Some people have come up with the word “enshittification” to describe the basic cycle of modern web services.

The cycle consists of three parts:

1. You make the service that attracts new users by providing what they want. Often you do that at a loss, because your goal is to gain a big enough userbase for steps 2 and 3.
2. Once there’s enough users, you shift to attracting commercial interests instead – vendors if you’re running a store, advertisers or celebrities or other “big clients” if you’re a social network, etc.
3. Once both users and commercial interests are hooked, you can start tightening all the rules and switching completely to profiting yourself and your shareholders.