> 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 $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good.
> It is exactly that content that Twitter's new model relies on promoting - and those newly-minted blue ticks are quickly learning that there is no magic behind the checkmarks. New followers are not magically heading their way. The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good.
> That means lots of blue ticks stop paying - but everyone else is forced to read the low-quality content that the remaining blue ticks produce. This is what is powering the enshittification of Twitter.
(From: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitt...)
It's also kind of a Pandora's box; even if they removed the attention boost, the taint is already there, and people will be suspicious of bluetick replies forever.
Pay your fee, you get not only an attention boost, but the ability to un-boost blues. If the net result is 0, the Nash Equilibrium is that everybody pays.
Look how many people "#BlockTheBlue" on twitter right now. Just charge them to make it easy. The real value in someone who's willing to pay to be seen isn't in their 8$ subscription, it's in the 100 other people they incentivize to pay you to shut them up.
But I think you have to be quite naive to believe that a New Blue Tick™ will game that.
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.
$8 a month is pretty much the monthly cost of a cellphone plan across Europe. One could also get Spotify, or Netflix, at the same price point.
Comparatively speaking, paying $8 to have unlimited access to generally low quality content, at the same price point where other platforms offer actual good content, is a waste.
Or I can pay Elon for delivering tweets that he got some rando to write for free. The latest content is a right - wing conspiracy that nuclear weapons do not exist, and thay video footage of nuclear ezplosions is staged.
I used to pay for a Twitter client, I now pay for a Mastodon client, I contribute to the upkeep of my local friendly Mastodon instance. In all it's in the ballpark of 8EUR/month. There's no world where I would _pay for attention on Twitter_, though.
I am somewhat surprised they didn't just charge for client API access/other bits and pieces (that is, charge the user, not the person who makes the client), and nuke the pay-for-attention/pay-for-flair feature before launch as an obviously terrible idea. I think more people would pay for that. Not many people, but more people, and it would be far less corrosive on the user experience as a whole.
That the "heavy user" threshold is 3 posts a week is surprising to me, and seems like a bad threshold I'm sure that actual Twitter data is likely more accurate and shows different numbers, but it's not really about the usage I guess, it's about the promise of more followers and engagement. But demonstrably this is not the case, and many persons who did buy the Blue Check complained they didn't see the increase in activity it was advertised that the Blue Check would give. The signal behind what a Blue Check means has been quite noisy for a very long time, even before Musk's take over, and the decisions post-Musk on what a Blue Check really means/does is very confusing and unclear.
Why would I pay $8 a month to maybe get some followers by being promoted when I could just spend a few hundred USD once and just buy followers from some follower farm, which is arguably a better signal of "hey, this person is worth following?" as opposed to the Blue Check? It doesn't matter if it's just a "couple of coffees", why pay for something that arguably provides 0 benefit for me?
Twitter should not have tried to sell identify validation as a major marketable service; they already try to validate your identity even without it, and it doesn't seem to benefit anyone, not even Twitter.
Game companies figured out how to monetize useless things with cosmetics and such, and if Twitter wanted to monetize heavily, they should have just done that. Fancier reactions, more edits and stupid stuff for the changeable usernames, etc. The idea that they can somehow sell the user attention is a folly; yes, they gate and can control the feeds, but the users always have the option of just not following or even just not looking. It's a resource Twitter _never_ really had control over; they might as well have been selling ocean wranglers, offering that someone will beat the tide with whips for you if the ocean pisses you off for some reason; it's about the same effectualness, and equally useless service.
Please cut that. Everyone wants 'a couple of coffees' and it adds up even for SV techbros.
(Long ago I suggested that Twitter should have allowed people to contribute towards premium accounts for other people, a bit like Reddit Gold. Since a large part of the value derives not from your own posting but other people's.)
This is a very US-centric take and almost insulting for people living in certain other areas of the world. In my country (central Europe, as is easy to guess), an experienced teacher (definitely a "knowledge worker" in my book) may earn about $10k per year. Not sure how much a beginner one gets, but surely less. $8 per month is a lot then.
And the value of a blue check is less than that.
Wow.
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.
Heavy users I follow tweet more than 3 times a day.
> The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good.
No, it was a biased algo that's still being removed (as recently as 2-3 weeks ago they discovered another throttle which was impacting many users, including Elon).
The main problem is that all centralized platforms have to deal with government-mandated censorship in large markets such as the EU, which kills content and engagement and also negatively impacts paying users (because despite the payment, their content still gets shadow-banned). That's not Twitter's fault, but they're relatively more impacted than social networks that focus on art and have no political content.
