How platforms decay, as explained by Cory Doctorow to NPR. Finally a name for what we may not consciously recognize but deep down know is going on.
… I think Facebook’s a good example. Facebook went through the whole lifecycle of platform decay. They started off by offering a really good deal to their end users. They said, “Hey, leave MySpace, come to Facebook. It’s just like MySpace, except we only show you the things that you asked to see, and we’ll never spy on you.”
And then once those users were locked in — because once you’re in a place with all of your friends, it’s really hard to leave — they started to take away some of that good stuff they gave them, and they handed it to advertisers and publishers.
To the advertisers, they said, “We were lying when we said we weren’t going to spy on these guys. We’re totally spying on them. Here’s all the data you need to target them for ads that we’re not going to charge you much money for.”
And to the publishers, they said, “We are also lying when we said we’d only show them the stuff they asked to see.”
And then once the publishers and the advertisers were locked in, well, they took away those surpluses. The ads got more expensive. Publishers had to put more and more of their content — not just to get recommended, but even to be shown to the people who subscribed them. And that’s the final stage, the stage where there’s just only the residual value left on the platform that the platform owner thinks will keep the users and the business customers they bring in stuck to the platform. And that’s when we’re at the beginning of the end.
Further reading.
Jesus what Elmo has done to Twitter (sorry, x), which for all its faults used to be useful for a lot of things. Now it’s just paid trolls.
Thank Jeebus for the blogs, amirite?
The paywall gets installed in February.
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The giant teddy bear analogy was great.
I thought maybe David Roth had made the word up. Turns out he was quoting the Doctorow article.
Roth and Albert Burneko are outstanding writers for Defector. They frequently cover the enshittification beat. A few of my favorites from recent months:
Burning Down The House
You’re Supposed to Be Glad Your Tesla Is a Brittle Heap of Junk
Looking Good, Elon! Feeling Good, Trashcan Man!
On Musk:
There’s the man’s howling bottomless anti-charisma; the painful, excruciatingly misplaced cocksureness; the not merely bad but actively uncanny timing of someone unaccustomed to unmediated meatspace interaction. Has there ever been a less magnetic individual? I wouldn’t follow him if he was ahead of me in line for free ice cream.
I died.
His posts were joke-shaped and troll-scented without ever containing humor or even identifiable trolling
is a marvelous turn of phrase.
Funny how most of these guys want to fly off into space while their companies are going to shit.