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The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok: Or how, platforms die
- djoldman 3y agoExcerpt: > 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.
- smoldesu 3y agoDoctorow's definition of "enshittification" has always rubbed me the wrong way. Platforms oscillate between good and bad for all sorts of reasons, and the best platforms (imo) live and die on the culture of their userbase. There have been truly godawful social media systems out there, like Nintendo's Miiverse or the old Dark Souls message system (or even HN, in a way). They're still immensely fun to use, though - mostly because of the culture of their userbase. You could argue they might leave if their surpluses are directed back to the shareholders, but many of these platforms don't need much surplus to exist in the first place. The $40 billion Twitter valuation is a joke, it's undeniable that there is some form of imposed value outside of what the company is actually worth. In other words, the enshittification of TikTok correlates directly with the enshittification of it's userbase. Same goes for all of these other lowest-common-denominator platforms. Plus, his examples seem to contradict his thesis: - Mobile app stores have always been controlled by their vendors, there is no illusion of non-shittification there - Steam has no real shareholders, and exploits suppliers to cater to users and and themselves - Facebook has a half-dozen different platforms that have all arguably launched in pre-shittified states - Twitter lives a constant repeating lifecycle of enshittification and resurrection, mostly because most people can't be bothered to find an alternative It all feels like trying to unify these concepts under one formal thesis of shit is a bad idea. Our expectations of the internet are constantly changing, and our cultural landscape is shifting to realize that we've had a pretty raw deal for the past decade. Now we want to lash out at the platform-holders, when deep-down we know that we're partially to blame. I just wish Doctorow didn't use this idea to peddle the idea of helplessness to Twitter/Tumblr/Whatever users. There are alternatives, TikTok should not be the be-all-end-all of internet interaction anyways.
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- vkou 3y agoThere's no resurrection to Twitter, its been a cesspit since day one, it's just that there's no meaningful competitor. I'll agree on Steam - it has its problems, but the users, as a rule of thumb, don't hate it. It works, its reasonably convenient, most users don't get burnt by its policies, and nobody wants to install crap like Origin and UPlay.
- Quikinterp 3y agoI'd even go as far as saying that I like steam, and that I would rather use it and have it exist than not. Steam/valve also does a lot of things that everyone benefits from. Amazing controller support, Proton, etc. Even some minor things like allowing p2p games to route through their servers so players IPs aren't shown to others
- smoldesu 3y agoLook, I hate Twitter. I've tried using it 4 different times over the past decade and it never stuck with me. For everyone else though, it's like digital crack. It was the place to be for a while, even though it's users would chafe over minor changes. And of course, there was the original Cambrian explosion of microblogging movies and blind dates and garage sales and haircuts et. al... mostly replaced today by politics and related vitriol. It's 100% the fact that there is no meaningful competitor, exacerbated by people being lazy and distrustful of other private platforms. And good - these people should be wary, and Cory Doctorow should be on his soapbox telling people how to live in a post-social-media world rather than riling them up to go yell at clouds online.
- eertami 3y ago> For everyone else though, it's like digital crack I'm not sure Twitter ever was a universal thing. I barely know any people in real life that actually use it. It's only tech nerds/people working in media, and the others don't exist in real life because they don't go outside. It's easy to ignore Twitter drama completely, because nobody cares about Twitter except the people that use Twitter. Instagram and TikTok however really did capture the mainstream.
- manmal 3y agoI may be out of the loop, but what’s the issue with Steam? It seems like it hasn’t changed that much over the decades?
- eulers_secret 3y agoMay be because they're a private company, so there's no pressure from shareholders to "extract the value from the brand"
- Runepika 3y agoIsn't Microsoft doing a piss-poor job of that with Xbox Games Pass?
- danudey 3y agoGame Pass is doing a lot better than the XBox itself is. I honestly think that Microsoft needs to pull a Sega, stop making hardware and release their games on other people's hardware instead. Game Pass on PS5 would get a lot of subscribers. Halo on PS5 would do insanely well.