> relatively more impacted than social networks that focus on art and have no political content
Funnily enough a lot of artists also want uncensored platforms so they can post NSFW art, but this is completely orthogonal to the political questions.
Most art is political, you probably just can't take a hint.
1. The analysis is wrong
2. The analysis is correct, but it is the algorithms fault.
3. The analysis is correct, but actually its really state censorship that is culprit here!
Twitter censors nudity and pornography, and import American neo-puritanism to the rest of the world. No-one in EU mandates this.
But american brain is incapable of putting two and two together, they have it wired into their brain that opression cannot be private, only government.
If modern right-wingers existed in 1500, they would be defending the rirht of a feudal lord to sleep with your wife because he isnt a government and your signed up for it when you were born as a peasant.
I happen to agree with your actual take: biased unfair algos are the result of platforms being coerced (internally and/or externally) to ultimately serve some socio-political agenda, and thus their content enshittifies. No blue checkmarks needed.
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 assuming no costs around policing - like a shop with no security whatsoever. Works fine for a while, but as it grows and people realise it's got no security they start to get targeted, and costs go up.
Oh, wait, it's not just that. It's also greed. Greedy customers wanting things without paying what they're worth, greedy entrepreneurs not wanting to grow a business steady, healthy and organically, greedy investors, greedy software engineers, etc, etc.
What expectation of knowledge make the average person taking a deal, greedy? And how many people taking that deal meet that expectation of knowledge?
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.
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.
Which today is primarily Google, Amazon, Meta, and yes, even Apple (0)
(0) https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-privacy-analytics-class-act...
It's head scratching to users and outside observers, but the incentives are such that there is pressure to grow on a quarterly basis, get those charts looking good and individuals in the management chain are doing what they can to optimize their career growth leading to short term decision making at the cost of users and customers.
The big picture thinking and long term decision making are incredibly hard. Very few companies are able to do this over the long term. Micosoft and apple are doing great currently and it will be interesting to see how stripe and openai navigate this process.
My current opinion is that only small founder owned companies or foss organizations can avoid this trap over the long term and it involves not trying to squeeze out every last bit of value. Both of these require a certain level of financial security + there's the opportunity cost vs just going the vc route.
VC funding is incredibly valuable and it opens up a lot of possibilities that small orgs can never hope for. I guess what I'm saying is: expect enshittification and enjoy the ride while it lasts and then jump ship when trouble starts. Jumping ship becomes incredibly hard with network effects, so that's the challenge we are seeing with social media companies now. Also once companies become too big to fail, it's a drag on society.
Personally I would still go the VC route since I don't have a few million lying around and tell myself this is just the cycle of life (for corporates) to avoid existential questions and going down the rabbit hole of questioning everything around me. Sorry about the disconnected thoughts.
I decided to buy the next model up from the same company, not knowing in the mean time it had been bought by a PE company and the quality had gone to shit. The mower is bigger, but the engine is smaller and they are notorious for blowing a head gasket any time the mowing blades stall out.
I was thinking of starting a web register of all PE PortCos (private equity portfolio companies) so people would know to treat the products with caution as the main way of reducing costs seems to be a) sacking people and b) cutting corners on product quality.
You buy a company with a good reputation, cut quality drastically, and profit for the decade or so it takes until everyone realizes the brand sucks now.
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 to user while charging very little. Those businesses obviously outcompete any business which do not recieve such investment.
However, as time goes on, those investments must eventually earn a return. Switching from a model which loses money every year to one which must profit every year is invariably going to affect the quality of the product. Especially in an environment where directly charging customers for your service would be a death sentence.
In the absense of such cheap credit, however, a truly competitive environment could potentially emerge, where businesses must be sustanably profitable from the ground up. Esentially this would mean the last 15 or so years has been wasted time in pursuit of this goal, as false monetary signals were steering us in completely the wrong direction.
Some of todays tech companies may survive the transition, but I believe that most will eventually be replaced by completely new ones. Unless we go back to a policy of lowering interest rates to near (or even below) 0%.
- huge amount of very cheap money
- widespread availability of highly educated technologists
- knowledge of the climate model
.. and instead "collectively" ended up funding giveaway services to users and inflating the SF housing market rather than doing the climate Manhattan project.
(High interest rates are bad for renewables, because buying a solar panel is effectively buying 20-30 years of electricity upfront, and therefore hugely dependent on cost of capital and discount rates)
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 every town, price gouging government contracts for missiles, fooling elderly people with complicated financial instruments.
I just can't really put together any argument at all, if am being honest, to justify the idea that companies with a self interest in profit will reliably help people or the world. It just does not at all feel rational, its like everyone in the world is dreaming.
