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cory doctorow has codified this precisely in his theory of "enshittification": 8<------------------------------ Here is how platforms die: first, they are goo
by zem 4y ago
cory doctorow has codified this precisely in his theory of "enshittification":
8<------------------------------
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, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
- flanbiscuit 4y agoAre there examples of sites/platforms that are doing it "right"? (however you interpret 'right' to be, I guess). Ones that have been around for a while and haven't enshittified?
- zem 4y agohm, maybe the crowdfunding platforms like kickstarter and indiegogo? as far as I know those haven't started down the curve yet. but I would guess it's inevitable once you take vc money and are beholden to your investors to squeeze out every drop of revenue you can :( it would require a really strong mission statement baked into the company to say "we are here to provide value to our users and everything else has to come second to that". if nothing else you eventually get acquired, e.g. tumblr, and everything goes to hell then.
- newaccount74 4y agoKickstarter and Indiegogo have quite a few charlatans selling a tech version of snake oil, and they don't care because they get 10% (or whatever their fees are).
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y agoI am not sure how much vetting you want the platform to do? If someone says they can synthesize gasoline from air for $.02/liter, should Kickstarter shut it down? Send a guy to investigate? Where does the arbitrary this-is-probably-wrong line land?
- delecti 4y agoWell that example wouldn't be allowed on Kickstarter, because they require a prototype to exist for electronics campaigns. I think that's a fairly reasonable arbitrarily chosen line.
- HWR_14 4y agoI don't think Kickstarter "doesn't care", they just don't care enough to proactively find out. Indiegogo will keep outright scams up. Kickstarter says "eh, someone will flag it if it is a scam"
- robotnikman 4y agoNot sure if it counts, but Steam maybe?
- ALittleLight 4y agoHacker News
- bartvk 4y agoSlashdot?
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agolol
- doctor_eval 4y agoFreshmeat?
- bartvk 4y agoI wasn't joking, actually. I still visit Slashdot, though not as often. Ownership has changed over the years, but in principle, the site its features haven't changed.
- geerlingguy 4y agoCraigslist
- heleninboodler 4y agoBandcamp, although many are holding their breath since the Epic takeover.
- walterbell 4y agohttps://NeoCities.org https://NeoCities.org, free static hosting, $5/mo for higher storage/traffic limits. https://Groups.io https://Groups.io (rebooted Yahoo Groups).
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agohttp://Wordpress.com http://Wordpress.com (not.org)
- slymerson 4y agodo all platforms go through this? if so, it's very sad.
- sircastor 4y agoIt's a sort-of inevitable thing when your focus becomes earnings and growth rather than whatever your actual business is. Facebook's business was providing a common platform for people that know each other to share publicly. Twitter's business was a billboard to share what they're doing. Google's business was to provide a way to find things on the web. Unfortunately, none of those things is particularly easy to charge money for. So you take Venture Capital to fund your development, and then you try to find a way to pay that VC through other means - Advertising mostly, it turns out. Then you have to keep pushing that because your investors want returns, and it funds the party.
- pixodaros 4y agoNone of those things was Facebook or Twitter's business, because none was how they make money. Facebook and Twitter are for-proffit businesses, and for almost all of their history the money has come from selling advertising and surveillance (its pretty clear that birdsite guy never understood that twitter users are his products and advertisers are his customers). There are not many alternatives if you want to provide a centralized global service for tens of millions of users. So my web presence focuses on things hosted by small companies or run by community members, not on giant 'free' corporate services.
- doctor_eval 4y agoWhat you’re saying is true in terms of where the money comes from, but it doesn’t explain why customers are being screwed. The thing is, all of these companies make money by arbitraging value consumed by the end users versus value produced by advertisers. It’s a two sided market, except that consumers pay in attention rather than currency. It’s catchy - and probably true - to say that if you aren’t paying, “then you are the product”. But these companies still need a quality product or, eventually, the advertising and data collection is not valuable to those with money. Which is what we seem to be seeing with Twitter. Abusing end users is a very short sighted strategy, even if they’re not paying.
- dannyr 4y agoLove that post. Sadly, every major tech platform is going thru "enshittification".
- bee_rider 4y agoThe enshittification cycle has always been here, but progress continues. It just feels like things are getting worse as the programs we grew up on enter the shit-zone part of their lifecycle.
- xdfgh1112 4y agoWikipedia seems like a weird exception to this rule.
- zem 4y agowikipedia isn't a "platform" in that sense of the term, they don't make money by being a middleman between producers, consumers and advertisers.
