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Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

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Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#161

Post by ssklash »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #138
sharperguy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue could be rooted in recent monetary policy rather than an inhrenent feature of the market itself. Artificially low interest rate environments lead to a lot of money in the hands of investors, which due to inflation slowly loses purchasing power over time. However, with large reserves, they can easily afford to prop up a business model which persistantly spends more money on bringing "free" features t…

Just don't understand how one could be convinced these days of the fundamental conceit that even a properly profitable company is necessarily going to provide good things for people downstream, or for society in general. What is the argument for that in general again? Because to me, if your not Twitter, your Wal Mart or Raytheon or BoA. If your not shittifying a platform you are pushing out small businesses from ever…

A guy named Karl came to the exact same conclusions, in 1867.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#162

Post by rsynnott »

FullstakBlogger wrote: post #159
rsynnott wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still amazed they went with the $8-for-attention model. Everyone _already knows_ this doesn't work well; the dating site industry has been trying to make it work for literally decades. It's also kind of a Pandora's box; even if they removed the attention boost, the taint is already there, and people will be suspicious of bluetick replies forever.

The smart thing to do isn't to remove it; They should charge for adversarial features. Pay your fee, you get not only an attention boost, but the ability to un-boost blues. If the net result is 0, the Nash Equilibrium is that everybody pays. Look how many people "#BlockTheBlue" on twitter right now. Just charge them to make it easy. The real value in someone who's willing to pay to be seen isn't in their 8$ subscript…

I mean, if they want to turn Twitter into SomethingAwful, that would be a good route.

Honestly at this point it's in such a bad state that it would be worth considering; a gamified war might be better than just every high-traffic tweet having hundreds of nonsense bluetick comments before you get to the real comments. It'd at least be more interesting; the bluetick content is usually just very dull, and tends to bring to mind the writing style of those wannabe-influencer posts you see on LinkedIn. (I think a lot of people paying for it are doing so because they want to be... a Twitter influencer? Are there even Twitter influencers, beyond dril?)

Probably not a _great_ way to build a sustainable business, though.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#163

Post by SantalBlush »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #138
sharperguy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue could be rooted in recent monetary policy rather than an inhrenent feature of the market itself. Artificially low interest rate environments lead to a lot of money in the hands of investors, which due to inflation slowly loses purchasing power over time. However, with large reserves, they can easily afford to prop up a business model which persistantly spends more money on bringing "free" features t…

Just don't understand how one could be convinced these days of the fundamental conceit that even a properly profitable company is necessarily going to provide good things for people downstream, or for society in general. What is the argument for that in general again? Because to me, if your not Twitter, your Wal Mart or Raytheon or BoA. If your not shittifying a platform you are pushing out small businesses from ever…

>What is the argument for that in general again?

Free-market types used to have some assumptions about how free markets are expected to work, then they would derive the result that a free market yields a net benefit to society from those assumptions.

Now it is glaringly obvious that a free market can cause a net loss to society, but they still need to believe free markets are good. So they ignore the evidence, and instead of deriving the result from assumptions, they treat it as an axiom instead.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#164

Post by mojo74 »

prox wrote: post #109
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #96

I wonder what the people at the top of large corps (Pichai, Zuckerberg, Musk et al) think of this perspective and how its increasingly dominating the narrative about what they do. Are they mystified or perplexed by it? Worried? Or do they just think: hey, you figured it out in the end ?

I think the latter. These guys aren’t consumers in the same way most of the public is. They are beholden to other bounds and checks which keeps them in place. I had the pleasure to go along for a week with a bunch of CEOs, one was a former billionaire and he had stories that really emphasize how insulated they are from the rest of society. I mean imagine that traveling is all by jet, that everyone you meet is at leas…

I was listening to a programme on the radio the other day and they highlighted the same thing as you. Put a billionaire in a party with average people (with money, health worries etc) and they would be unable to relate to any of the other party goers. So removed they are from general life that they might as well be aliens was the conclusion.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#165

Post by rjsw »

glun wrote: post #72
_eypq wrote: post #44

I've been thinking about how enshittification, venture capital, shareholders and the life cycle of a company are in some ways related. Any company that has external investors is bound to go through this cycle of - building a great product - taking in external funding money - growing and then either being acquired or going public (or more commonly shutting down) - then all the head scratching decision making starts It…

This only happens when the users are the product or its a marketplace. Most business models dont suffer from shittification. But VCs love investing in the ones that do.

For an example of literal enshittification see water companies in England. Not discharging raw sewage into rivers and the sea would interfere with dividends to the PE owners.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#166

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Really, isn't this just all corporations? Walmart has long "Enshittification" of small towns.

It is Moloch again, driving to lowest common denominator, what is the worst thing we can do (cheapest), that people will still buy.

Twitter was never a bastion of democratic free speech, and was never going to be, they were always a corporation selling advertising.

