Remember when searching google was simple? Type what you want. Find it in the first 3–5 results. What the heck happened?
I distinctly remember as a high schooler experiencing Instagram. I was into art at the time and did a lot of sketching. I loved following fellow artists and getting inspiration from them. It was so wholesome back then. I made so many friends with people I still haven’t met to this day, yet we are still Facebook friends and Instagram friends — however, it’s probably been close to 7 years since I actually saw a post from them. But you know what I have seen? Ads… Nothing but ads…
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At risk of sounding cynical, YES, I do understand how business works. And yes, I do understand you can’t build servers to handle millions of photos and never turn a profit (I build cloud infrastructure for goodness sakes…).
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The internet just isn’t what it used to be — and honestly, that makes me really sad. I think we can all agree, there’s just a connection with other humans that feels so long gone. The innocence and wholesome connections have been replaced by hundreds of soulless ads and companies vying for our ever so limited attention with every minute of our days being consumed with a near brain-dead doom scrolling.
When you take a step back, you have to ask, what happened?
In 2022, writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined a term that perfectly captures this decay: enshittification. It’s not that platforms are getting worse randomly. It’s a deliberate, predictable cycle that nearly every major internet platform follows. A three-act tragedy that plays out the same way, every. single. time.
Stage 1: Be Good to Users
Platforms start by being genuinely useful. Facebook connected you with old friends. Google gave you the best search results. Amazon had everything at great prices. YouTube was an endless library of creativity. These services were so good and so helpful, that we built our lives around them.
Stage 2: Abuse Users to Please Business Customers
Now you’re locked in the platform. All your friends are on Facebook. Your entire social life runs through these platforms. But now businesses start experiencing incredible results. A small business could run Facebook ads and reach exactly the right customers. Pay for Google search placement and suddenly you’re competing with giants. Amazon sellers were making life-changing money. For a while, it genuinely worked. Businesses got customers, platforms got revenue, and you, the user, well, your feed got filled with ads. Search results started prioritizing whoever paid the most. Every scroll became a marketplace. But you couldn’t leave, because everyone else was still there. Your friends, your community, your connections, all trapped in the same system. And businesses kept paying because it kept working.
Stage 3: Abuse Everyone to Maximize Profit
Finally, the platform turns on everyone. Advertisers pay more for worse results and your carefully targeted campaigns now reach bots and disengaged users. Sellers face impossible fees that eat into every transaction. Amazon takes a cut so large that many sellers barely break even. Google’s ad costs skyrocket while click-through rates plummet. And users? You’re drowning in low-quality content, AI-generated slop, and algorithmically-optimized rage bait designed to keep you scrolling, not to inform or connect you.
By this point, no one can leave because the network effects are too strong and the switching costs are high. What other social media platform ISN’T running ads? And for small businesses, where would you advertise if not on Google or Facebook (because after all, “that’s where everyone is”)? What’s the alternative to Amazon when that’s where customers expect to find everything?
The platforms have become monopolies, and monopolies don’t succeed by being good, they succeed by eliminating alternatives.
I think we are all starting to realize, we’re not customers anymore. We’re barely even users. We’re a commodity. Our attention, our data, our behavior is all packaged and sold in a system designed to extract every possible dollar.
In a system that rewards this behavior (at least in the short term), I find myself reflecting on Steve Jobs a lot. Specifically, his early philosophy of building truly great products and trusting the stock price would follow. There’s a video where he says exactly that: he didn’t care about the stock price. He knew if they built great products, the numbers would take care of themselves. And they did.
When Tim Cook took over as CEO (the former CFO and an efficiency and logistics genius), what he did worked. Share prices skyrocketed. Apple became one of the most valuable companies on the planet, hitting a market cap of over $3 trillion at its peak. Fast forward to 2025, and where are they now? They’ve fallen behind Nvidia and Microsoft because they got complacent. Small, incremental upgrades and higher prices every year. They knew people would buy their products anyway, so they thought they could coast. They stopped innovating and started optimizing, and now they’re paying the price for those decisions.
Being an early stage startup, we find ourselves at that crossroad right now. We can promise users freebies and get them onto the platform and make everything we offer too good to be true. Then follow the same playbook: make switching hard, charge users high fees for early cancellations, and nickel and dime every feature we know users rely on to make their infrastructure work.
I think every founder faces this choice, usually long before they think they will. Not in some dramatic boardroom moment, but in a hundred small decisions that compound over time. And those early choices set the trajectory for everything that comes after.
Don’t get me wrong — revenue is essential for growth and supporting your employees. But when you begin to over-prioritize profits, even the people you think you’re helping (customers and employees), start to feel that strain. Both become numbers in a spreadsheet, and honestly, that’s a miserable existence for everyone involved.
I believe companies can protect themselves from that path by becoming obsessed with BOTH their customers and employees. They MUST build systems of radical accountability early on and make it an integral part of their company and customer culture so that if they do become tempted, they feel the pain immediately — not years down the road when it’s too late to course correct.
Perhaps I’m completely naive and overly idealistic. But from what I’ve seen, companies that stayed true to their customers tend to survive, while those that abused them often didn’t.
Blockbuster became infamous for outrageous late fees and ignoring what customers wanted. US Airways slashed customer service budgets and filed for bankruptcy after mishandling complaints drove customers away. W.T. Grant ignored customers moving to suburbs and filed what was then the second-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, companies that refused to squeeze their customers have built empires.
Costco, founded in 1983, has maintained a membership renewal rate over 90% by capping markups at 14–15% and refusing to raise prices even when they could. The company’s co-founder once bought Calvin Klein jeans for $22.99 that were flying off shelves at $29.99, and resisted the temptation to charge more. Costco pays above-market wages, offers generous benefits to 91% of workers, and has an annual turnover rate of just 6% after the first year — FAR below the retail industry average.
The path of enshittification might look profitable in the short term, but history suggests it’s a slow death.
It’s far better to build something people genuinely want to use than to trap them in something they can’t escape.
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Carpathian’s Publications: https://carpathian.ai/publications
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