Stage 4: Trash

Fan wikis written by volunteers, wrapped in heavy ads, and big communities are leaving for independent hosts.

Connected bikes and classes behind a subscription, with a fee for used equipment, a price rise, and a shrinking member base.

The canonical enshittification case: a feed that once showed your friends now serves ads, recommended posts, and AI content to an ageing, shrinking audience.

Once best-in-class retrieval; now cluttered with SERP features, ads, and SEO sludge—users get the residual junk.

Once the default Q&A layer for programmers; the community-built corpus now mostly feeds AI tools, and new questions have all but stopped.

API paywalls, algorithmic feeds, verification products, and ad load shift surplus toward the operator and advertisers—classic extraction on a still-central public square.