For a brief time when Trump was on twitter, a lot of people got riled up and though it was supposed to be a free 'town square' of discourse. But, it's just advertising and eye-balls. I think Musk got caught up in this 'free speech and democracy' hype and thought Twitter was more than it was.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#167

Post by Jgrubb »

SantalBlush wrote: post #163
beepbooptheory wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't understand how one could be convinced these days of the fundamental conceit that even a properly profitable company is necessarily going to provide good things for people downstream, or for society in general. What is the argument for that in general again? Because to me, if your not Twitter, your Wal Mart or Raytheon or BoA. If your not shittifying a platform you are pushing out small businesses from ever…

>What is the argument for that in general again? Free-market types used to have some assumptions about how free markets are expected to work, then they would derive the result that a free market yields a net benefit to society from those assumptions. Now it is glaringly obvious that a free market can cause a net loss to society, but they still need to believe free markets are good. So they ignore the evidence, and in…

Or, blame meddlesome government regulation as the problem, blocking a free market and instead having winners and losers chosen by the state. It’s an effective argument because it’s got some truth to it.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#168

Post by sanderjd »

bsenftner wrote: post #157
DrScientist wrote: post #152

Isn't this just a function of a lot of these business models don't actually work? Ie a lot of these are the equivalent of giving away free ( investor funded ) banana fritters, getting decent uptake and using it to declare that the market in banana fritters is huge, but when you start to charge for them it turns our the market is quite small. Another way the business models don't work is the companies start off assumi…

We have an evil cabal of enshitification enforcers in the form of the entire advertising and marketing industry. They enforce the group think impressed on society, and will not put any energy into anything not following the current zeitgeist of shitty exploitation and only the legally required (reluctant) fair treatment of their consumer and their employees. Our society voices, both journalism and advertising/marketi…

I think you've missed the point of the parent comment. The point is that the entire model only exists in symbiosis with what you call "enshitification enforcers". There is no mass market social media without the "evil cabal... of the advertising and marketing industry". There is no other model that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions of active users posting their own content with mostly no restraint.

The closest to an alternative model that works here is wikipedia. They achieve it by having a different default for user generated content - that it doesn't remain unless it is strictly on topic (you can't just write your random thoughts and shitposts in an article) - and by having a social mission that attracts donations. (They also run incredibly lean, which other mass market sites could definitely learn from.)

Another alternative model being pursued is the federated approach. I like this approach in principle but I don't think it will ever reach the mass market hundreds of millions of active users position of the mainstream social media products. Its solution to the problem is that some subset of power users will self-host and absorb the costs, either via individual altruism or something, or by developing some other model. I think this will end up centralizing, with a small number of nodes hosting most of the usage, and probably eventually falling back to advertising to cover costs. But I dunno, we'll see, maybe this will work.

Another more successful model is to just not be mass market at all, like HN and other various message boards. This reduces costs both for hosting and moderation and can then be justified by some non-financial benefit (like tacit advertisement for YC in the case of HN, or by tight community camaraderie for niche message boards).

Then another model that works is subscriptions. This drops the active user count massively and generally makes it harder to get traction, but I think it works the best of any of these when the stars align. I'd rather be Netflix or the NYT than Twitter or Reddit.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#169

Post by Hamuko »

fsckboy wrote: post #101
wunderland wrote: post #65

A perfect example with the recent changes at Twitter: > Most Twitter users barely tweet and don't care about followers - a "heavy user" tweets on average less than three times a week. So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good. > It is exactl…

> enough to be willing to pay $8 a month you realize $8 a month is nothing to the majority of adults who would be in the "knowledge worker" category? a month? a couple of coffees is $10 and that's a day.

I could definitely afford $8 but why would I give Elon $8 per month in order to tell people that I took a shit that was thiiiis big? The blue checkmark has questionable benefits at best, and the increased character limit for paychecks is ruining the essence of the service.

Re: Cory Doctorow: Platform Capitalism and the Curse of “Enshittification” [audio]

#170

Post by sophacles »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #77
amatecha wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The perceived significance of the reward is irrelevant and doesn't affect whether its degradation is "enshittification" or not. It's not excluded from that categorization because it's considered a "trivial" feature. In fact, I'd argue it's specifically a good example of enshittification because it's one of the very few things that's actually just "a nice thing" the developers added, that was previously a nice friendl…

> The perceived significance of the reward is irrelevant Completely false. A vanity badge that's based on some effort, has a value equal to the effort required. Unlike increasing requirements for core functionality where you have increased effort for the same reward, increasing requirements for an effort-based vanity item increases its value in exact proportion to the effort.

> A vanity badge that's based on some effort, has a value equal to the effort required.

Completely false

Effort has no direct relationship to value in anything. See job wages for a few billion examples. There are high paying jobs that require little cumulative effort and little on-going effort. There are low paying jobs that require high cumulative effort and high on-going effort.

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