DVDs (how many people even still own a player?) are not a real alternative to streaming for a number of reasons. Nor is “just watch something else on another platform.” Or, at least, if your claim is that entertainment is interchangeable then you’ve got no real complaint about YouTube. Hell, YouTube has its own ad-free subscription. By your own logic, the ads can’t be enshittificantion because you can just pay more to avoid it!

The enshittification of Netflix goes beyond just charging more. It’s any decision the company makes to make the user experience worse so they can make more money. That’s things like hiding your list and your recently watched shows so they can make you scroll through more recommendations. So then they can autoplay the content they stuck in your way. Recommendations that, like YouTube, are more concerned with what they want to monetize than what you actually want. And it’s restricting the way you used to be able to use the service, like on multiple TVs even within the same house, to get you to wade through a bunch of payment plans.

But my point still stands. Enshittification doesn’t require them to become a monopoly and start producing nothing but reality TV. It just describes the strategy shift that these companies inevitably make from making the platform better to attract more users, to making it worse to extract more money from the user base they’ve built up.