Cory Doctorow, on coining the term:

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.

The term was about online platforms degrading. This term described things like going to a subscription model, creating tiered subscription models, injecting more ads, and other practices to min-max short term profit on an online platform once enough customers were locked into it.

Since then a few examples I have seen referred to as “enshittification”:

A movie sequel not being as good as the first movie.

A game sequel not being as good as the first game.

An unintentional quality defect on a one-time purchase of a consumable product.

A UI change to software (that didn’t lock out previous features or change functionality) that the person personally didn’t like.

The price of a new (luxury) product being higher than the complaining person would like.

A restaurant changing their menu.

A specific product being discontinued.

A TV show’s writing getting worse.

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The term has been so diluted it just means “a thing I don’t like happened with any product or service.”