Reddit's Enshittification Meme Has Found Its Most Convenient Target Yet

Last week, someone in r/degoogle asked whether Gemini might be next in line to collapse under its own bloat, then answered themselves with the kind of joke that only lands because it's true: "I just want Gemini and Banana crap to die, everything is enshittified and I can't keep making pizza with glue guys." The sarcasm tag at the end barely mattered. The post cleared nearly 400 upvotes, which in a community built around fleeing Google's product ecosystem is less a data point than a temperature reading.

The pizza-with-glue reference is doing a lot of work here. It traces back to the moment Google's AI Overviews suggested adding glue to pizza cheese to help it stick — a real output from a real product, embarrassing enough that it became a meme shorthand for AI-generated nonsense laundered into authoritative-sounding answers. The r/degoogle community has spent years cataloguing Google's product decisions as a slow betrayal of utility in favor of engagement metrics and lock-in. What's new is that AI features have become the most legible symbol of that decay. Gemini isn't just a bad product to these users — it's the proof that the enshittification thesis, first articulated by Cory Doctorow to describe how platforms degrade over time once they've captured their users, now applies to AI assistants before they've even finished launching.

This is a pattern that keeps surfacing: the people most fluent in how tech platforms fail are also the first to recognize the same failure modes appearing in AI products. The r/degoogle crowd isn't surprised that Gemini is bad. They're frustrated that it was supposed to be different — that AI was the feature that would justify staying inside the Google ecosystem, and it turned out to be just another surface to push unwanted integrations onto. The enshittification meme resonates here not as hyperbole but as a technical description. The joke lands because the community has a precise vocabulary for exactly this kind of decay, and Gemini fit the template on arrival.

What's worth watching is how quickly this framing spreads beyond communities already primed for it. r/degoogle users are by definition early adopters of the exit mindset — they've already done the work of deciding Google can't be trusted. But the same "glue on pizza" shorthand is now appearing in threads on r/technology and in general-purpose tech complaints, carried by people who couldn't name Doctorow or define enshittification but immediately understand the feeling it describes. When a meme that started as specialist critique becomes the default vocabulary for casual user frustration, the product has a different kind of problem than a bad review cycle. Google can fix a pizza recommendation. It can't fix the fact that people now have a word for what it does to things.