Apurv Mehra | Portfolio

Have you been observing this too: a gradual drop in the consumer experience and quality of service across a lot of products?

The first time I came across the term enshittification was in a Ken article by Praveen. The term was coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022; it even became the word of the year for 2023, and he's since written a whole book on it. The pattern he describes is pretty predictable: a platform treats its users well to win them over, locks them in, then shifts the value to its business customers, and finally claws it all back for itself. By the end, the thing that got you in the door is the thing they've taken away.

Once you have the word, you start seeing it everywhere. Which is where I have to be honest with myself. Is this real, or am I just noticing what I now have a name for? Confirmation bias is a live risk here. But there's a more unsettling flip side. There's a widely discussed claim that a tribe with no word for blue struggled to see blue at all: the category has to exist in your head before your eyes reliably pick it out. That's exactly why naming this matters. The degradation you can't name is the degradation you'll never fight.

Sorry, we sidetracked. Back to the pertinent question: why do they do it? Maybe the economics aren't working and it's the only choice. Or maybe it worked too well, the industry consolidated into a monopoly or duopoly, and now it's time to extract the pound of flesh (evil laughter!). My read points mostly to the second, but it barely matters which is true, because in both cases the consumer is completely unprotected. Features you had on day one get moved behind a premium tier or removed outright, and your only real recourse is to leave a service you're already locked into.

There's a very apt Black Mirror episode on this exact topic, Common People, where a subscription keeps sprouting new tiers and ads until the base plan is barely usable. A must-watch.

A few recent examples from the Indian market:

Amazon Prime Video launched as a clean, premium streaming service. In June 2025 it started running ads on the plan people were already paying for, announced by a single email. Going ad-free became a separate ₹699-a-year add-on (₹129 a month) on top of the ₹1,499 membership. You paid the same and got less, then had to pay more to get back what you'd had.
WhatsApp was sold as a private, secure, clutter-free way to talk to people. It has quietly become a marketing channel: a feed of business broadcasts and daily "updates" nobody asked for, wrapped around the messaging you actually open it for.
AI slop on social media. Most platforms have allowed it to proliferate widely, as long as it gets engagement. YouTube, X, and Insta are major perpetrators here. While X and Insta are free and monetize your time, with YouTube my biggest beef is that they have ensured there's no way for me to disable Shorts.
The Ken. This one comes with some pain. I've subscribed since 2017 for exactly one reason: a few deeply researched, low-noise business stories. It's now several stories a day, a podcast, and a stack of newsletters, and very few of them hold the depth the early work did. More volume, less of the thing I paid for. (Sorry, Ken.)

Maybe I'm being too harsh, and this is just what businesses do as they grow up and chase revenue. That's a fair charge, and I don't think there's a clean answer to it. But the pattern is real, it's accelerating, and the part I can't get past is that at no point does the person paying the bill have any protection at all. That's the part worth staying angry about.