The Slow Bleed: On Meta, Enshittification, and the Platforms We Can't Quite Quit

There’s a piece doing the rounds this week claiming Meta is dying. The comments underneath it are, predictably, a mess. Half the people are dunking on the headline without reading past it. The other half are pointing out, correctly, that a company pulling $200 billion in annual ad revenue is not exactly on life support.

Both groups are sort of right, which is the annoying thing.

The article isn’t really claiming Zuckerberg will be selling pencils on Swanston Street by Christmas. The actual argument is quieter and more interesting than that: that Meta is showing the early signs of a slow institutional rot. Turning the screws on advertisers. Cramming more ads into already bloated feeds. Daily active users down for the first time, even if only by a couple of million and even if Meta blames it on Iranian traffic. The argument is that these are the moves of a company that has stopped growing and started harvesting.

Someone in the comments put it well. When a platform’s user base stops growing, the company tries to extract more value from the people still there, which makes the experience worse, which shrinks the base further. You can trace that arc through MySpace, through Yahoo, through Digg. None of them collapsed overnight. AOL is technically still operating. These things take years to die. Sometimes decades.

The word that keeps coming up in these discussions is enshittification, Cory Doctorow’s term for the predictable lifecycle of a platform. Build something genuinely useful, attract users, attract businesses, then squeeze both until they leave. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just incentive structures playing out. First you subsidise the user experience to grow. Then, once you have scale, you monetise it. Then you over-monetise it. Then you watch it curdle.

I deleted my Facebook account properly a few years ago. Not deactivated. Gone. The thing that finally pushed me was spending ten minutes scrolling and realising I had seen exactly one post from an actual person I knew. Everything else was ads, recommended content from pages I’d never heard of, and what I can only describe as ambient rage. My feed had become a machine for manufacturing mild anxiety and occasional fury. I didn’t miss it for a single day.

Instagram is still on my phone, which I’m slightly embarrassed about. I use it maybe once a week to look at photos of places I’ll probably never go. It’s also significantly worse than it was three years ago. The Reels push has turned it into a bad TikTok impression, and the ads are relentless. Someone in the thread mentioned their feed being 70% ads. I don’t think they’re exaggerating.

The thing is, Meta’s position is genuinely hard to compete with. The network effect is real. The reason WhatsApp is so useful is precisely because everyone is already on it. A better app doesn’t automatically win if nobody you know is on it. Signal is better in almost every meaningful way and I still find myself opening WhatsApp when I want to reach someone quickly, because that’s where they are. Switching costs aren’t just technical. They’re social.

So here’s the tension I keep sitting with: the platform probably is in slow decline, and the decline probably will take fifteen years, and in the meantime it will continue to be the default for billions of people across Latin America, Southeast Asia, Europe, and everywhere else where WhatsApp is just how you communicate. The headline is technically right and also practically meaningless for most of those people’s daily lives.

What the article is really about, I think, is the gap between financial health and product quality. Meta can keep the revenue growing for a while by degrading the experience, and it will, because that’s what the incentives demand. The experience will get worse. Some users will leave. The ones who stay will be shown more ads. Repeat.

The more honest version of the headline would be: “Meta Is Becoming Less Useful While Remaining Very Profitable, Which Is A Pattern We’ve Seen Before And Didn’t End Well, Eventually.”

Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.