A perfect example with the recent changes at Twitter:
> Most Twitter users barely tweet and don't care about followers - a "heavy user" tweets on average less than three times a week. So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good.
> It is exactly that content that Twitter's new model relies on promoting - and those newly-minted blue ticks are quickly learning that there is no magic behind the checkmarks. New followers are not magically heading their way. The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good.
> That means lots of blue ticks stop paying - but everyone else is forced to read the low-quality content that the remaining blue ticks produce. This is what is powering the enshittification of Twitter.
I'm still amazed they went with the $8-for-attention model. Everyone _already knows_ this doesn't work well; the dating site industry has been trying to make it work for literally decades.
It's also kind of a Pandora's box; even if they removed the attention boost, the taint is already there, and people will be suspicious of bluetick replies forever.
The smart thing to do isn't to remove it; They should charge for adversarial features.
Pay your fee, you get not only an attention boost, but the ability to un-boost blues. If the net result is 0, the Nash Equilibrium is that everybody pays.
Look how many people "#BlockTheBlue" on twitter right now. Just charge them to make it easy. The real value in someone who's willing to pay to be seen isn't in their 8$ subscription, it's in the 100 other people they incentivize to pay you to shut them up.
I mean, if they want to turn Twitter into SomethingAwful, that would be a good route.
Honestly at this point it's in such a bad state that it would be worth considering; a gamified war might be better than just every high-traffic tweet having hundreds of nonsense bluetick comments before you get to the real comments. It'd at least be more interesting; the bluetick content is usually just very dull, and tends to bring to mind the writing style of those wannabe-influencer posts you see on LinkedIn. (I think a lot of people paying for it are doing so because they want to be... a Twitter influencer? Are there even Twitter influencers, beyond dril?)
Probably not a _great_ way to build a sustainable business, though.
Give me the ability to set sliders to filter accounts and replies based on metrics like the number of their followers vs the number of people who have blocked them, and the number of their posts vs the number of their upvotes -- things that help me find the good stuff, and make it possible for me to access the "wisdom of the crowd" -- and I'd pay $20/mo.
Sure, and if they'd kept it to that, maybe it could have been a reasonable niche feature, though it would always be niche. As it is, I think it likely has negative value to most people.
Those are not benefits. Giving the blue checks the opportunity for a longer, even colder take that readers must click through to read is doing them no favors.
Far, far more than that, now. The ability to organize your own feed via Tweetdeck is also being limited to blue checks, as well as security options like MFA.
Actually it is the algo. Twitter often doesn't bother showing the tweets of NPCs (with fewer than a few thousand followers) no matter how good they are.
But I think you have to be quite naive to believe that a New Blue Tick™ will game that.
you realize $8 a month is nothing to the majority of adults who would be in the "knowledge worker" category? a month? a couple of coffees is $10 and that's a day.
This is true only in a handful of places, for a handful of people.
$8 a month is pretty much the monthly cost of a cellphone plan across Europe. One could also get Spotify, or Netflix, at the same price point.
Comparatively speaking, paying $8 to have unlimited access to generally low quality content, at the same price point where other platforms offer actual good content, is a waste.
I don't get the $8/month. If you would pay for verification, that would be a one time payment. If the creators would be payed, then this might be fine, but they aren't. So it is only a fee to use the infrastructure.
You get a decent VPS for 8€/month, that has more computing power and bandwidth and storage that one person can use per month compared to what they would use on their systems for just streaming some videos and getting some messages.
Sure I don't calculate here the cost for development and maintenance, but this cost is mostly constant with numbers of active users.
Lets see, for $8 a month I can subscribe to a real Journal, like Which. They hire proffesional writers, fact check their content, buy actual consimer products and test them. And they are a charity to boot.
Or I can pay Elon for delivering tweets that he got some rando to write for free. The latest content is a right - wing conspiracy that nuclear weapons do not exist, and thay video footage of nuclear ezplosions is staged.
It's not just the cost; most people would, I think, be _embarrassed_ to be seen to be paying for attention.
I used to pay for a Twitter client, I now pay for a Mastodon client, I contribute to the upkeep of my local friendly Mastodon instance. In all it's in the ballpark of 8EUR/month. There's no world where I would _pay for attention on Twitter_, though.
I am somewhat surprised they didn't just charge for client API access/other bits and pieces (that is, charge the user, not the person who makes the client), and nuke the pay-for-attention/pay-for-flair feature before launch as an obviously terrible idea. I think more people would pay for that. Not many people, but more people, and it would be far less corrosive on the user experience as a whole.
> It's not just the cost; most people would, I think, be _embarrassed_ to be seen to be paying for attention.
I agree.
The Twitter tick had some cool when it was a mark of authenticity. Now it's a bit cringe.
The embarrassment factor might work better for Twitter if they offer an option similar to what LinkedIn does for paying users: Give the user the option to disable the blue tick on their account so other people don't know they are paying, while still having access to useful paid account features.
Like you I'd be more willing to pay a small amount for API access and useful features if I can do so quietly, without broadcasting the fact.
I think you actually can hide it now. However, at least speaking for myself, I would be embarrassed to be paying to have my posts artificially boosted, even if this fact was hidden. There's a reason that pay-to-win, particularly in multiplayer games, has always been a slightly difficult sell.