I think there's a cultural problem. Companies are made of people not papers. It's people that are pushing for profits no matter what. And as lots of money with no value get made, the value of the money drops, so you need more of it. So people start thinking in terms like "I have a family to raise so fuck principles", "If I don't do it someone else will" and so on.
I'm not talking about major figures, people always focus on those. I'm talking about regular people who have no problem working for an online casino for example when they know a significant portion of their customers are underage.
So we are adapting, but in a downward spiral. That's how I see it.
> consumers will become warier of lock-in
Also, I got this feeling bigger shareholders might think they are smart and part of the scam and that they will jump ship (sell the stock) before smaller shareholders notice.
I guess e.g. Ben and Jerries would be all vanilla ice cream at this point of they were run in this way. You could always decrease the amount of nuts and fillings with 1% more without anyone noticing ...
Absolutely. Decades of “you can’t beat the market” propaganda has created a large class of “investors” whose only strategy is buy all of the stocks and hope for the best.
Frustratingly, they almost have a legal fiduciary duty to behave this way as currently structured, as their only mandate is to increase value for shareholders. Negative externalities on users, employees, or society at large are not relevant to decision making at all.
The conclusion I found is that the only ethical solution would be to create a cooperative public benefit corporation. With that structure, the company has a mandate to do right by their customers, their employees, and society as a whole in measurable ways.
https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/
I welcome any tactful feedback. Also I have no idea how to initiate such an idea.
It is a constant struggle to convince people that your higher quality product/service is worth the extra cost, and obviously, many times it is not.
But the formula for operating a successful, long term business is not as simple as “output the best quality product or service you can, and you will be rewarded”. It is more like “output the best quality product or service you can relative to prices of competing sellers, and at prices your clientele can afford”.
Which may or may not include sellers that have access to much cheaper money (VC, bigger companies with other revenue streams, etc), or sellers operating in different jurisdictions with lower costs.
It happens when nobody wants to be the first to show flagging growth and investor expectations have not reset yet after a period of growth.
It’s just easier in tech to manufacture growth metrics you cant get checked on
(don't forget the Wilderness Years, Apple came close to death)
"Enshittification" - Wiktionary : https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
Cory Doctorow - Enshittification : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#Enshittification
I downloaded the podcast from here (mp3) : https://mediacore-live-production.akamaized.net/audio/01/jo/...
Without timestamps: https://pastebin.com/F1NVMeQq
Duolingo formerly had conversational language lessons, which were 100% audio (not even able to see text on screen). These were phenomenal for actually learning to speak <language>, compared to the generated garbage in the lessons.
Duolingo formerly had lessons that explain new concepts, like a particular verb tense. It doesn't seem to have any of them once changing over the to completely linear lesson tree.
I believe that Duolingo has fallen into a logical trap. They can easily track app engagement. It is known that regular practice is the key to learning a language, but they incorrectly forget the quality of the interactions. I've got my Duolingo 800 day streak still kicking, but I've learned almost nothing with the changes over the last year or so. I'm not terribly sure why I even use the app anymore, as there are plenty of anki decks with the same quality content. (The only thing I'd lose is the speech recognition, but that's so laughably bad that it reinforces incorrect pronunciation.)
Why have vanity badges, or other kinds of gamification, to begin with? Because it gives users an added incentive, through an added reward, a goal, which helps them get through something that could otherwise be too tedious or un-fun for them to endure.
And if everybody agrees that the added goal aligns with the user's actual goal, that's a great strategy.
But you get what you reward, because people like to get rewards. The dopamine rush of knowing you'll reach the goal.
If the rewards stop helping users towards their real goals, and you've trained them to work towards your goals already, you'll get people doing daily tasks to get daily rewards that they shouldn't really care about. But they do. Because you made them care.
And you might have replaced their intrinsic motivation, wanting to learn a language, with an extrinsic goal, wanting to get a reward. And if they then stop caring about the extrinsic goal, they just might stop entirely.
Messing with people's motivations is dangerous, and "driving engagement" is the absolutely most useless reason to do so.
If you use the app regularly (as you "should" if you're learning a language), you will absolutely certainly get the badge. Well, that is, until recently, because some of the quests can be difficult to accomplish. No longer is it just a nice consistent monthly thumbs-up in the form of a fun little badge, it's now a source of uncertainty and perhaps even a source of anxiety for people who are driven by "collecting" (e.g. "achievement hunters"). Sure sounds like enshittification to me, regardless of how big a deal it is.
Rule 34 needs a twin:
Anything can be useful.
