Cory Doctorow has a word for what happens to platforms over time: enshittification. First they’re good to their users, then they abuse those users to serve their business customers, and eventually they abuse the business customers too, to claw the value back for themselves. It’s a pattern you can trace across almost every major platform of the last decade. I’ve been thinking for a while about where designers fit into that story. We were there the whole time – nobody shipped any of this without us – and I’m not sure we pushed back the way we should have.

Meanwhile, on LinkedIn

There’s a thread on Reddit that sums up something I’ve felt for a long time. Design conversations, especially on LinkedIn, have drifted away from what actually matters. What gets discussed is which tool to use and which trend to follow, with a good dose of framework worship, while the platforms we work on keep getting worse for the people who use them. That distance between what we talk about and what we ship bothers me, because we spend energy arguing about Figma plugins while we ship products optimized for engagement metrics that don’t serve users. How did we get here?

Our part in this

I think designers contributed to enshittification in a few ways we don’t much like to admit.

To start with, we put aesthetics ahead of function. Not always, but often enough. Polished interfaces, the kind that look great in a portfolio and that at the same time push users toward behavior that benefits the business instead of them. Dark patterns dressed up in clean typography.

We also stayed out of strategy, and that turns out to be an expensive choice. Plenty of designers treat business decisions as somebody else’s problem. So nobody from the design team is in the room when the incentive structures get drawn up, and you end up executing decisions that compromise the user experience without ever having had the chance to challenge them.

Then there’s the part where a feature compromises privacy, or uses a psychological trick to boost engagement, or buries the unsubscribe button three levels deep. Somebody designed that. Often that somebody knew it wasn’t right and shipped it anyway.

Which is really an ethics problem, and it’s where we gave in quietly. Most designers I know haven’t fought hard enough against features they knew were manipulative, and it isn’t for lack of caring. The pressure to ship is real. So is the fear of being seen as difficult. Between the two, it’s a lot easier to let something slide than to hold the line.

I’ve done it too.

What’s behind the screen

There’s a line from Charlie Munger I keep coming back to: “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcomes.” Most of the problems with digital platforms aren’t design problems in the visual sense. They’re incentive problems. The platform rewards behavior that’s bad for users, and the design executes that reward structure faithfully. So the thing that makes the biggest difference in a designer’s work isn’t redesigning a screen. It’s questioning the incentive model behind it: understanding how users, advertisers, and the platform itself are motivated, finding where those motivations conflict with the wellbeing of the people using the product, and proposing something else.

This isn’t a one-person job. Designing incentives pulls in business strategy and behavioral psychology, plus a working sense of ethics, which means talking to people outside the design team. It also means learning enough about the business to be taken seriously in those conversations – nobody’s favorite part.

A few practical approaches I’ve seen work:

• Map the incentive structure before you design anything. Before you open Figma, understand who benefits from each feature, and how. If the main beneficiary isn’t the user, that’s worth flagging.
• Prototype the incentive model, beyond the interface. When you propose a change to how a platform works, test different reward structures with real users, and see what happens when you reward quality content instead of engagement, or when privacy becomes the default instead of the opt-in.
• Use your communication skills strategically. Designers are often the best communicators on a product team, and you can use that to argue for ethical incentives in the terms decision makers already care about: retention, trust, growth that holds up over time. Framing user-centered design as a business advantage gets you further than framing it as a moral stance, even when the moral case is the one you actually believe.

Platforms that got it right

Not every platform follows the enshittification playbook. A few have managed to line up a sustainable business with real value for users, and you can see it in the design choices they made.

Duolingo turned language learning into a game, and the gamification there serves the user, because the design drives engagement in a way that also drives learning outcomes, and the business model works because people who learn effectively keep coming back, without needing to be manipulated into staying. Signal, for its part, built its whole product on the idea that privacy is a right and not a premium feature. The interface is deliberately simple, which puts encrypted communication within reach of people who aren’t technical, and being a non-profit, they never had to give that core principle up. Their growth shows there’s demand for products that respect users.

Firefox has consistently positioned itself as a browser that works for its users rather than for advertisers. Mozilla’s open-source approach and its transparency about how the business runs helped Firefox stay relevant in a market dominated by Google’s Chrome, which is decent evidence that aligning design with users’ interests can sustain a product long-term. Basecamp resisted the complexity creep that defines most productivity tools. Their flat pricing, instead of per seat, reflects a philosophy that prefers simplicity for the team over squeezing revenue out of every user, and the product stays focused because the business model doesn’t incentivize bloat.

Bigger than design

The forces pushing enshittification are structural: venture capital, growth-at-all-costs culture, business models that run on advertising. No designer fixes that alone. But we’re not powerless either. The designers who will matter most over the next decade are the ones who understand incentives as well as they understand interfaces, who can sit in a strategy meeting and explain why a feature that boosts engagement now will erode trust later. Which mostly means being willing to be the uncomfortable person in the room.

I’d take that over another argument about Figma plugins.