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

Post by zeroonetwothree » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 1:04 PM UTC

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…

Post by zeroonetwothree » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 1:06 PM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #102

Enshittification is a (very good) name for when you start off with naturally non-scarce information resource, and later impose artificial scarcity on it in order to make the moneys. It's like building a theme park, and only later adding walls and a turnstyle that checks for tickets. Of course people are going to hate you for doing that.

Post by zeroonetwothree » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 1:11 PM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #63

yarg wrote: post #51

The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse incentives. This seems to be universally true, and when it becomes apparent that advertising doesn't work and isn't profitable, dark patterns are the best that you can hope for. Short of a company having the internal need for a generally useful distributed communications platform, as well as a willingness to release it relatively freely, I struggle to see how t…

> The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse incentives. Only because, despite their immense importance, those platforms are essentially unregulated. Imagine water suppliers were unregulated. There would also be "perverse incentives", such as doctors paying them to add poison to the water so they get more patients and can make more money. But nothing like that ever happens, because there are rules such…

Post by sanderjd » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 1:13 PM UTC

indigochill wrote: post #182

sanderjd wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 restrain…

I expect that if federated social media takes off, nobody (among the mass market) will know that it's federated, just like email. It'll just be, like you say, a couple of big sites that happen to enable people to communicate with people on other sites (and also a handful of wizards who self-host). I think the killer feature of federation in general (particularly in the context of social media) is that it decouples us…

Post by sanderjd » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 1:15 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #175

sanderjd wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 restrain…

"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 government can. These companies could be nationalized, or the government could make their own competing sites if they were interested in doing so. But they're just not. It takes more than just the means. It takes a will to do it.