Therefore, anything can be enshittified. And will be.
Period dot period. QED. I have spoken.
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 this gets resolved.
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 companies must abide by. Therefore, they simply sell water for money, and that's it. There are no incentives to extract more profits through other means, because anything else is prohibited.
I fail to see why analogous regulation wouldn't work for online communication platforms.
Water being regulated is probably the biggest cause of shortages in the US West. Prices are set too low (especially for certain buyers) and it causes overconsumption. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons that public management has failed to resolve.
As far as doctors bribing water suppliers to get more customers, the law is seldom enough to discourage bad behaviour when you're expecting not to get caught or the fines are too low for criminality to be profitable.
This is why anything recommended by a for-profit dentist is the opposite of what you should probably buy.
The need to have profit is the goal of any business.
The problem isn't that. The need for profit has been entirely replaced with the need for continuous unimpeded growth. Which is decidedly not the same thing, but no one cares anymore, and profit doesn't even come into equation anymore.
This isn't true. A non-profit is still a business. Charities are businesses. Cooperatives can make profit. Also (almost) no-one thinks small businesses making modest profit and riding the ups and downs alongside others in a locale is a problem.
The problems arise in companies that choose to only or mainly focus on profit. Most capital funds don't make anything themselves other than money, which they extract from businesses that do make things. You can claim that they're market-correcting forces that allow money to easily move between different areas of human interest... but ultimately their product is their own enrichment. The speed and convenience they provide might be an illusion created by their apparent success. It might be better that our markets and locales develop more slowly; if more smaller scale investors made a wider range of decisions, rather than a handful of large ones making most of them.
A bit like trying to extract energy out of vacuum, except, that due to our believe system of economics, it can actually work for them.
But I disagree that the continuous growth model is the cause, although I certainly believe that it frequently adds fuel to the fire (growing a company when it's making a loss on a per customer basis frequently leads to accelerating death spirals as well as all manner of desperate measures).
It's fine to seek profit; it's seeking triple digit millions of revenue that drives the problem.
Is it possible this is simply a knock-on effect of too-low interest rates for so long? Too cheap VC money?
So going for some unhealthy revenue target is the path of least resistance, since the failure still is in the future.
* autotesting music for 'hit worthy' == music blandifies to the bangers and you never get interesting voices any more. but .. it works (for profit)
* kindle genres like 'in the style of' and the tendency to more and more but worse and worse in fiction because.. it works (for profit)
* politics descending to the lowest grab, not the highest goal.
Ted Gioia the music critic has made a lot of good observations on these issues. In particular, artists, intellectuals and politicians of old used to lead, persuade, and pull their audience along with them. Today, everyone simply panders.
From the Wikipedia page about the practice [1]:
> he reduced his costs and increased his profits at the expense of poorer performance [...] so the Muntz TVs were adequate for a very large fraction of his customers. And for those [...] where the Muntz TVs did not work, those could be returned at the customer's additional effort and expense, and not Muntz's. He focused less resources in the product [...] and focused more resources on advertising and sales promotions.
While reading this I thought "This guy is a used car salesman if I've ever seen one", and he was! haha
There was a book with that name, years back. Saw a relative reading it and browsed it briefly myself. Probably are more books by now.
> Facebook was going to be the social media service that never spied on you back in 2006. And once people were locked in, it, you know, did the Darth Vader MBA thing.
I mean imagine that traveling is all by jet, that everyone you meet is at least a millionaire, that work can be done everywhere on the planet.
The internet was the mysterious wild west, Now its just a boring corporate meeting room.
Just posted today, private blogs of HN users: https://dm.hn/
A weird search engine which skips a lot of corporate crap: https://search.marginalia.nu/
Or skip the first million search results: https://millionshort.com/
Then there's neocities, weird subreddits, 4chan, niche forums still running on phpBB discussing all kinds of stuff.
You seem to expect that niche communities should've scaled with the rest of the internet. Like, back then, there were a few million people online. Now it's billions, but the few millions still online in their niches aren't interesting enough for you. Why?
I hate to be the bringer of bad news bud, but their isnt as many people online as you think there are.
Most people are afraid to say anything interesting or different from the popular things/status quo, because social media conditions people to not rock the boat too much because they'll get downvoted/banned. Niche or interesting things just die.
The remainder of places have become incredibly toxic due to the remaining people's frustrations with everything as well.
What is it that you want? Intelligent discussion, but not too strange, but interesting, not too toxic, but you wanna say what you think and you feel like you can't say what you think, because then "the others" come with their toxic bullshit?!
