"[H]e expands his various blog posts and articles on the subject into an over-all theory of 'why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it'...."

"Enshittification unfolds in three phases: first, a company is 'good to users,' Doctorow writes, drawing people in droves... with the promise of connection or convenience. Second, with that mass audience consolidated, the company is 'good to business customers,' compromising some of its features so that the most lucrative clients, usually advertisers, can thrive on the platform. This second phase is the point at which, say, our Facebook feeds fill with ads and posts from brands. Third, the company turns the user experience into 'a giant pile of shit,' making the platform worse for users and businesses alike in order to further enrich the company’s owners and executives. Facebook’s feed, now choked with A.I.-generated garbage and short-form videos, is well into the third act of enshittification...."

From "The Age of Enshittification/In a new book, the technology critic Cory Doctorow expands on a coinage that has become bleakly relevant, in Silicon Valley and beyond" (The New Yorker).

"I see it cropping up everywhere. In addition to 'HGTV-ification,' The Atlantic has covered the 'flu-ification of covid policy'...."

"Vox has lately published articles on the 'old man-ification' of television, the 'Easter egg-ification' of celebrity beefs, and the '"You’re doing it wrong"-ification'of TikTok influencers.... (The New Yorker has proved reticent on this particular kind of neologism, although, as far back as 2002, the magazine did refer to fears of 'le Big Mac-ification' of French life.) Pundits and politicos... [have] been indexing the 'Trump-ification' of just about everything since his candidacy in 2015. (Meanwhile, the rap dignitary Chuck D, of Public Enemy, attributed the groundswell of support for Trump to 'dumbass-ification.') During the past few years, the Washington Post has diagnosed the 'NRA-ification,' '"alternative facts’-ification,' 'hoax-ification,' and 'Hitler-ification' of the Trumpian right....Trump’s embattled rival Ron DeSantis likes to decry the 'woke-ification' of various institutions...."

Writes Lauren Michele Jackson in "The '-ification' of Everything/Novelty coinages are good at grabbing attention in the digital economy. What do they really have to say?" (The New Yorker).

"TikTok and ByteDance employees regularly engage in 'heating,' a manual push that ensures specific videos 'achieve a certain number of video views'..."

"... according to six sources and documents reviewed by Forbes," says Forbes, in "TikTok’s Secret ‘Heating’ Button Can Make Anyone Go Viral."

For years, TikTok has described its powerful For You Page as a personalized feed ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app. But that’s not the full story....

I'll have to give some more thought to how nefarious this is. 

Cory Doctorow seems to think it exemplifies the awfulness of all sorts of things: "Tiktok's enshittification."