet slang. It was selected as the Macquarie Dictionary’s 2024 Word of the Year, not for novelty, but for resonance.
It captured a growing collective sense: that many of the services we rely on are getting worse, not better.
Meta’s platforms offer the clearest example.
- Facebook shifted from a social network to a content machine. Posts from friends are buried beneath “suggested for you” videos.
- Instagram has prioritized Reels over photos, pushing algorithmic virality over intentional sharing.
- Threads, Meta’s answer to X (formerly Twitter), launched with a surge in mid-2023 but by 2025 is cluttered with promotional noise and algorithmic bloat.
Even business users feel the shift. Advertisers are paying more to reach fewer people. Creators face shadowbans and declining organic visibility.
Bank of America analysts have cut their 2025 global digital advertising spending forecast by about 4%, citing weakness in brand and direct‑response budgets—with Meta considered among the hardest hit.
This aligns with anecdotal accounts from marketers who report rising CPMs and declining ROAS on Meta platforms, despite the platform still dominating overall ad spend.
But the problem runs deeper than performance metrics. It’s about how these platforms are structured to decay.
The deeper tension: we’re trapped in platforms we no longer trust
The real pain of enshittification isn’t just inconvenience—it’s dependence.
We use these platforms for everything:
- Keeping in touch with family
- Running small businesses
- Discovering events, communities, and opportunities
- Building personal or professional identities
And yet, as the platforms change to serve internal business goals, we’re left with a version of social media that feels… empty.
More ads. Less connection. More friction. Less joy.
This tension isn’t new—but it’s becoming harder to ignore.
More people are feeling overwhelmed by the noise on social media, frustrated by algorithmic feeds, and uncertain about whether the time they spend online is actually worthwhile.
We’re exhausted, but stuck—because leaving often means losing access to the people, tools, and visibility we need.
What gets in the way of seeing it clearly?
Meta doesn’t present its changes as decline. It calls them “improvements.”
Reels are described as “more engaging.” Algorithmic feeds are sold as “more relevant.” Declining organic reach is reframed as “optimization.”
This is the noise: platforms frame their changes as progress—more features, better targeting, new tools.
But often, these so-called improvements mask a deeper erosion of value.
What once felt open, user-driven, and useful becomes tightly controlled, harder to navigate, and increasingly monetized.
The system doesn’t collapse—it slowly shifts away from serving people and toward extracting from them.
That enclosure is subtle. It doesn’t break the system—it bends it slowly.
By the time people notice, the platform has already locked in new behaviors, pricing models, and expectations.
The most insidious part? We’re conditioned to blame ourselves.
- “Maybe I just don’t understand the algorithm.”
- “Maybe my content isn’t good enough.”
- “Maybe I’m not targeting the right audience.”
In truth, it’s not you. It’s the system.
The Direct Message
The platforms didn’t get worse because you changed. They got worse because their priorities did.
What now? Navigating a platform that’s no longer on your side
Enshittification forces a reckoning. Not just with social media, but with the entire platform-based model we’ve come to rely on.
It raises hard questions:
- What do we do when the tools we need are designed to extract, not empower?
- How do we build resilience in a digital world optimized for churn?
- What does it look like to rebuild trust—not in companies, but in communities?
These aren’t problems with easy fixes. But they do open the door to clearer choices.
For users:
Recognize that frustration isn’t a personal failure.
Pay attention to how a platform makes you feel—confused, depleted, manipulated—and treat those signals as valid data.
For creators and marketers:
Diversify where and how you build.
Relying on a single platform (especially one in decline) is a vulnerability. Invest in email lists, owned websites, community platforms, and SEO—not just short-term reach.
For all of us:
Start asking a different question—not “what can this platform do for me?” but “who is this platform accountable to now?”
When that answer isn’t you, it might be time to pull back.
