We’re under the weather this week. This is not a reference to the cold spell sweeping across the US: we’re literally down with a stomach flu, and the perfect opportunity to report American Dialect’s 2023 Word of the Year – “Enshittification,” as we feel like, well, need we spell it out?

The word “became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse. “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,” Doctorow wrote on his Pluralistic blog.”

The good news is, re this stomach bug, we will recover. What about those platforms?  “Gen Z is crazy about a handful of online platforms including Twitch, Reddit, TikTok, Imgur, Unfold, Brat, NTWRK, and Lomotif,” according to Business Insider, while Later reports that YouTube is their online entertainment channel of choice, “and TikTok (68%) and Snapchat (67%) aren’t too far behind. Interestingly, the platform that has really skyrocketed in this group is BeReal, as according to zdnet, “On BeReal you cannot have followers. Similar to the earliest forms of social networking sites (remember AIM), on the app you have friends instead of followers and only these select groups of people can see your posts. This takes away the pressure of wanting to curate a perfect public image and brings back the fun of sharing content only with your friends.”

There’s a bit of a heads up to founders focused in the space and on this increasingly valuable group.

In humans, bugs come and go. Such is the systole and diastole of life on this planet. As for the malaise in the current leading platforms? The incessant marketing, manipulation and tracking. It may well be that there’s a change in the air. Time will tell. While we are certain that we will recover, we wonder about the current market leaders, considering that in their case, it’s a feature, not a bug. Onward and forward.