In my opinion, the question is generally not whether something is a lot of money or not, but if it feels worthwhile relative to other similar things. For example, $8/mo is in the same ballpark as Spotify or Apple music and right now Twitter's blue tick doesn't come anywhere close to providing similar value.
I don't really get what you're saying here; it's not about the affordability (but let's put that aside for a second), it's that the entire payment model is based on a theory that is demonstrably disproven; the GP post had some rough stats from an article which suggests that Twitter either grossly overestimates how its users use the platform, or completely misunderstands how people want to use Twitter.
That the "heavy user" threshold is 3 posts a week is surprising to me, and seems like a bad threshold I'm sure that actual Twitter data is likely more accurate and shows different numbers, but it's not really about the usage I guess, it's about the promise of more followers and engagement. But demonstrably this is not the case, and many persons who did buy the Blue Check complained they didn't see the increase in activity it was advertised that the Blue Check would give. The signal behind what a Blue Check means has been quite noisy for a very long time, even before Musk's take over, and the decisions post-Musk on what a Blue Check really means/does is very confusing and unclear.
Why would I pay $8 a month to maybe get some followers by being promoted when I could just spend a few hundred USD once and just buy followers from some follower farm, which is arguably a better signal of "hey, this person is worth following?" as opposed to the Blue Check? It doesn't matter if it's just a "couple of coffees", why pay for something that arguably provides 0 benefit for me?
Twitter should not have tried to sell identify validation as a major marketable service; they already try to validate your identity even without it, and it doesn't seem to benefit anyone, not even Twitter.
Game companies figured out how to monetize useless things with cosmetics and such, and if Twitter wanted to monetize heavily, they should have just done that. Fancier reactions, more edits and stupid stuff for the changeable usernames, etc. The idea that they can somehow sell the user attention is a folly; yes, they gate and can control the feeds, but the users always have the option of just not following or even just not looking. It's a resource Twitter _never_ really had control over; they might as well have been selling ocean wranglers, offering that someone will beat the tide with whips for you if the ocean pisses you off for some reason; it's about the same effectualness, and equally useless service.
Different location, different economy and different currency, but yeah buying coffee out is crazy and I can't believe I was stupid enough to do it for so long.
I convinced myself I "needed the time out of the office" yeah cool, go for a walk you dork and make coffee in the kitchen like the person with bills that you are (is what I now tell myself)
(Long ago I suggested that Twitter should have allowed people to contribute towards premium accounts for other people, a bit like Reddit Gold. Since a large part of the value derives not from your own posting but other people's.)
> $8 a month is nothing to the majority of adults who would be in the "knowledge worker" category
This is a very US-centric take and almost insulting for people living in certain other areas of the world. In my country (central Europe, as is easy to guess), an experienced teacher (definitely a "knowledge worker" in my book) may earn about $10k per year. Not sure how much a beginner one gets, but surely less. $8 per month is a lot then.
Not only that, the $8 might not be much, but what you get isn't either.
If everyone felt entitled to charge $8 for not much in return that can add up and mean real money even to US-centric people, once they're paying it to 50 different services every month that deliver (and ask) for "nothing".
What I thought was stupid was removing the blue check from people who are worth far more than that per month to Twitter. I thinking about people like Stephen King and large news outlets.
I could definitely afford $8 but why would I give Elon $8 per month in order to tell people that I took a shit that was thiiiis big? The blue checkmark has questionable benefits at best, and the increased character limit for paychecks is ruining the essence of the service.
People tweeting are not usually paid to post. Discussing the quality of posts as if entertaining people with unpaid labor is a need is the fatal flaw of social media sites. They keep pushing the narrative that posters should work for attention and struggle when winning in the current mold is albeit impossible without lots of funding or the specific attributes that make people overlook marginal skill and talents.
The truth of the matter is these platforms always invent wacky schemes to sedate people into a false narrative that they can go viral, or even that they can be recognized for their talent or wisdom, but undercover the platform does nothing to promote individuals, and often does a lot to DEMOTE individual posters on them.
If one truly understands how things work, these platforms often have millions of people as a potential audience for content. They only show posts to an ever shrinking fraction of 1 percent of that multi-million user audience initially (in between all the paid ads), often they barely do that and give users less than 300 views by an audience they know is not a good demographic fit for their post (e.g showing a post about penguin migration to a rapper promoting his music in LA, rather than showing the content to a known animal scientist who would be much more likely to click on "like") .
As a result of frustration with low views and limited validation/affirmation of their work and time, many users pay for ad boosting, which still now usually does not work in their favor, because the audience is never properly aligned with the content for viewing there again. Even an audience of 20k people on a platform of millions is measley. The platform has no interest in making users more popular, because they will log in less, spend less on ads, and possibly relocate their activities to another platform if they grew in popularity.
If you take an honest look at the type of content that trends, it's often not funny, not creative, not the best, but now it's there because it had healthy funding for ads behind it, to get it to the right audience that liked it (if it's not boosted by nefarious -bots= etc...).
The truth is, that if each content poster was exposed/promoted to a much wider audience, they'd find their niche, SIMILAR to how original Twitter was, this is why no one is getting followers any more,because the audiences who can view posts have become too small out of shear manipulation for ad profit. It's not about post quality, that's simply a lie that coddles wealthy and celebrity posters and maintains the status quo of limiting upward mobility on social media sites.
