This whole thing reminds me of this comment when Tumblr "died":
"I think the real problem here is that big media corporations seem to believe that social media userbases are fungible, and persist in acting on this belief no matter how many times it’s demonstrated to be wrong.
There’s a specific pattern of events that plays out over and over (and over) again, and it looks something like this:
1. Social media platform becomes popular
2. Social media platform is purchased by big media corporation in order to gain access to it large user base
3. Big media corporation realises that social media platform’s demographics are not the demographics they want to sell things to.
4. Big media corporation institutes measures to drive away “undesirable” users, apparently in the honest belief that the outgoing users will automatically be replaced by an equal number of new, more demographically desirable users
5. This does not, in fact, occur
6. Social media platform crashes and burns
You’d think that, by the sheer law of averages, at least one person who’s capable of learning from experience would become involved in this whole process at some point."
Cory Doctorow calls this enshittification[0], and it applies to more than just social media companies. But social media is the most obvious representative of this cycle.
"I think the real problem here is that big media corporations seem to believe that social media userbases are fungible, and persist in acting on this belief no matter how many times it’s demonstrated to be wrong.
There’s a specific pattern of events that plays out over and over (and over) again, and it looks something like this:
1. Social media platform becomes popular
2. Social media platform is purchased by big media corporation in order to gain access to it large user base
3. Big media corporation realises that social media platform’s demographics are not the demographics they want to sell things to.
4. Big media corporation institutes measures to drive away “undesirable” users, apparently in the honest belief that the outgoing users will automatically be replaced by an equal number of new, more demographically desirable users
5. This does not, in fact, occur
6. Social media platform crashes and burns
You’d think that, by the sheer law of averages, at least one person who’s capable of learning from experience would become involved in this whole process at some point."