- fbdab103 3y agoIs Xbox losing money? Even if it is not mega-profitable, having a consumer device sitting in many living rooms has got to be worth something. If nothing else, as a gateway to Game Pass. If you are looking at weirdo things - Microsoft still makes keyboards. That has to be such a minuscule part of the business as to be completely irrelevant.
- hef19898 3y agoThey did add a bunch of achievements for each gamr, collectables and in game purchases along with a plattform to trade those. But it is not on the nose, and mostly cosmetic stuff like skins as far as I can tell. All of that is offset by Steams drive to get more and more games playable under Linux so.
- EGreg 3y agoThis is why utility tokens can be a far superior way to fund a project. The network can end up being owned by its users in the end - more akin to social democracy than capitalism. It’s the difference between disney dollars vs shares in Disney Corp.
- cushpush 3y agoIf we're gonna use French prefixes, can we just go with french all the way? En-merdification maybe?
- MoSattler 3y agoSince the prefix in French has latin origins, we should go ALL the way and call it inmerdificationem?
- evertedsphere 3y agoat which point you'd want emmerdification
- croes 3y agoFun fact: with the german prefix Ent- the meaning would be the opposite.
- sombragris 3y ago[flagged]
- erehweb 3y agoI wish we could talk about important ideas without using the word s--t, but I guess this marks me as a prude in our brave new world.
- BitwiseFool 3y agoIt's attention grabbing for sure, but I feel like a more carefully chosen name would make the discussion and acceptance of the concept go a lot farther.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoIs it even attention grabbing anymore? Everyone I know from teenagers to 60-year-old county employees use it now. From my experience, the shock value is now minimal. Instead of shock value, it just makes me take whoever uses it less seriously because I mentally associate them with a high-school-level of maturity.
- wkat4242 3y agoYes especially people that say things like "chips" instead of "shit". I'm always like WTF are you 5??? I lived in a small town in Ireland for a while and I got that a lot here. Though go to the pub and the F-word would be interspersed twice in every sentence. I never really got that hypocrisy.
- jker 3y agoI too have been trying to think of a more civil version of this word lately. Entrashment? Crudification?
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- leokeba 3y agohttps://archive.is/1i94Y https://archive.is/1i94Y
- teach 3y agoOr you can read it straight from the horse's mouth: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ Discussed four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480479
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- wkat4242 3y agoYeah even though it's old news I'd personally link to the real author rather than Conde Nast.
- davedx 3y agoGenerally a good article, didn’t appreciate the pogroms comparison though, pretty bad taste that one
- Lendal 3y agoIt was a Fiddler on the Roof reference. I don't believe most people think of Fiddler on the Roof as a musical about pogroms, although from a certain point of view maybe it is. He's referencing it because the final scene is what's important.
- sschueller 3y agoThat's a good thing. New players, new platforms, new rules etc. make it more fair. Of course unless the previous player buys the next thing up.
- sieste 3y agoInteresting side note on crypto: > Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money. Is that even true, and if so, documented and quantified somewhere?
- RealityVoid 3y agoSurely _some_ came from ransomware, but I feel the article overstates this. Presumably, the hackers also exchange it as soon as they have the chance and they wouldn't have used this as an environment if it didn't have value in the first place. I think a much better case can be made that early crypto liquidity came from darknet markets.
- jaidhyani 3y agoGoing to be extremely hard to quantify, ransomware peddlers aren't famous for their meticulous public record-keeping. You could try to sift through all the transactions on the public blockchain and try to classify the ransomware ones, but that's going to be challenging at best I imagine. Overall I'm skeptical of the claim. It could be true, or partially true, but demonstrating that would probably require some work. Alternatively, someone could demonstrate that liquidity came from speculators or some other source, which seems potentially less doable but still not easy.
- SkyMarshal 3y agoPretty sure that early crypto liquidity came from VCs, hedge funds, and speculators on Mt.Gox and other early fiat-crypto exchanges and OTC desks. To the extent crypto ransomware contributed, it was a small portion of that.
- geuis 3y ago1570 words before starting to get to the topic of the article. I know Doctorow is a respected writer, but come on.