Paying for visibility on a social media service is far too manipulative, there should be a simple flat fee for access in my opinion because paying for visibility creates an inherent inequality. Deceptively promoting a service as free with tiers also deceives people into signing up for a service that is deceptively handicapped/neutered until they figure out they need to pay monthly for only slightly a less handicapped tier (still far below wealthy individuals and celebrities on each platform).
It's a self defeating cycle that only social platforms profit from. It would be better if content creators truly recognized that and saw through the others with tons of cash and the sponsored (undercover social media company employees) all faking their success to make these casino companies look legit.
Heavy users I follow tweet more than 3 times a day.
> The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good.
No, it was a biased algo that's still being removed (as recently as 2-3 weeks ago they discovered another throttle which was impacting many users, including Elon).
The main problem is that all centralized platforms have to deal with government-mandated censorship in large markets such as the EU, which kills content and engagement and also negatively impacts paying users (because despite the payment, their content still gets shadow-banned). That's not Twitter's fault, but they're relatively more impacted than social networks that focus on art and have no political content.
I'm interested to know what your examples of content would be that is (a) good and (b) banned by "government-mandated censorship in large markets such as the EU".
> relatively more impacted than social networks that focus on art and have no political content
Funnily enough a lot of artists also want uncensored platforms so they can post NSFW art, but this is completely orthogonal to the political questions.
> uncensored platforms so they can post NSFW art, but this is completely orthogonal to the political questions.
Its not orthogonal, the center of american politics is neo-puritanism. This is specifically the attitude of american elites, and they force it on the rest of the world. They deny access to banking and payment to anyone who does not comply.
> I'm interested to know what your examples of content would be that is (a) good and (b) banned by "government-mandated censorship in large markets such as the EU".
> government-mandated censorship in large markets such as the EU
Twitter censors nudity and pornography, and import American neo-puritanism to the rest of the world. No-one in EU mandates this.
But american brain is incapable of putting two and two together, they have it wired into their brain that opression cannot be private, only government.
If modern right-wingers existed in 1500, they would be defending the rirht of a feudal lord to sleep with your wife because he isnt a government and your signed up for it when you were born as a peasant.
I think the strong response is to your opening statement. Cory is a thoughtful writer. The analysis may be inaccurate in your opinion, but that doesn't make it garbage.
I happen to agree with your actual take: biased unfair algos are the result of platforms being coerced (internally and/or externally) to ultimately serve some socio-political agenda, and thus their content enshittifies. No blue checkmarks needed.
Isn't this just a function of a lot of these business models don't actually work?
Ie a lot of these are the equivalent of giving away free ( investor funded ) banana fritters, getting decent uptake and using it to declare that the market in banana fritters is huge, but when you start to charge for them it turns our the market is quite small.
Another way the business models don't work is the companies start off assuming no costs around policing - like a shop with no security whatsoever. Works fine for a while, but as it grows and people realise it's got no security they start to get targeted, and costs go up.
It's basically just "if it's too good to be true than it ain't". Which was obvious for me from the begging for free video streaming, lower cost higher quality taxi, lower cost higher quality hotel rooms, zero cost but quality banking and so on.
Oh, wait, it's not just that. It's also greed. Greedy customers wanting things without paying what they're worth, greedy entrepreneurs not wanting to grow a business steady, healthy and organically, greedy investors, greedy software engineers, etc, etc.
Can we really say the customers are the greedy ones? I take some offense to that. Most people are just trying to survive with the options they're offered. If someone comes along promising a free solution to something i previously had to pay for, or even better, offering something for free which was never previously offered even at cost. By taking that offer I'm being greedy? What if it actually works, and it's free? I'm suddenly greedy for trying to save up to survive the housing market? Or student loans, or a million other things?
What expectation of knowledge make the average person taking a deal, greedy? And how many people taking that deal meet that expectation of knowledge?
>Most people are just trying to survive with the options they're offered.
I disagree with this. While this group certainly exists, there's a far larger segment of people that have a variable cost-return analysis eschewing towards rock bottom that inevitably lends itself to buying shittier products.
In other words, a lot of people are cheapskates.
You can make a stellar game app but even charging one flat $5 fee will absolutely tank your downloads because people would rather play hundreds of ad-ridden shitty lootbox gambling games for free. And what's worse, they'll even try to pirate your game for the fuck of it too.
It plagues food shelves with increasingly worse results. People don't give a shit about cage free, roaming organically grass fed whatever eggs. Sure, some do, but not most. Oh, Carton B costs 20 cents less than Carton A? Bingo. I just saved 20 cents. The eggs taste practically the same (they don't). But it gets them 90% there, and that's a compromise most people are fine with because they saved money. This trickles up to the producers, who obviously emphasize Carton A production now. Let it go on for long enough, with a little bit of poor government oversight, and you can even sell Carton A eggs as Carton B, and reap more from the suckers who think they're getting a better product. It's greed all the way around, and people fuck themselves constantly because of it. It's why we have laws and building codes and health and safety regulations. Society functions on setting the minimum bar for everything, because otherwise we devolve into chaos. And people constantly love to fucking limbo.
Yea “greedy” customers is probably unfair but I get that it was for effect.
To flesh out the point I assume they were making is that customers unfairly adjust their expectations around an unsustainable, too-good-to-be-true edge case, rather than recognizing it for what it is. And consequently scoff at anything that doesn’t now align with what they’ve unfairly shifted their expectations to.
