Are social media platforms dying a slow death?
S&T – IT
3 NOVEMBER 2025
- YouTube videos has unskippable ads to access the content you want — unless you pay.
- Twitter used to be a space to collect news, engage with verified figures, and discuss world events, but is now teeming with verified scammers.
- Instagram was once an app to post and admire photos, but it now prioritises scrolling through viral and commercial short videos chosen by an algorithm.
- Google helped you find articles of repute and academic papers for projects, but now serves up an AI-generated mishmash of content that you will have to further vet.
- What has caused this degradation across platforms and apps?
- One theory that has gained traction is enshittification.
- In 2022, the Canada-born author, tech journalist, and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification.”
- The now-viral term helped put a name to a change that internet users are noticing: the feeling that many of your digital experiences, transactions, and services are not improving with time, but are actually becoming worse because of their makers’ updates.
- We see now both sponsored product listings as well as Amazon’s own products often take precedence while a user is searching for items, meaning that they are not necessarily being shown the best products first.
- Google, Apple, and Spotify have also been accused of this kind of self-preferencing, where content that is more profitable to the companies is shown first, to the loss of other business rivals.
- Meanwhile, the difficulty of cancelling an Amazon Prime account has became a legal challenge in itself.
- As per a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit, Amazon allegedly enrolled millions of customers in Amazon Prime subscriptions without their consent, and also complicated the cancellation process.
- The e-commerce giant will have to pay $2.5 billion to settle the case — a slap on the wrist for a company with a market cap of over $2 trillion.