- mrweasel 3y agoWell, respected sure, he does write on interesting topics. He's just not a very effective write, he's a story teller, which is good for novels, but annoying for articles like this one. Anyway, I fail to see the point really of the article. I don't disagree with it, but I doubt that anyone in power cares that Facebook is a zombie, if it still makes money. The only way to really implement a way for consumers to leave these "expired platforms" is to prevent them from forming to begin with. I just don't see how you'd do that, make a law that states that you can't be a social network and a marketplace, or that your users aren't allowed to coordinate event using your platform. They will regardless of you supporting it or not. Half of Twitters features are invented by the users, Twitter just added the features to support the thing the users did anyway.
- yellow_lead 3y agoThe article is too fluffed and tries to make a general judgement about platforms that is in reality more nuanced. But I agree with some part of it - platforms are often abused by their owners.
- bonestamp2 3y agoHe talks about enshittification and how platforms die from the first sentence -- that's a big part of the topic. But ya, I guess he could have flipped the order, and put the Tik Tok case first, then backed up his hypothesis with the other examples.
- falcolas 3y agoHow to know you've made it big as a corporation: Your take any action, and mainstream media finds a way to link that action to the company literally dying. Ideally they use a credible blogger or economist, but it's hardly required.
- markhahn 3y agoit's hilarious that you think Doctorow is a pawn of "mainstream" media.
- falcolas 3y agoDoesn't matter what Cory Doctorow's affiliation (or anybody's affiliation) is - if they can use it, they will. It's not as if they need his express permission, or for him to make a comment. Heck, they'll use NIN (Nine Inch Nails) songs and lyrics as justification of pro-government propaganda, to use one example.
- pimlottc 3y agoWhat are you even talking about? Who is "they"? Where are is someone using NIN lyrics here?
- red-iron-pine 3y agoA better example would be the GOP using Rage Against The Machine for their rallies.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoI think that as long as Doctorow is the face of the movement... with articles like this, we aren't going anywhere and corporations probably don't mind him. Conciseness is a virtue. When's the last time a corporation has ever produced a 2000-word essay on the reasons you should buy their game? Or a political party releasing a 3000-word essay on the virtues of their economic proposal for public viewing? If the best minds of our movement can't get a point across without, to put it on an extreme note, blathering on and on all over the place, they aren't afraid. Slogans and catchphrases have more power than detailed essays. To quote the 80s cartoon Pinky and the Brain, "Simple Ideas for Simple Minds" is a much smarter strategy for taking over the world. It's even better when it's behind a paywall. You will pay to read a long essay? The only reason you would do that is if you already care about the subject. Anyone who doesn't care yet won't ever see it or pay for it or read it, so nothing happens at all.
- bmarquez 3y agoI think Instagram is a better example of enshittification than TikTok. It's been around far longer, the algorithm has gotten far worse, and it's not Chinese controlled so people don't criticize it as much and changes slide under the radar.
- greyman 3y agoIn which way, exactly? My feed looks more or less the same.
- tqi 3y agoPlatforms are a carnival mirror reflection of the people who use it (both users and suppliers), and "enshittification" is just what it looks like once everyone piles in.
- npteljes 3y agoNot really. This one happens because the incentives are aligned in a specific way. (The one you point out would also happen, no doubt, given enough time)
- imbnwa 3y agoAs an active TikTok user, I have no experience with what he's talking about. My FYP is almost completely small creators with the occasional big creator in a domain TikTok has determined I am engaged by rather than some non-germane 'big' creator getting fished views. Maybe I misunderstood.
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- EGreg 3y agoThis is a great overview of how for-profit, closed networks start extracting rents for their shareholders from all sides of the marketplace, pit their customers against each other in zero-sum games and even turn to surveillance capitalism — all to turn a profit for their shareholders. And why open source gift economies and Utility Tokens can be a great alternative to shares, with an incentive structure that is better aligned with the public good. Here is how things can be, instead: https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem
- LegitShady 3y agoHow is steam "enshitified"? Because they take money for services? There's no argument even, which youd think Doctorow could fit into his inflated wordcounts.
