Not necessarily customers. Here’s a summary:
- Early stage: Platform is generous to users to attract adoption (subsidized features, low fees, great UX)
- Middle stage: Platform shifts focus to lock in business customers (merchants, advertisers, creators)
- Late stage: Platform extracts maximum value from all users, degrading service quality while raising prices/fees
In last stage, there can be stock owners for instance that push companies to do things against their customers.
It’s not inevitable if you’re not greedy though. Enshittification clearly doesn’t need to happen:
- Wikipedia
- Valve
- Nintendo
- Costco
- Patagonia
I’m sure there are more.