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.

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 us... See more

As large platforms get richer off their users’ personal data and time, people are trying to regain control. We spent the last fifteen years working for gig money, likes, retweets, or follows. The platforms gave us reputation or cash, but no ownership, upside, or voice in its evolution.

Author Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe the gradual decline of services as they prioritize value extraction over value creation for users, a process he views as an inevitable consequence of platform capitalism.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not... See more