I’ve watched every tool I loved turn into bloated garbage

I remember the first time I opened Slack. It was just… clean. A chat app that actually made sense. No email threading nightmares, no endless CC chains, just conversations that felt natural. I evangelized it to my team. “This is going to change how we work,” I said.

I was right, but not in the way I hoped.

Five years later, Slack pegs my CPU at 100% while sitting idle. It freezes during calls. It’s added so many features—workflow builders, AI assistants, huddles, Atlas—that I can’t find the things I actually need. The thing I loved for its simplicity has become everything I hated about the tools it replaced.

And it’s not just Slack.

I’ve lived through this pattern too many times

Notion felt like magic when I discovered it. Finally, a tool that could be my notes, my wiki, my database, my project tracker—whatever I needed. The flexibility was intoxicating. I migrated everything. Built complex systems. Became dependent.

Now those same databases crawl. Pages with linked relations and formulas take seconds to load. And when they moved AI features to expensive enterprise tiers after I’d already prepaid for an annual subscription? That felt like a betrayal. The users on Reddit begging “please stop adding features before it gets bloated” saw this coming. We all did. We just hoped we were wrong.

Figma was supposed to be different. The scrappy alternative to Adobe’s expensive, bloated design tools. Real-time collaboration in the browser. A team that actually listened to designers. When Adobe announced they were acquiring it for $20 billion, my stomach dropped. I knew exactly what was coming: “Adobification”—price increases, feature bloat, and the slow death of everything that made Figma great.

Miro started as this delightful digital whiteboard. Simple. Fast. Just worked. Now the business features I used to get as standard cost $16 per seat per month, and the enterprise plan requires “contacting sales for custom pricing” —which is corporate speak for “we’re going to charge you as much as we think we can get away with.”

I finally understand what’s happening

I thought I was going crazy. Was I just being nostalgic? Were these tools always this bad and I’d forgotten? But then I discovered Cory Doctorow’s work on enshittification, and everything clicked.

He describes this three-stage decay process:

First, platforms are good to users to lock them in. That was Slack in 2015. Notion in 2018. Figma before Adobe. They were genuinely great because they needed us trapped in their ecosystem.

Second, they abuse users to court business customers. That’s the enterprise pivot I’ve watched happen to every tool I’ve loved. Suddenly the roadmap is all SSO, SCIM provisioning, admin controls, compliance checkboxes —things I don’t need but enterprises demand. Performance degrades. Prices escalate. Features multiply to win procurement deals, not solve real problems.

Third, they abuse everyone to extract maximum value for shareholders. What’s left is expensive garbage that barely works, kept alive only because we’re too invested to leave.

I’ve lived through all three stages multiple times now. And I hate that I can predict it.

The decay is personal

When Slack was acquired by Salesforce, I watched it “devolve” in real-time. Users on Reddit describe the same thing I experienced: the platform adding “anti-features,” becoming resource-heavy, losing the simplicity that made it useful. But switching is painful when your entire organization lives in Slack.[2]

When Notion gets slow with complex databases, I try to optimize—reduce relations, simplify formulas, archive old data. But I’m working around their technical debt. Why should I have to engineer workarounds for a product I’m paying for?

When Figma lags on large files, I hear the same excuse every time: “It’s cloud-based, so…”. Yeah, and? That should make it better, not worse.

When I see the pricing for these tools—costs that rival junior employee salaries —I feel the absurdity viscerally. I’m spending more on software subscriptions than I used to spend on rent.

I now understand it’s structural, not personal

Here’s what really gets me: this isn’t a failure of individual companies. It’s the inevitable result of how these tools are financed and governed.

Venture capital demands exponential growth. You can’t pitch “we’re going to stay simple and excellent” to VCs looking for 10x returns. You have to expand, add features, capture enterprise markets, and eventually sell or IPO. The research confirms what I’ve experienced: innovation quality declines sharply after companies go public. They shift from genuine innovation to commercialization and extraction.

The venture model requires enshittification. And I’m tired of being the one who pays the price.

What I actually want

I want tools that improve over time instead of degrading. I want software where the people who use it daily have a say in what gets built. I want to stop watching beloved products get acquired and destroyed by companies optimizing for shareholder value at users’ expense.

I’ve been learning about decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and cooperative ownership structures. What if productivity tools were owned by the people who actually use them? What if users held governance tokens and could vote on roadmaps ? What if developers earned reputation for long-term user satisfaction instead of quarterly revenue growth ?

This isn’t theoretical. The technology exists. Transparent governance through smart contracts. User ownership through tokens. Aligned incentives through reputation systems. We could build tools where enshittification is structurally impossible because there are no external shareholders to extract value for.

I’m done accepting this cycle

I’m done pretending this is normal. I’m done watching tools I love become expensive, bloated, slow, and user-hostile. I’m done with the cycle of discovery, dependency, and decay.

The tools that briefly showed me what was possible—elegant software that genuinely improved my work—have now shown me what’s inevitable under current ownership structures: extraction until only “the mingiest residue” of value remains.

But I refuse to believe this is the only way. We built Slack once. We built Notion once. We built Figma and Miro. We can build them again, but this time with governance structures that prevent the predictable decay.

I don’t want the “next” Notion before it gets ruined. I want tools that can’t be ruined because their users own them.

The tools to build this exist. The economic logic is sound. Now I just need to stop tolerating the decay and start building the alternative.

Because I’m tired of loving tools that are designed to betray me.