Hmm, not sure I agree it ever only meant "running at a loss to capture the market" - even after having gone back and re-read Doctorow's early postings. It's certainly a common way for the situation to start (getting a large mass of users to abuse is a difficult task), but it's never specified as the only way. I could be very wrong of course, but if so I must have missed some very explicit language in the early coinage.

The original post https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/ about it makes no mentions of running at a loss, just what happens when a two-sided platform gains a bunch of users.

Later in "The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok" https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ Doctorow does explicitly mention Amazon operated as a loss leader to gain it's initial users but when they get around to the subject of the article they explicitly note it was the recommendation system which made it grow the early audience:

> Which brings me to TikTok. TikTok is many different things, including “a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.” But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, TikTok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good.

> By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, TikTok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like YouTube and Instagram. Now that TikTok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to YouTube and Insta.

And, in the very same, he opens up with this generic definition of enshittification that it's "good to users" then "abuse users for profit" but not an explicit "how" of either:

> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.