"Wait, I think you're platform-pilled"

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, t... See more

Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.

Social networks have become “the web” for many pe... See more

“We write to the machine, it collects and aggregates our desires and fantasies, segments them by market and demographic and sells them back to us as a commodity experience.”

Platforms have boxed our social lives and creative endeavors into slick, hyper-designed perimeters, guiding users through algorithmically perfect scrolls.

One of the wildest moments of this conversation for me was when I made a comment that I thought was just a universally believed truth about the post-platform internet: that people these days prefer individuals to brands. And then Nilay told me, “No, that’s wrong. It’s not people who are doing that; it’s the systems that deliver content to people” —... See more

To accomplish this goal, the “proud extroversion” of the early Web soon gave way to a much more homogenized experience: hundred-and-forty-character text boxes, uniformly sized photos accompanied by short captions, Like buttons, retweet counts, and, ultimately, a shift away from chronological time lines and profile pages and toward statistically opt... See more