> Can we really say the customers are the greedy ones?
The amount of piracy that occurs and the number of bad things that happen because consumers buy purely based on price without doing basic research shows that yes, the customers are greedy.
> a lot of these business models don't actually work
It depends on how you define "work". They may not work in the way that the users were led to believe, but often enough someone got rich, and in that sense they do work.
We have an evil cabal of enshitification enforcers in the form of the entire advertising and marketing industry. They enforce the group think impressed on society, and will not put any energy into anything not following the current zeitgeist of shitty exploitation and only the legally required (reluctant) fair treatment of their consumer and their employees. Our society voices, both journalism and advertising/marketing, are owned by the Orwellian Capitalists and only what they allow get through... which is a declining human society.
I think you've missed the point of the parent comment. The point is that the entire model only exists in symbiosis with what you call "enshitification enforcers". There is no mass market social media without the "evil cabal... of the advertising and marketing industry". There is no other model that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions of active users posting their own content with mostly no restraint.
The closest to an alternative model that works here is wikipedia. They achieve it by having a different default for user generated content - that it doesn't remain unless it is strictly on topic (you can't just write your random thoughts and shitposts in an article) - and by having a social mission that attracts donations. (They also run incredibly lean, which other mass market sites could definitely learn from.)
Another alternative model being pursued is the federated approach. I like this approach in principle but I don't think it will ever reach the mass market hundreds of millions of active users position of the mainstream social media products. Its solution to the problem is that some subset of power users will self-host and absorb the costs, either via individual altruism or something, or by developing some other model. I think this will end up centralizing, with a small number of nodes hosting most of the usage, and probably eventually falling back to advertising to cover costs. But I dunno, we'll see, maybe this will work.
Another more successful model is to just not be mass market at all, like HN and other various message boards. This reduces costs both for hosting and moderation and can then be justified by some non-financial benefit (like tacit advertisement for YC in the case of HN, or by tight community camaraderie for niche message boards).
Then another model that works is subscriptions. This drops the active user count massively and generally makes it harder to get traction, but I think it works the best of any of these when the stars align. I'd rather be Netflix or the NYT than Twitter or Reddit.
The model that isn't sustainable is a permanently investor funded one.
Often when these products launch - they have zero advertising, zero features to make money - they are totally aimed at growing market share - totally focused on the user.
Then it's inevitably downhill from there - whether it's people not being prepared to pay ( eg Blue ticks ) or complaining about advertising or scrapping of data.
One of the damaging effects of the large amount of investor funded products is that it makes it very difficult for the user supported ( paid ) ones to thrive.
Perhaps the current state is because we are not at equilibrium - and as regulation, and the market matures it will become a bit more sane.
"There is no other model that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions of active users posting their own content with mostly no restraint."
The government can. These companies could be nationalized, or the government could make their own competing sites if they were interested in doing so. But they're just not.
It takes more than just the means. It takes a will to do it.
In essence that's a user ( indirectly through taxes ) supported model.
In the UK, the BBC follows that model ( the license fee is in effect a tax in all but name ) - and it's model is constantly under attack from certain quarters.
Indeed the BBC has being doing pilots in the social space - with SOLID and data pods.
I’m curious - have you used SOLID? Either as a developer or a consumer?
I found myself struggling with Linked Data for quite some time now, and I have struggled with the idea that perhaps part of the problem with adoption of Linked Data is existing mental interia of RMDBS or other systems.
I like the idea - kinda back to a decentralised web of peers like it was in the early days.
However the complexity of the technology is certainty off-putting - I'm not enough of an expert to tell how much of that complexity is adherence to a tech stack ( like RDF, SPARQL ) and how much is simply the complexity of the underlying problem.
I would say the guys behind it seem fairly pragmatic. As an example while the technology allows you to self host, they acknowledge that most people won't be able/want to - and are looking to enable providers as well.
I think one of the problems with the LD/RDF community is it can attract the type of person that things 'we just need a single well defined data model for the universe'.
I think trying to get one schema to rule them all is doomed to failure - for two reasons
- for ontologies to be effective all the users of that ontology have to have a shared understanding of the ontology - simple a written down definition isn't enough.
- the world can be viewed from multiple angles - even if you could agree one view, it's not going to be optimal for all use cases.
However as I said, the SOLID project doesn't appear to be falling into that trap - it appears very focused and pragmatic.
Interesting. I personally found the whole defining your schema up front to feeling like trying to construct the universe up front.
I’ve been trying to work on an alternative solution to SOLID, but I’m always double checking myself just to make sure that I’m not just simply failing to grasp the concepts.
Government funding of generic user generated content hosting is a terrible idea, IMO.
But I do quite like your proposal for how it could be accomplished technically through federation. It at least sidesteps the problem of the government building it through their fundamentally broken technology "procurement" processes.
Just went into more detail on this in a different comment. Basically I think this would suck in the same ways that public meetings inevitably suck, but times a million.
I expect that if federated social media takes off, nobody (among the mass market) will know that it's federated, just like email. It'll just be, like you say, a couple of big sites that happen to enable people to communicate with people on other sites (and also a handful of wizards who self-host).
I think the killer feature of federation in general (particularly in the context of social media) is that it decouples user account administration (and by extension, data collection) from the network effect. I run my own node that just has my account on it, but I can still benefit from the network by federating with other nodes.