- realworldperson 4y ago[dead]
- bee_rider 4y agoThey are super successful at gathering donations, right? I think their goal is fundamentally well-scoped to the sort budget they can hope to get just from donations. I mean most of the value there is in text written by volunteers, which must not be so expensive to host (compared to, say, an image hosting site for example).
- chubot 4y agoYes, definitely agree, and "enshittification" is a good word for something I've observed for ~25 years. Very similar to this phenomenon, in relation to imgur and so forth: https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-online-services.html https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli... I think that all image hosts suffer from the same sad pattern of eventual failure. That pattern is: I wouldn't place the blame squarely on the company however. It's also true that consumers have predictable behavior patterns -- they want free stuff, and they will stick around to get that, and then move to the next thing. On the other hand, we want free stuff because we don't want to sign up for subscriptions, and companies are always making that annoying -- betting on us forgetting to cancel, making it hard to cancel, tacking on hidden fees (banks do a lot of this), etc. I wish that money could just be exchanged for goods and services, as Homer Simpson once noted ...
- zem 4y agothere's also this old ribbonfarm post on "the locust economy", describing that sort of consumer behaviour: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/
- chubot 4y agoGreat analogy! I hadn't seen that. I can definitely see that in Groupon (which seems much less popular now?) Although I would also consider the other side of the "sharing economy" -- IMO sharing like Zipcar makes a lot of economic sense, and I don't have a lot of sympathy for incumbents there (although I guess Zipcar got bought). Likewise with the taxi and hotel industries -- the incumbents deserve some competition / disruption. But yeah consumers are certainly fickle
- xnx 4y agoTerrific and succinct observation. How does competition not prevent this? Does lock-in prevent competition? e.g. Medium's suck-factor will always hover at the level where it's just not quite worth it to use something else if you already have many posts on Medium. New users will still pick Medium because it sucks, but is still popular/accepted.
- PaulHoule 4y agoThe remarkable thing about Medium was that it went downhill so quickly, or, compared to other platforms like Twitter, it started trying to make money early in the process of gathering an audience, which limited it's growth. In my mind it never had a good reputation. Successful blogging has three elements: (1) writing a lot, (2) technically running your blog, and (3) promoting your blog. In principle Medium took (2) and (3) out of your hands so you could focus on (1) but I think Medium attracted a person who was too lazy to blog before and who is interested in working on (1) as little as they are on (2) and (3). In principle you might make some money blogging on Medium but a lot of people blog to promote themselves or their business and the registration wall reduced their reach and actually damaged their personal brand because I think a lot of people felt it was annoying to have to register to read articles on a blogging platform that is just a bit worse than the rest of the web as opposed to just a bit better. (Certainly anyone whose Medium blog posts connected with someone has received an email telling them it's a shame that a good blogger is blogging on Medium)
- Eduard 4y ago> Successful blogging has three elements: (1) writing a lot... How much truth is in this often-repeated statement?
- sircastor 4y agoIn the case of blogging, writing is (typically) one's product. Writing is relatively cheap and depending on the subject is highly commoditized, so you need to write a lot to incentivize audiences to return and to continue to consume, and presumably pay you somehow. This isn't always the case. You might be an otherwise famous individual who will have an audience regardless of your publishing frequency. But I think for most bloggers, you have to have enough material that people will visit, and continue to make more so people will come back. I published between 1 and 3 times a year on my blog/website. But then I'm not doing it for income.
- bee_rider 4y agoThis definitely seems like at least half of it. With blogging platforms, an additional aspect: I don’t really care to read the opinions of people who are mostly interested in blogging about a topic. I want to read from actual practitioners. As soon as a platform becomes well known, the non-practicing bloggers show up and it turns into a crapshoot whether what I’m reading is first or third hand information. And that’s during the early still-OK-ish phase. After a while the natural tendency is that the non-practicing folks will produce more content because they’ve got more spare time!
- MattDemers 4y agoI'll agree; we're just getting to the "Substacks writing about writing Substacks" phase now. Up until now all those people were on Medium.
- anigbrowl 4y agoThis is just a cool-sounding wrapper on the much older concept of rent-seeking, which has a solid theoretical literature behind it. Doctorow seems to specialize in this.
- zem 4y agoit's more like a specialisation of "rent-seeking" when applied to this particular case and pattern. nothing wrong with inventing a more specific term when the pattern behind it gets common enough.
- quickthrower2 4y agoIt is like rocket stages or a maggot turning into a fly: each stage bootstraps the next but cannot last forever