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

>Most people are just trying to survive with the options they're offered.

I disagree with this. While this group certainly exists, there's a far larger segment of people that have a variable cost-return analysis eschewing towards rock bottom that inevitably lends itself to buying shittier products.

In other words, a lot of people are cheapskates.

You can make a stellar game app but even charging one flat $5 fee will absolutely tank your downloads because people would rather play hundreds of ad-ridden shitty lootbox gambling games for free. And what's worse, they'll even try to pirate your game for the fuck of it too.

It plagues food shelves with increasingly worse results. People don't give a shit about cage free, roaming organically grass fed whatever eggs. Sure, some do, but not most. Oh, Carton B costs 20 cents less than Carton A? Bingo. I just saved 20 cents. The eggs taste practically the same (they don't). But it gets them 90% there, and that's a compromise most people are fine with because they saved money. This trickles up to the producers, who obviously emphasize Carton A production now. Let it go on for long enough, with a little bit of poor government oversight, and you can even sell Carton A eggs as Carton B, and reap more from the suckers who think they're getting a better product. It's greed all the way around, and people fuck themselves constantly because of it. It's why we have laws and building codes and health and safety regulations. Society functions on setting the minimum bar for everything, because otherwise we devolve into chaos. And people constantly love to fucking limbo.

(I'll say it again). I like the term "enshittification" - it implies a deliberate intention that is missing from degradation. And regression merely implies reversion towards a previous state.

Enshittification is a deliberate process: provide a (typically cheap/free) service, (dominate the field,) lock users into it, and exploit to the maximum possible in the short term, ultimately destroying the service.

> Can we really say the customers are the greedy ones?

The amount of piracy that occurs and the number of bad things that happen because consumers buy purely based on price without doing basic research shows that yes, the customers are greedy.

People tweeting are not usually paid to post. Discussing the quality of posts as if entertaining people with unpaid labor is a need is the fatal flaw of social media sites. They keep pushing the narrative that posters should work for attention and struggle when winning in the current mold is albeit impossible without lots of funding or the specific attributes that make people overlook marginal skill and talents.

The truth of the matter is these platforms always invent wacky schemes to sedate people into a false narrative that they can go viral, or even that they can be recognized for their talent or wisdom, but undercover the platform does nothing to promote individuals, and often does a lot to DEMOTE individual posters on them.

If one truly understands how things work, these platforms often have millions of people as a potential audience for content. They only show posts to an ever shrinking fraction of 1 percent of that multi-million user audience initially (in between all the paid ads), often they barely do that and give users less than 300 views by an audience they know is not a good demographic fit for their post (e.g showing a post about penguin migration to a rapper promoting his music in LA, rather than showing the content to a known animal scientist who would be much more likely to click on "like") .

As a result of frustration with low views and limited validation/affirmation of their work and time, many users pay for ad boosting, which still now usually does not work in their favor, because the audience is never properly aligned with the content for viewing there again. Even an audience of 20k people on a platform of millions is measley. The platform has no interest in making users more popular, because they will log in less, spend less on ads, and possibly relocate their activities to another platform if they grew in popularity.

If you take an honest look at the type of content that trends, it's often not funny, not creative, not the best, but now it's there because it had healthy funding for ads behind it, to get it to the right audience that liked it (if it's not boosted by nefarious -bots= etc...).

The truth is, that if each content poster was exposed/promoted to a much wider audience, they'd find their niche, SIMILAR to how original Twitter was, this is why no one is getting followers any more,because the audiences who can view posts have become too small out of shear manipulation for ad profit. It's not about post quality, that's simply a lie that coddles wealthy and celebrity posters and maintains the status quo of limiting upward mobility on social media sites.

Paying for visibility on a social media service is far too manipulative, there should be a simple flat fee for access in my opinion because paying for visibility creates an inherent inequality. Deceptively promoting a service as free with tiers also deceives people into signing up for a service that is deceptively handicapped/neutered until they figure out they need to pay monthly for only slightly a less handicapped tier (still far below wealthy individuals and celebrities on each platform).

It's a self defeating cycle that only social platforms profit from. It would be better if content creators truly recognized that and saw through the others with tons of cash and the sponsored (undercover social media company employees) all faking their success to make these casino companies look legit.

> a lot of these business models don't actually work

It depends on how you define "work". They may not work in the way that the users were led to believe, but often enough someone got rich, and in that sense they do work.