I agree that this is what it will look like if it takes off. But then those "couple of big sites" will have all the same incentives / problems as the current mass market sites, and will themselves be enshittified eventually. The model needs to somehow result in distributing the user load and thus the costs across many hosts such that it is a bearable cost for each individual host without requiring any deep pocketed support. But you and I are in agreement that that doesn't seem like the likely outcome.
One of the questions I don't see answered here (and is, IMO, the greatest obstacle, and the reason I've backed out of discussions to set up a similar geographically-oriented node) is who moderates, say, your city's ActivityPub node? If a corporation, we're right back to corporations moderating public speech. But even having governments moderating speech in a public forum feels weird to me since it provides an easy lever to bend the discourse to the interests of the incumbents.
Or maybe to protect against that, there's a strict moderation governance document for that to the effect of "If it's not illegal, it flies". That could still get rough since there's lots of non-illegal content you could put on there which people wouldn't want to see.
Independently hosted nodes still feel like the way to go to me. No hard authority, just people talking with people and moderating to set the tone they want for their community. If the moderators are jerks, moving to a different node should be easy (thus putting the power into the hands of the users to abide by the governance they find most agreeable) and not cause you to exile yourself from your civic community.
This gets at why I think this is fundamentally a terrible idea. I think it would be a legal and social minefield the likes of which I'm not sure the world has ever seen.
You know how community meetings and town halls are awful and fruitless because they're filled to the brim with the noisiest cranks and they can't be kicked out because they're still members of the public after all, and nobody else participates because it's maddening to be around all those noisy cranks? Like that, but web scale.
I'm sure the noisy cranks would love this, but I'm not interested in it.
I want to acknowledge that feedback, because it’s useful.
As a follow question: is this a solvable problem between host moderation and user self moderation?
In other words: Let’s pretend NPR hosts a Reddit-like site whose primary objective is to facilitate discussion on topics shared by NPR.
NPR doesn’t outright ban everything unless it violates some terrible things.
Could user moderation NPR Reddit also expand on this? So long as they fall under the same guidelines?
I ask this question because it seems to me that there does exist some useful moderation: there are well moderated Reddits and for the most part Wikipedia is also pretty well moderated.
Yes, there are private entities with good moderation. A public entity (in the US) with those same moderation policies would have a very hard time avoiding infringement of the first amendment.
Does there exist a medium between host moderators and user moderation the makes this work?
Wikipedia is self moderated and there are well moderated Reddits. The host of the ActivityPub site doesn’t have to do all the moderation, and there doesn’t seem to be a reason that users themselves couldn’t “mute” troublesome posters from their own feeds, right?
> The host of the ActivityPub site doesn’t have to do all the moderation
The person who set up the server doesn't, no, they can appoint moderators that lack administrative privileges. I don't recall at the moment if moderators have the ability to federate/defederate with peers, and that might be an implementation detail anyway. This is probably the way a large well-run node should work - developing a team of moderators from within the community.
> there doesn’t seem to be a reason that users themselves couldn’t “mute” troublesome posters from their own feeds, right?
This is true as far as it goes, but if a node federates with peers that dump a high volume of content onto the network the user doesn't want to see, then the user will find it a headache to manually filter just what they want to see (approximately the feeling of manually filtering out email spam). So some filtering should be done by the host.
Actually no. Those companies are the primary service providers to the advertising and marketing industry. But the industry itself predates them and exists (and would continue to exist) independently of them.
I was under the impression that Apple makes most of its money from margins on hardware sales, with services a growing percentage (Apple TV, App Store).
The "advertising and marketing" that is involved with Apple is them spending money on it so people know about what they sell, and not so much Apple taking in advertising and marketing money (which Google and Meta do).
Nope, they have an extensive ad network that conveniently continues to track users, even when they opt out of the tracking that Meta and Google fought so hard against:
The bad part (from my perspective) is that I pay a premium for iOS/MacOS but still get ads anyways. Why does the App Store show me ads if I'm sponsoring it with every app I purchase? Why does Apple Music show me a pop-up ad when I accidentally auto-launch it with my headphones? Why does Safari still want me to try the new one?
Apple does not live or die off advertisements like some others, but they are definitely a victim of this downward trend. As their margins on hardware shrink, their relationship with China comes under threat, and their monopoly on The App Store becomes less certain, it will be interesting to see how well they resist this pattern.
I've been thinking about how enshittification, venture capital, shareholders and the life cycle of a company are in some ways related. Any company that has external investors is bound to go through this cycle of
- building a great product
- taking in external funding money
- growing and then either being acquired or going public (or more commonly shutting down)
- then all the head scratching decision making starts
It's head scratching to users and outside observers, but the incentives are such that there is pressure to grow on a quarterly basis, get those charts looking good and individuals in the management chain are doing what they can to optimize their career growth leading to short term decision making at the cost of users and customers.
The big picture thinking and long term decision making are incredibly hard. Very few companies are able to do this over the long term. Micosoft and apple are doing great currently and it will be interesting to see how stripe and openai navigate this process.
My current opinion is that only small founder owned companies or foss organizations can avoid this trap over the long term and it involves not trying to squeeze out every last bit of value. Both of these require a certain level of financial security + there's the opportunity cost vs just going the vc route.