In the first, cash is burnt/used to give free goodies and provide good quality services. Rents are a byproduct and not a goal during this phase of the operation, the goal here is to build goodwill and market share through measures that the competition can't match. All in all, it is a good experience to use the service during this stage.
The second stage of the operation is all about rent-seeking. Portions get smaller, ads are deployed in full force, all of the bridges in and out are lifted so value can stay inside the ecosystem. Prices in general go up and it is time to cash out all of that goodwill and market share for money. Owners and founders generally sell during or before this stage, as the business will lose consumer confidence and competitors will gnaw at its heels until it becomes just another bad app/store in a very saturated market.
I remember reading a multiwork series on The Office (US) and it used terms like 'psychopaths' and 'sucker' to describe how organizations grow and die when the 'psychopaths' at the top decide to cash out, I'd point to their exit as the turning point in my text.
I can't back up what I feel with books or research, just what I've seen by looking at the progression of big businesses in my country. Apps, burger boutiques, consulting firms, even the furniture builder guy that lives around the block, all of them went through this cycle.
Your calculation is roughly correct but a p/e of 10 is kinda low so probably you can halve the numbers at least.
The Essay you were referring to is the brilliant "The Gervais Principle"
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Reforge talks about your cycle - I can't find the exact artcile but you can see it with marketplaces a lot - i.e. Facebook creates APIs for events, 3rd parties build platforms on these APIs, Facebook kills the API access. This is the closest article I could find related to "tactics" https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-loops
It looks like an interesting read about what this decision looks like from the other side.
Thank you for introducing me to reforge, I know what I'll be doing with tomorrow's downtime now.
Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate.
Managers need to feel powerful, hire more managers.
Managers need to meet their performance targets or just want to carve their own little Mt Rushmore face in the product, wacky user hostile decisions ensue.
Family owned businesses, employee owned businesses, privately owned businesses etc all manage to better avoid this problem because they don't have to listen to outside voices telling them grow or die.
It's not enough to be profitable and successful, but also you need to siphon as much value out of consumers as you can so you can pass along the money to these vultures. Then once the company has picked everything dry, they write it off as a failure and move on.
No point to this comment, other than that I find it interesting how these things spread.
I don't like the word enshittification. People glom onto it because they like shaking sticks more than solving problems, and Corey Doctorow is excellent at exploiting that desire. It's annoying how he enables that sense of defeatism when he's obviously aware of resilient and game-changing alternative software (like FOSS) that has revolutionized the world in his lifetime. Putting pearls before swine makes for nice fiction, but it's a bad tool for explaining real life phenomena like this.
"Enshittification" is a very fun and usable thesis. It also obfuscates the problem and fetishizes it's own victimhood instead of enabling users to resist lock-in.
For example, he's the reason I'm supporting the devs of pidgin despite not even directly using that software myself, because he wrote a thread on how nobody donates to it even though it apparently is important enough for bad actors to post bounties for sharing zero day bugs that lets them break into it.
More importantly, the term "enshittification" does the exact opposite of "obfuscating the problem". It comes with a very concrete description of a pattern of how things are made worse that most people have felt but had no word for until now. It can also seen to be played out over and over again. It even has predictive powers.
Which means people can now describe a problem without having to write five paragraphs explaining the issue. Or needing the skill to write it in the first place. That's what words are for. That's what sharing ideas is for. Are you going to blame people for relying on a doctor's diagnosis instead of studying medicine themselves too?
And by finally being able to quickly identify an issue, people can start taking active steps against it. Which is the exact opposite of what you are claiming.
But hey, how dare people speak up about issues that affect them them without immediately knowing how to solve/having the means to solve a large systemic problem that other people with more power and money inflict upon them, I guess.
(I always found that a bit ironic about Doctorow. He identifies problems with social media but uses its preferred form of virality to spread his own message.)
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.
1. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/co...
The largest input in a flight is fuel - and that's 3x more expensive today, adjusted for inflation.
Also, the taxes on flights are much higher today.
It's not a surprise you could offer a much better product for 15% more money, significantly less taxes, and ~45% of your cost being 3x cheaper.
Anyway first class is still pretty comfortable IMO. And airports are much nicer than before.
None of this should come as a surprise though and we can merely see it as one mode of capitalism working as intended. The problem wouldn't be nearly as bad if the companies were family owned rather than by venture capitalists and investors.
Classic literature: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095101
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.
The word "enshittification" seems to be a Maxwell's Daemon designed to concentrate all the stray negative thoughts into (this) one huge snipe session.
(Anyways, as annoyed as I am by plenty of other commenters here, there's also plenty of people who contribute here who don't fit your stereotype.)