Meta Announces New "Enshittification" Team to Optimize User Experience

Menlo Park, CA– In a bold new move, Meta (formerly Facebook) has unveiled its latest innovation: a dedicated "Enshittification" team, aimed at streamlining the steady decline of its platforms for users while maximizing revenue extraction. The company announced the appointment of Richard "Dick" Grifton as Meta’s first-ever Director of Enshittification, citing his "unparalleled expertise" in transforming beloved online services into ad-choked, algorithmically manipulated wastelands.

Our goal is simple: we want to give users the worst possible experience they’re willing to tolerate while ensuring our advertisers remain ecstatic."

Grifton said in a press conference - "We’re not just changing the game; we’re making sure there is no game left to play—unless you’re a corporate partner.

Grifton comes with an impressive track record. He previously spearheaded similar efforts at Amazon, where he helped degrade the customer shopping experience by flooding search results with low-quality sponsored products, and at Twitter (now X), where he contributed to making the site increasingly unusable for anyone unwilling to pay $8 a month.

Richard "Dick" Grifton, Meta's new Director of Enshittification, enjoying a glass of wine (of course).

"I’ve always believed in a core principle: hook users in with an actually useful service, then gradually make it worse until they either leave in frustration or pay up," Grifton explained. "Meta is the perfect place to take my work to the next level."

The new team’s first initiatives include increasing the number of unskippable ads on Instagram Reels, ensuring Facebook’s feed prioritizes enraging, low-effort content over meaningful social connections, and fine-tuning WhatsApp so that users will soon need to navigate a labyrinth of pop-ups just to send a simple message. Additionally, they plan to further obfuscate privacy settings, making it even harder for users to control their data.

When asked whether this move might alienate Meta’s user base, Grifton was unfazed. "Look, we know people complain. But they complained when we put Stories at the top of Facebook. They complained when we started inserting six ads per minute in Reels. And yet, here they are. We call this the Boiled Frog Strategy—users don’t notice they’re being cooked until it’s too late."

Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, expressed enthusiasm for the initiative, saying, "We’ve been enshittifying our products for years, but with Dick Grifton at the helm, we can accelerate the process with scientific precision. We look forward to a future where Meta’s platforms become the ultimate test of user endurance."

With Dick Grifton at the helm, we can accelerate ... [enshittifying our products] ... with scientific precision.

Industry analysts predict that Meta’s Enshittification team will set a new gold standard in digital misery, forcing other tech giants to either follow suit or risk offering a product people actually enjoy.

At press time, Meta confirmed that the team is also exploring ways to make the VR Metaverse even more aggressively unappealing, with plans to introduce microtransactions for basic avatar expressions and a new feature where Horizon Worlds crashes if a user tries to have fun.

"It's an exciting time," Grifton concluded."We can’t wait to see just how much worse we can make things before people finally break."

Stay tuned.