VC funding is incredibly valuable and it opens up a lot of possibilities that small orgs can never hope for. I guess what I'm saying is: expect enshittification and enjoy the ride while it lasts and then jump ship when trouble starts. Jumping ship becomes incredibly hard with network effects, so that's the challenge we are seeing with social media companies now. Also once companies become too big to fail, it's a drag on society.
Personally I would still go the VC route since I don't have a few million lying around and tell myself this is just the cycle of life (for corporates) to avoid existential questions and going down the rabbit hole of questioning everything around me. Sorry about the disconnected thoughts.
15 years ago I bought a ride-on lawn mower that gave me 12 years of service, but was getting a bit long in the tooth.
I decided to buy the next model up from the same company, not knowing in the mean time it had been bought by a PE company and the quality had gone to shit. The mower is bigger, but the engine is smaller and they are notorious for blowing a head gasket any time the mowing blades stall out.
I was thinking of starting a web register of all PE PortCos (private equity portfolio companies) so people would know to treat the products with caution as the main way of reducing costs seems to be a) sacking people and b) cutting corners on product quality.
I have an old cohort of co-workers who I went through the PE experience with and we pretty much use PE ownership of a company as a heuristic to avoid buying their products. Duracell batteries would be an example. A list would probably be helpful but depressingly long.
Which company is this? I’ve heard this referred to as “reputation mining”.
You buy a company with a good reputation, cut quality drastically, and profit for the decade or so it takes until everyone realizes the brand sucks now.
It is all over the place. The worst part is when you realize reputation is always a trailing indicator the only rational action seems to be to buy the cheapest one and use the saved money for the replacement. Basically, optimize your life around rapid disposal and replacement which makes extra trash and takes extra time versus just having a good quality item you can rely on.
My mower recently started to rust out and I dread buying a replacement. Aside from cheaply replacing poorly designed wheels fairly often I was 100% with this mower. But I can't buy it again because the march forward with redesigns means it is no longer made. Is the new one better? General life experience says, probably not.
I had this conversation with someone online. "X makes great cars! I bought one 15 years ago and it's been rock solid!" Yeah, well 15 years is a long time. The car you buy that was made this year could be a piece of crap. Who even knows? No one will know for at least the next 5 years. You just have to roll the dice and hope they care about the reputation - and check if the badge has been sold.
I also consider a few products disposable like that, but it's generally cheaper things. Non-stick pans are one of those, they work until they don't and I'm not going to baby them.
I have been considering for years to make something similar. A site that offers a company search and it will tell you how many PE tendrils are wrapped up in it. The data is out there. Anyone else want to join in? Is there an API we should be considering?
I think the issue could be rooted in recent monetary policy rather than an inhrenent feature of the market itself.
Artificially low interest rate environments lead to a lot of money in the hands of investors, which due to inflation slowly loses purchasing power over time. However, with large reserves, they can easily afford to prop up a business model which persistantly spends more money on bringing "free" features to user while charging very little. Those businesses obviously outcompete any business which do not recieve such investment.
However, as time goes on, those investments must eventually earn a return. Switching from a model which loses money every year to one which must profit every year is invariably going to affect the quality of the product. Especially in an environment where directly charging customers for your service would be a death sentence.
In the absense of such cheap credit, however, a truly competitive environment could potentially emerge, where businesses must be sustanably profitable from the ground up. Esentially this would mean the last 15 or so years has been wasted time in pursuit of this goal, as false monetary signals were steering us in completely the wrong direction.
Some of todays tech companies may survive the transition, but I believe that most will eventually be replaced by completely new ones. Unless we go back to a policy of lowering interest rates to near (or even below) 0%.
I remain infuriated that we had the confluence of:
- huge amount of very cheap money
- widespread availability of highly educated technologists
- knowledge of the climate model
.. and instead "collectively" ended up funding giveaway services to users and inflating the SF housing market rather than doing the climate Manhattan project.
(High interest rates are bad for renewables, because buying a solar panel is effectively buying 20-30 years of electricity upfront, and therefore hugely dependent on cost of capital and discount rates)
Yeah. Climate change would be dirt cheap to solve if we actually bothered to do it. The famously expensive Georgia nuclear plant cost less than 75% of what Twitter did. Juicero flushed $120M straight down the toilet.
Just don't understand how one could be convinced these days of the fundamental conceit that even a properly profitable company is necessarily going to provide good things for people downstream, or for society in general. What is the argument for that in general again?
Because to me, if your not Twitter, your Wal Mart or Raytheon or BoA. If your not shittifying a platform you are pushing out small businesses from every town, price gouging government contracts for missiles, fooling elderly people with complicated financial instruments.
I just can't really put together any argument at all, if am being honest, to justify the idea that companies with a self interest in profit will reliably help people or the world. It just does not at all feel rational, its like everyone in the world is dreaming.
> Just don't understand how one could be convinced these days of the fundamental conceit that even a properly profitable company is necessarily going to provide good things for people downstream, or for society in general.
if one has worked in a number of business it should become fairly obvious that good products and good revenue are orthogonal phenomena (sometimes they align of course)
> What is the argument for that in general again?
i think the general conceit is that bad or good product, someone is paying and they are getting some kind of value so who is anyone to say its good or bad for society?
