Ruby Thelot pushes back hard against the "enshittification" theory—Cory Doctorow's idea that platforms deliberately degrade to serve advertisers over users, then eventually collapse. The numbers tell a different story. Instagram and Facebook have grown from 2.5 billion social media users in 2016 to nearly 6 billion today. Average daily usage keeps climbing. When researchers measure satisfaction through surveys like ACSI, scores have actually ticked up from 70 to 75 out of 100 over the last five years. People complain constantly about algorithmic feeds, Stories, Reels, and ads, yet they keep using these platforms more, not less. That gap between what people say and what they do reveals the real pattern. The core issue is that platforms evolve as their user base explodes and diversifies. Facebook started as a tool for college students in urban areas. As it scaled globally, product managers had to accommodate radically different needs—someone in Missouri wants different things than someone in Bushwick or the Philippines. When Instagram switched from a chronological feed to an algorithmic one, or when it added Stories and Reels, these weren't random decisions to squeeze users. They were responses to what millions of people actually engaged with, tracked obsessively through behavioral data. Early Western adopters—mostly millennials—feel alienated because the platform no longer caters primarily to them. That feeling of feature-need mismatch gets labeled "enshittification," but it's really just platform narcissism: the belief that changes to serve a broader audience constitute degradation. The pragmatic argument against enshittification is straightforward. If platforms were genuinely getting worse for users overall, you'd see declining time spent, fewer daily active users, and lower satisfaction scores. Instead, every metric moves in the opposite direction. Meta's product managers aren't secretly sabotaging their own platforms—they're making thousands of small, data-driven decisions that pull the platform toward whatever actually keeps people engaged. The platforms remain free, which undercuts claims about price gouging. Both revealed preference (actual behavior) and stated preference (survey responses) show improvement or stability. The enshittification narrative makes for compelling criticism and book deals, but the evidence doesn't support it.