- npteljes 3y agoSteam is a shitty example, I have no idea why the author brought it up. I don't see Valve "clawing back the value to themselves" at all. Where this launcher shittiness happens in gaming are the other launchers, because studios act the same as media rights holders did with Netflix. As soon as they saw that streaming is profitable, they clawed back whatever IP they could, just so they can launch their own shitty delivery product. Which makes sense to a business, but for the customer, it's now shit. Same with the other Steam competitors with their shitty launchers and exclusives. And in the meantime, Steam delivers customer value better than ever. I also give them props for funding open source development - the windows compatibility layer they package works like a charm, and its development improved gaming on Linux for every Linux gamer, not just those who pay on Steam.
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- manv1 3y ago"Enshittification" sounds much more clickbaity than "Degeneration." But a literal reader might think "what's digesting TikTok?" Because technically, enshittification means sucking the nutrients and water out of it. It's what happens to food in your digestive track.
- Zigurd 3y agoI'm new to using social media as a medium to reach an audience. My audience is a niche audience, technical, and not what people associate with typical TikToks. But TikTok has been a good place to start: It is simple; content creation tools are easy to use; the audience is new and growing; there are fewer established content creators in my field on TikTok. TikTok obviously is differentiated in some ways, but it seems to work like most social media: It will seek an audience response and eventually give up if it can't find one. I cross-post my content, and I will start using "platform neutral" creation tools because social media platforms appear to detect and deemphasize obviously cross-posted content created primarily for competing platforms. I'll be jumping on BlueSky as soon as the beta deities look favorably on me. No high-growth phase lasts forever.
- kyleyeats 3y agoThe pride over coming up with this word is completely misplaced.
- aquova 3y agoWhile I do think "enshittification" is a thing, I think it's also the fear of becoming "stale" that leads platforms to eventually overcompensate, aliening its users and potentially dying off. In my opinion, the life cycle of a platform looks like: 1. Platform is created with a strong vision in mind. 2. Platform gains popularity, adding new features. Many will die here, but the most successful projects will create features that positively supplement the core vision. There is a lot of positivity amongst its userbase. 3. Platform eventually becomes one of the leaders amongst its particular niche, typically new features begin to slow down as the platform reaches its ideal feature set and all the low hanging fruit is gone. 4. The platform is no longer causing disruption in the space, but is now the status quo. New competitors or clones will pop up trying to get a piece of the pie, but the network effect keeps users on the platform 5. Despite having an ideal feature set, platforms don't want to completely stop development, so new features continue to come in, but are more and more misaligned to the original vision. UI changes, incorporating clever features from its competitors, or trying to chase the trends in the tech space (NFTs, AI, etc) 6. Users are more and more alienated, but are willing to remain with the platform until a competitor arrives that is viewed to be worth the trouble to switch. As the network effect kept users on the platform, it also opens a floodgate as users quickly switch away. 7. The platform languishes in relative obscurity before being bought out and left in a zombie state. I think there are quite a few established platforms that remain in stage 5 or so. There's lots of criticism of Facebook, Twitter, Discord, etc. but everyone continues to use them because of the value they feel from other users using the platform. It's only once people leave for greener pastures that they die out (just look at the rise and fall of chat apps like AIM, MSN, Skype, etc. over time).
- CyberDildonics 3y agoWhile I do think "enshittification" is a thing It's not 'a thing' it's a made up word for clickbait
- mcphage 3y agoEvery word is made up, that’s where they come from.
- it 3y agoIt seems like the enshittification life cycle directly results from the involvement of venture funding, since it requires the infusion of capital to allow operating at a loss in the beginning, baiting users onto the platform while killing off competitors. By contrast, the Basecamp approach of bootstrapping cannot make the initial first step of operating at a loss by definition.
- RangerScience 3y agoWIRED has reprinted Cory Doctorow’s essay (legally, and with attribution…?) Original: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoI will never understand this passion from the establishment to see TikTok die, next level organized FUD, it's becoming useless at this point, this has 0 effect on TikTok's popularity, worse, I learned about TikTok thanks to this FUD campaign TikTok is now the 2nd most downloaded app on Android and 2nd most grossing on the Apple store.. wow, what a successful and effective FUD campaign -_- https://app.sensortower.com/top-charts?os=ios&category=0&device=iphone https://app.sensortower.com/top-charts?os=ios&category=0&dev...