> the idea that companies with a self interest in profit will reliably help people or the world
wasn't this idea put forth strongly by milton freidman and the chicago school - "greed is good" [1] - because more economic activity rises all...? i have to admit intuitively it sounds good even if its probably b.s [2]
> It just does not at all feel rational, its like everyone in the world is dreaming.
Let's remember that Adam Smith was against the idea of the joint stock company, a company where the shareholders and managers are different people.
He thought that smaller, owner operated businesses would outcompete joint stock companies, primarily because the incentives between owners and managers were aligned.
Managers managing other people's money will make worse decisions over the long term than managers managing their own money.
That was his theory back in 1776, things didn't turn out that way obviously.
I mean, you say "companies" but really you mean "people" because people run companies. You can't, or shouldn't, abstract away the people ultimately making decisions if you're trying to reason about this stuff.
And people can make decisions, even the ones who run companies, to balance profits with contributing to a greater good. But they choose not to.
So the people who are running these companies are choosing to prioritize profits at all costs. Some of this is because the people who operate the financial markets tell them they will be punished if they don't, but obviously there's also some agency on the part of the company leadership as well.
We need a renaissance where voters wake up and remember that companies exist at the behest of the people. A business has no god-given or natural right to exist. They apply to their state with incorporation documents, and the state (in other words, the people) decides whether or not they should exist by granting them a business charter / license.
Companies are allowed to exist because they provide some common good, in exchange for us allowing them to profit and have limited liability. I think companies have forgotten this bargain, and feel they simply have the right to exist and that their only duty is to provide profit to shareholders.
The people should hold companies to a high standard, and demand that they also serve the public good in addition to serving their shareholders. And we should revoke companies' existence when they fail to uphold their side of the bargain. When was the last time that happened to a major company--that their business charter was revoked by the government for wrongdoing? We've gotten so used to simping for companies and not holding them accountable that they now strongly believe their only obligation is to their shareholders and financial markets.
Books have been written on the subject, so an HN comment isn't going to do it. But if you consider that anyone making a mutually consentual transaction is doing it because they value the traded good more than what they're trading, it's not hard to see how a free market can provide good things for people and society in general as resources flow to where they are most valued. Of course there's nuance here (such as assuming purely rational actors, addressing realites around information asymmetry, and that macroeconomics is different than micro) but that's part of the low-level foundation.
I'm not a big fan of capitalism as it can be an utterly cruel mistress, but given the unfortunate realities of human nature I can't think of a system that is on the whole better. As long as there is scarcity, there will be something used as a basis for rationing (who gets what, and why). If it's not who is willing to pay the most, then it's who has the most powerful friends or the biggest army, or something else. There are problems with under-checked capitalism, and there are problems with over-checked capitalism. We'll never get it just right because humans aren't smart enough to, but perhaps we'll achieve post-scarcity at some point. One can hope.
I don't think I can do justice to the entire topic on here so I will just point to this small part of your reply:
> pushing out small businesses from every town
Those small businesses are also run on a for profit basis and are market driven. If there is something causing them to fail despite providing a better quality of service then perhaps we are still looking at market distortions rather than a fundamental failing of capitalism.
Free-market types used to have some assumptions about how free markets are expected to work, then they would derive the result that a free market yields a net benefit to society from those assumptions.
Now it is glaringly obvious that a free market can cause a net loss to society, but they still need to believe free markets are good. So they ignore the evidence, and instead of deriving the result from assumptions, they treat it as an axiom instead.
Isn’t the whole argument in this thread that the government meddled in the economy by printing tons of money that then was used for questionable investments? How is that “free market”?
IME 80% of criticisms of “free market” is actually a criticism of government policy (and then the same critics think that more of those policies are called for!)
Government regulation and the Fed will continue to exist in some form, at least to some small degree, so you will always be able to claim markets weren't "free" enough to properly implement a free market system. But if that's true, then it's moot; if a free-market system requires absolute purity from government to perform as intended, then it's worthless, because that will never happen. In other words, its proponents admit it's a fantasy that will only exist in their heads. As such, I have no reason to care about it or about how great some people think it is.
Fortunately, most economists already agree that market failures exist, and that free-market economics is bunk.
Or, blame meddlesome government regulation as the problem, blocking a free market and instead having winners and losers chosen by the state. It’s an effective argument because it’s got some truth to it.
IMO: Consumers will adapt to the reality, as humans always do. Once people adjust to the fact that popular brands are generally strip-mined for profit, brand loyalty will drop and keep dropping, consumers will become warier of lock-in, and the enshittification playbook will be less and less effective.
There's always going to be room for an un/poorly regulated gold rush somewhere somehow. If we drop the loyalty to major brands they will open small proxy ones and flood the market. Just an example.
I think there's a cultural problem. Companies are made of people not papers. It's people that are pushing for profits no matter what. And as lots of money with no value get made, the value of the money drops, so you need more of it. So people start thinking in terms like "I have a family to raise so fuck principles", "If I don't do it someone else will" and so on.
I'm not talking about major figures, people always focus on those. I'm talking about regular people who have no problem working for an online casino for example when they know a significant portion of their customers are underage.
So we are adapting, but in a downward spiral. That's how I see it.
The reviews are already useless. We had plenty of discussion here about that, won't go into details. Again, it was just an example, don't get stuck on it, there are a million ways to fool the public because:
1. There is just too much information to obtain to make an informed decision. There is not enough time for a regular customer to dig into all that. We know these things because we are insiders. That's why you need regulation bodies made of experts to pass legislation to protect the customer.
