Enshittification describes a pattern of platform decay. It proposes a reason for ubiquitous platform decay and simultaneous platform decay where all the platforms we rely on are going bad. And it proposes a remedy, a way out of it. And so the pattern of platform decay that kind of the pathology, the symptomology, is that you have companies that are good to their end users and they find a way to lock the end users in. And then once those end users find it hard to leave, they make things worse for those end users in order to make things better for business customers. And they lure in those business customers, they lock them in, too.
The Ensh*ttification of Everything with Cory Doctorow – YouTube
The reason for enshittification’s popularity is that it embodies a theory that explains the accelerating decay of the things that matter to us, explaining why this is happening and what we should do about it.
Because enshittification isn’t just a way to say “Something got worse.”1 It’s an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once.
The reason for enshittification’s popularity is that it embodies a theory that explains the accelerating decay of the things that matter to us, explaining why this is happening and what we should do about it.
Because enshittification isn’t just a way to say “Something got worse.”1 It’s an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once.
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, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
This is why – as Cat Valente wrote in her magesterial pre-Christmas essay – platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”:
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start
This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you’d have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can’t agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.
Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn’t follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users’ throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines and blogs.
Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden.
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I will never forgive them for what they did to the computer.
ED ZITRON
In Bezos’s original plan, the company called “Amazon” was called “Relentless,” due to its ambition to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” Today, Amazon is an enshittified endless scroll of paid results, where winning depends on ad budgets, not quality.
Pluralistic: How monopoly enshittified Amazon/28 Nov 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Amazon charges its sellers billions of dollars a year through a gladiatorial combat where they compete to outspend each other to see who’ll get to the top of the search results. May the most margin-immolating, deep-pocketed spender win!
Why would sellers be willing to light billions of dollars on fire to get to the top of the Amazon search results?
Prime.
Pluralistic: How monopoly enshittified Amazon/28 Nov 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
But everyone has to sell on Amazon, and Amazon takes their 45% cut, which means that all these sellers have to raise prices. And, thanks to MFN, the sellers then have to charge the same price at Walmart, Target, and your local mom-and-pop shop.
Amazon’s monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.
Pluralistic: How monopoly enshittified Amazon/28 Nov 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
This brings me back to the enshittification of Amazon search, AKA late-stage (platform) capitalism. Amazon’s dominance means that many products are now solelyavailable on the platform. With the collapse of both physical and online retail, Prime isn’t so much a choice as a necessity.
Amazon has produced a planned economy run as capriciously as a Soviet smelting plant, but Party Secretary Bezos doesn’t even pretend to be a servant of the people. From his lordly seat aboard his penis-rocket, Bezos decides which products live and which ones die.
Pluralistic: How monopoly enshittified Amazon/28 Nov 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if Amazon’s enshittification is because Bezos was a cynic or because he sold out. Once Amazon could make more money by screwing its customers, that screw-job became a fait accompli.
Pluralistic: How monopoly enshittified Amazon/28 Nov 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.
Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown “panic” over the rise of “AI” chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool – that is, a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Mindless megamergers have made many streaming services shittier, more expensive, and harder to use (Max is the poster child for this phenomenon). In a bid to please Wall Street, streaming giants have shifted away from trying to make users happy, and toward obnoxious nickel-and-diming efforts, whether it’s Netflix’s password sharing crackdown or Amazon’s decision to charge users paying $140 a year even more money every month just to avoid ads that didn’t exist previously.
As every corporation does eventually, they’ve shifted from innovative, consumer-friendly efforts to lure in new users, to obnoxious turf protection efforts focused on steadily exploiting existing users.
The underlying problem, as usual, is Wall Street’s unyielding, often myopic desire for improved quarterly returns at any cost. It’s not enough to provide a high quality, profitable service that people like. The need for improved quarterly returns ultimately results in companies cannibalizing their own products and brands in order to appease this need for relentless growth. Even if it harms longer term company health.
The end result is higher prices, layoffs, shittier product quality, worse customer service, weird restrictions, and no limit of new annoyances. It also contributes to an unyielding desire among executives for mindless consolidation in a bid to hack this broken system, nab some tax breaks, and create the illusion of meaningful “synergistic” growth and progress (again, see Max).
Cory Doctorow’s recently popularized term for this age-old phenomenon is “enshittification,” and it’s everywhere you look.
It’s possible to disrupt this downward cycle but it involves doing all the sorts of things large corporations don’t want to do, like reducing insane executive compensation, accepting antitrust reform, prioritizing customer service, paying creatives, not wasting your money on dumb shit like Netflix-themed restaurants, and (gasp) taking a small financial hit in order to retain users and maintain product quality.
Piracy Is Surging Again Because Streaming Execs Ignored The Lessons Of The Past | Techdirt
Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other:
https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-d6046dca366f
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
