the more you pay, the worse it gets

subscribed to Premium Frustration

I haven’t kept up with a lot of media recently. I don’t binge watch TV shows or movies despite being subscribed to almost all the top performing Over-The-Top OTT platforms, just in case I want to have another rerun of Girls on a Saturday night you know? Between the endless ads and that nagging little “Go Ad-Free” button, I notice another SMS about the auto-debit for a subscription. I pause, thinking, “Wait what the fuck? I’m still paying to see ads?”

Welcome to the scene of enshittification of digital products and platforms. A term coined by the tech critic Cory Doctorow. It describes a predictable cycle where digital platforms periodically and systemically degrade user experience to maximize profits. This phenomenon is particularly evident in streaming platforms, which have followed a pattern of declining quality, increased monetization, and diminished user value over time.

Doctorow describes how platforms die using this phenomenon in his essay as follows

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this ‘enshittification', and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”

We all hate ads, especially when they’re blaring in your face after only three swipes on Instagram stories or one scroll on Pinterest. But, a degraded user experience even after paying for something supposedly better, simply leaves us frustrated yet unable to fully abort media consumption on their platforms. Call it the sunk cost fallacy or the slow boil of a frog, but platforms have mastered monetizing the tension between delight and despair. They know we’re frustrated, but not enough to leave. So we stay. We complain. We pay. We subscribe to our own discontent.

Ria Chopra, in her video, argues that while this might be a “good business choice at the moment, it is a large scale scam.” And I agree, while it may seem like a great choice to maximize profits in the longer run, this stands at the very opposite end of what good products should feel like, because all it does is increase immediate revenue and keep the already dependent users locked in on their platform. What it also does is slowly erode user trust and loyalty, create a vulnerable gap for competitors to swoop in with alternatives (food for thought: is this why we have so many alternatives?), damage perceived value of product and brand, and lastly even abandonment of platforms once the experience has degraded severely.

But, people still stay don’t they? So, are the platforms really suffering? You’re right. Not at the moment they aren’t. But the reason why degraded platforms can still maintain some of their user base is not because they are actually that good, it’s simply because of other strategies such as having content exclusivity, ecosystem integration, almost all platforms following similar enshittification strategies so we just choose the best of the worst, intermittent reinforcement and lastly a status quo bias which argues that it is easier to stay and maintain than to change. None of these contribute to the actual increment of platform experience, for they just trap us there. It's not about better experiences, it's about stickier ones. Retention strategies dressed up as ad intrusions and increased subscription tiers.

Common People, Black Mirror

This reminds me of an episode called Common People from the famous dystopian speculative fiction Netflix show Black Mirror, ironical I know. Context for those who haven’t watched it, the episode is centering on Mike Waters, a welder, and Amanda, his schoolteacher wife, who is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. A tech startup named Rivermind offers salvation in the form of synthetic brain tissue powered by cloud servers. Sounds good right? A free surgery? But at the cost of a lifetime of subscription fees. Amanda initially functions well under the basic tier, but soon, the couple realizes key cognitive and emotional functions are paywalled behind increasingly expensive service upgrades. As Amanda begins to unconsciously speak in ads and Mike turns to a degrading livestreaming platform called Dum Dummies to fund temporary upgrades, the couple is trapped in a dystopian tech ecosystem that exploits both human love and desperation.

It paints a chilling speculative future where even life itself becomes subscription-based, and retention is achieved not through value, but dependence. Amanda’s survival hinges on tiered access to her own cognition, locked behind paywalls that escalate as her synthetic brain becomes more entangled with Rivermind’s monetization model. As Mike degrades himself on a humiliating livestream just to afford temporary moments of human connection, the system reveals its endgame: extract maximum value from users until their dignity, agency, and even death are commodified. The product never improves, only that its grip tightens.

No way to put an end to this? I’d like to not believe in a future so bleak and the reformative power of better business models, better policies and better design. So does Doctorow, as he says in this essay, puts forth two big picture principles to protect users from this. The End-to-End Principle means that digital platforms should let users control their experience by only showing them content they’ve specifically asked for, rather than pushing things they didn’t want through algorithms. This looks like social media showing posts from accounts users follow first, search engines prioritizing exact results over ads, and email only showing messages from trusted senders. Goal? To respect user choices and intentions, ensuring platforms exist to connect people, not manipulate them for business gain. The Right of Exit principle means users should be able to leave a platform easily, without facing high costs or barriers, so that they stay on platforms because they choose to, not because they’re trapped. This includes things like interoperable social media, where you can talk to the same people across different apps. By making platforms easier to leave and encouraging competition, we can create systems that keep users engaged by offering better experiences, not by locking them in. Goal? Puts user control back in the hands of individuals and encourages platforms to earn their retention through quality, not captivity.

Lots of food for thought? Now before you close Substack and hit play on your unwatched TV show episode, I will leave you with this thought provoking yet necessary reflection by Karri Saarinen, CEO of Linear at Config 2025, where he says that quality is in fact rare despite technological advancements because there has been a shift away from craft — the slow, human act of making where creators leave a part of themselves in the work. This, as we have come to see, is in contrast with mass production and manufacturing, which leads to doing "more" but losing connection to the output. While he talks about this in a context different from platforms reliant on a consumer’s attention, we can extrapolate to agree that platform decay is itself is a symptom of prioritizing metrics and process over the holistic, crafted, user-centric experience, more often than not also exacerbated by pressure to extract value through means like increased tiers of pricing models.

Config 2025: Crafting quality that endure (Karri Saarinen, Co-founder & CEO, Linear)

These takeaways on ‘how we can fix this’ aim to simply shed light and do not entirely capture the knowledge Chopra, Doctorow, Saarinen, and others put forth. I urge you, reader, to read and ponder more on what this means for consumers, engineers, designers, policy makers and others alike. If you liked what you read, I want to know more! Fill this survey to help me understand better what it is you wish to read when you come across my newsletter.

I am elated to let you guys know that there are now more than 200 of you I get to write for! This instills within me, a greater responsibility and gravity towards writing more content informed pieces, keeping it reflective, observational and true to my style. Inspiring from the different domains of my life as a product designer, a newsletter writer and a citizen of the digital scroll. My words will find you in the lulls and highs of your days soon enough, but until then — drink your coffee, read an essay on internet culture and maybe rewatch Girls while you’re at it.

All the articles, videos and essays referenced here have been linked in the essay itself. Click to read, watch and learn more.