Analysis
Andreessen Horowitz published an essay by Ruby Thelot, an NYU professor of design, AI and media theory, arguing that "enshittification" -- Cory Doctorow's widely adopted term for the process by which platforms degrade user experience as they extract more value for shareholders and advertisers -- isn't a real phenomenon, and that social media platforms are more popular and profitable than ever, 404 Media reported.
The Argument, and Its Central Data Point
Thelot's essay leans on the American Customer Satisfaction Index's 2026 Entertainment Study, which surveyed 30,886 customers and found overall satisfaction with social media rose one point year over year to 75 out of 100, with individual metrics like mobile app quality, loading speed, content freshness and ad relevance ranging from 68 to 84. The essay frames criticism of platform quality as a form of "platform narcissism" -- older users, implicitly including Doctorow, projecting their own aging preferences onto younger demographics that platforms are increasingly built to serve, and using stated dissatisfaction as license to keep using something they claim to hate.
Where the Rebuttal Lands
404 Media's Emanuel Maiberg pushed back directly, arguing Thelot cherry-picked supportive data while ignoring contradictory research from the same general period: the Searchlight Institute found voters believe social media has a negative impact on society; the Cato Institute found 75% of Americans distrust platforms' content moderation; a Reuters/Ipsos poll found 60% support stronger regulatory oversight of social media; and separate survey data found 35% of users report stress specifically from social media use, with 52% saying they spend more time on it than they'd like. A one-point year-over-year satisfaction uptick and a set of survey questions about app loading speed and ad relevance don't actually engage with those numbers, which are about trust, societal harm and compulsive use rather than product polish.
Why a VC Firm Publishing This Matters
Andreessen Horowitz -- which Pulse has covered extensively across its AI and consumer investments this year -- has a direct financial stake in how the enshittification debate resolves. The firm's portfolio includes numerous consumer social and platform companies with a straightforward commercial interest in "your platform experience is fine, actually, you just miss being young" becoming the dominant public narrative rather than "platforms optimize for engagement and ad load at the expense of user experience once they've captured a user base," which is the mechanism Doctorow's original argument actually describes. That doesn't make Thelot's argument wrong on its specific facts -- the ACSI number is real -- but it's a reason to read a venture-firm-published essay on platform quality with the same skepticism applied to any interested party's data selection, rather than as neutral academic commentary.
What the essay's framing elides: satisfaction with app-level polish (loading speed, ad relevance, content freshness) and trust in a platform's broader effect on users and society are different questions, and a firm with capital riding on the answer chose to measure the one where the data happened to be favorable.
The episode is also a preview of a broader dynamic worth watching as AI reshapes content and platform economics: expect more institutional capital -- venture firms, PE-backed media, ad-tech incumbents -- to fund research and commentary that happens to support the valuation thesis of their own portfolios, and expect readers to need to check the byline's balance sheet as carefully as the byline's credentials.
