Top all-time · #42
Cory Doctorow
Personal blog · pluralistic.netpoliticsculturewriting
Cory Doctorow's personal blog at pluralistic.net covers politics, culture and writing. Since 2020, 619 different Hacker News readers have linked it 1,420 times, most often “TikTok's Enshittification”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 1 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Cory Doctorow's blog for its writing on platform decline ("enshittification"), antitrust, copyright and surveillance. Commenters cite specific posts as the source of these ideas.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter calls him a writer whose work on how to fight enshittification is worth following, and recommends his site as a "read to get out of my filter bubb
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- TikTok's Enshittification63 people · 68 mentions · first linked 2023-01-21
- Enshittification22 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2023-01-21
- Pluralistic: Daily Links from Cory Doctorow12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2020-03-11
- A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet11 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2026-01-02
- The Post-American Internet11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2026-01-01
- Autoenshittification7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2023-07-25
- The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Criticizing AI7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2025-12-05
- Bluesky and Enshittification6 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2024-11-12
- Autoenshittification6 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2023-07-24
- Reverse centaurs and the failure of AI (2021)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-02-17
What Hacker News says?
> Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle). https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-...
Comment linking /2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/
on “FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations”Submitted The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've used as a story · 2666 points
HN discussionPeople can use words however they want, but it wasn't coined to refer to that in general . You can read the blog post: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ > "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 an…
Comment linking /2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
on “FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations”Submitted Careless People as a story · 1071 points
HN discussionApple is in the process of getting into the ad business. Why not sell privacy and personal data at the same time? They are in a perfect position to sell ad attribution. https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/
Comment linking /2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/
on “U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly”Submitted It's not a crime if we do it with an app as a story · 872 points
HN discussionHow does it favor the users? > https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/ > https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/
Comment linking /2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/
on “U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly”Submitted Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit as a story · 772 points
HN discussionBeing in a position where you can copy anything and crush competition is a problem. In terms of antitrust, I believe that if you could prove that Amazon forked and offered the service with the intent to crush the competition, it would be downright illegal. A current case is Meta: back then, Zuckerberg was happily writing (internally) that Facebook needed to buy WhatsApp and Instagram and Snapchat to prevent them fro…
Comment linking /2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/
on “Redis is open source again”Submitted HP Instant Ink is “ink as a service” as a story · 567 points
HN discussionIf you want some considered thoughts on consolidation and antitrust implications, Cory Doctorow's writings are interesting. Some relevant examples: "Hate the player AND the game (10 Sep 2025)" https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-p... "The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street (14 Aug 2024)" https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enfo..…
Comment linking /tag/antitrust/
on “Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros”Submitted It's hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is as a story · 526 points
HN discussionCory Doctorow: https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/24/1201-v-dl-youtube/#1201 EFF: https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca https://www.eff.org/search/site/1201
Comment linking /2020/10/24/1201-v-dl-youtube/
on “How journalists use youtube-dl”Submitted Disney Lost Roger Rabbit as a story · 500 points
HN discussionThis is a well-know enshittification, which is going on for a long time already: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/
Comment linking /2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/
on “But what if I want a faster horse?”Submitted Vizio makes more money spying on people who buy TVs than TVs themselves as a story · 390 points
HN discussion> I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode. Indeed this is how Cory Doctorow explains it: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/
Comment linking /2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/
on “Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week”Submitted Workplace surveillance is coming for you as a story · 382 points
HN discussionThere was a recent attempt to substantially reform copyright in the EU - it was called "Stop Killing Games". It gathered over one million signatures, forcing the EU parliament to consider it. Their response was "this would require us to change copyright law, and we can't do that, sorry." The USA strong-arms copyright law into every single trade deal. I think it was Chile who tried to strike DMCA 1201 out of some tra…
Comment linking /2025/11/28/disenshittification-nation/
on “Quad9 to exit France”Submitted Aaron Swartz, Vindicated as a story · 336 points
HN discussionImagine being so close to understanding something, but your whole identity requires you to not understand it. Venture capital (VC) is fundamentally at odds with good business. VC demands exponential growth from a finite world; something has to give. What usually happens is the company grows to the point that it's impossible to keep the "professional fakers" away. Then the Iron Law[1] kicks in, or enshittification[2]…
Comment linking /2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
on “Founder Mode”Submitted End of the line for Uber? as a story · 308 points
HN discussionThis sounds correct to me. Cory Doctorow wrote explicitly about how Kagi uses Google's own index, but just presents the results in a more useful way, which validates everything that you're saying. > In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google. > The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam…
Comment linking /2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/
on “Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image”Submitted Demonopolizing the Internet with Interoperability as a story · 291 points
HN discussionGood point, and good question. I like Cory Doctorow's take on this [0], that this is basically defrauding the shareholders. It used to be illegal, it probably should be illegal again. It's also unsustainable, in that you can only do this for so long before you've bought up all the open shares and there's so few remaining that your company is no longer effectively tradeable. I don't know where this practice leads, bu…
Comment linking /2025/09/06/computer-says-huh/
on “Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image”Submitted The worst possible antitrust outcome as a story · 268 points
HN discussion> Apple should return to its roots - creating products that prioritize user experience over feature creep . Apple needs to reclaim that ethos. This is the good, old enshittification, which started with Google and Windows, https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/ . I wouldn't expect that Apple listens to this.
Comment linking /2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/
on “Apple's Software Quality Crisis”Submitted Schroedinger's streaming service just died as a story · 257 points
HN discussionI don't know their reasons, but for me, I do use cloudflare, but only in a way that I have a transfer-off plan. So far as I can tell, Cloudflare seems to still be in the early stages of enshittification [1], and while I as a business customer am probably going to be taken for a ride later than most customers, I'm also small fry, so I'm guessing at some point in the next 5 years, some of the "for free" features like…
Comment linking /2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
on “Internet Archive: Security breach alert”Submitted "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit as a story · 252 points
HN discussion
