Cory Doctorow, on coining the term:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
The term was about online platforms degrading. This term described things like going to a subscription model, creating tiered subscription models, injecting more ads, and other practices to min-max short term profit on an online platform once enough customers were locked into it.
Since then a few examples I have seen referred to as "enshittification":
A movie sequel not being as good as the first movie.
A game sequel not being as good as the first game.
An unintentional quality defect on a one-time purchase of a consumable product.
A UI change to software (that didn't lock out previous features or change functionality) that the person personally didn't like.
The price of a new (luxury) product being higher than the complaining person would like.
A restaurant changing their menu.
A specific product being discontinued.
A TV show's writing getting worse.
The term has been so diluted it just means "a thing I don't like happened with any product or service."
I thought it was redundant since it's not a novel idea, & there were existing, broader expressions that weren't going to descend into another way to say "shitty".
Enshittification added nothing new except make it hyperspecific to online platforms as if that's useful. (It isn't.) How fucking insightful: that insight came preenshittified & popular media lapped it up.