2. The information gatekeepers are the same who are pushing the enshittification. Where are you going to search for better service? On Google's search engine. Who processes the reviews and decides which to show, which to flag? Again, Google, Amazon, etc. You can not rely on their tools to help you inform about their service. This is why we need regulations about search results.
In conclusion we can not simply rely on customers adapting.
Build consumer trust and profit from it by deceptive betrayal. People no longer trust brands like they used to. Instead people rely on reviews, but trust in that system is eroding due to betrayal as well.
It is some sort of scam I think. The shareholders don't have the detailed knowledge and insight into the everyday work so the managerial class can squeeze out a dime for a dollar of some hard to measure asset like consumer trust or whatever.
Also, I got this feeling bigger shareholders might think they are smart and part of the scam and that they will jump ship (sell the stock) before smaller shareholders notice.
I guess e.g. Ben and Jerries would be all vanilla ice cream at this point of they were run in this way. You could always decrease the amount of nuts and fillings with 1% more without anyone noticing ...
> bigger shareholders might think they are smart and part of the scam and that they will jump ship (sell the stock) before smaller shareholders notice
Absolutely. Decades of “you can’t beat the market” propaganda has created a large class of “investors” whose only strategy is buy all of the stocks and hope for the best.
I’ve also pondered over this recently. Many social media companies have incentives that are unaligned with their platform users’ best interests. For example, creating more engagement through polarizing or negative content, trying to maximize the time people are glued to screens to eke out ad money, the turning around to sell or exploit personal data.
Frustratingly, they almost have a legal fiduciary duty to behave this way as currently structured, as their only mandate is to increase value for shareholders. Negative externalities on users, employees, or society at large are not relevant to decision making at all.
The conclusion I found is that the only ethical solution would be to create a cooperative public benefit corporation. With that structure, the company has a mandate to do right by their customers, their employees, and society as a whole in measurable ways.
This only happens when the users are the product or its a marketplace. Most business models dont suffer from shittification. But VCs love investing in the ones that do.
I would say the opposite. Consumers frequently reward the business models that do whatever it takes to lower prices in the short term, often sacrificing the long term.
It is a constant struggle to convince people that your higher quality product/service is worth the extra cost, and obviously, many times it is not.
But the formula for operating a successful, long term business is not as simple as “output the best quality product or service you can, and you will be rewarded”. It is more like “output the best quality product or service you can relative to prices of competing sellers, and at prices your clientele can afford”.
Which may or may not include sellers that have access to much cheaper money (VC, bigger companies with other revenue streams, etc), or sellers operating in different jurisdictions with lower costs.
It’s not that consumers don’t reward quality. It’s that more consumers reward lower prices, and once outside money is involved you have to chase growth instead of steady profits.
Family owned businesses are often able to maintain very high quality. They’ll just never make enough to satisfy people looking for huge returns, which is nearly anyone who doesn’t have some deeper connection to the company.
Sure, but in those industries the users leave, the company suffers and the executives get fired. VC are attracted to moaty business models where users cant leave.
In Canada the once beloved brick and mortar retailer Mountain Equipment Coop shittified itself straight to (pandemic) bankruptcy hard and fast not long after the Harvard MBA types got their hands on the business. MEC was late to the party. Much of mall retail had already shittified itself ages ago.
It seems to be happening everywhere. Give the worst product you can get away with while using marketing to get people to keep upgrading before they realize how bad the product is. While progressively lowering the quality of the product each year. "Planned Obsolescence" is the physical product equivalent of digital enshittification.
For an example of literal enshittification see water companies in England. Not discharging raw sewage into rivers and the sea would interfere with dividends to the PE owners.
Apple's been around for a long time, and if anything I would attribute it to the force of will of Steve Jobs. By the time he was dead, Apple had such a huge cash pile that they're no longer beholden to investors in quite the same way. They now only have to worry about ordinary market complaints from shareholders.
(don't forget the Wilderness Years, Apple came close to death)
also the company that stays small will get clobbered by the vc backed competitor. they will build more features, have more marketing and lower cost during the growth phase.
Enshittification is a (very good) name for when you start off with naturally non-scarce information resource, and later impose artificial scarcity on it in order to make the moneys. It's like building a theme park, and only later adding walls and a turnstyle that checks for tickets. Of course people are going to hate you for doing that.
The analogy is good but I don’t think the name is very apt. It seems that we are just increasing the price of something not making the quality worse. Often that leads to higher quality—why do people prefer Disneyland to cheaper parks?
In my view, every software product has two parts: the product, and the artificial scarcity. Rarely is the later simply a paywall anymore, as in the metaphor. Instead, business school graduates are tasked with finding every angle to make a profit, from injecting ads, to building a marketplace, to selling surveillance data for profit, and a thousand other schemes. In reality there is a combinatorial explosion of profit schemes, since they sometimes are only viable in brittle combinations. (As engineers we often see this on the front end when an iframe loads a script which pulls a script from somewhere which rewrites the page, and so on. This is where the rubber meets the road, and the tech reflects the complexity of the deals.) The net result for the user may not be a paywall, but a slower, less responsive, more brittle product. For the eng team, it feels like coding in molasses.
Funny timing, as I just described Duolingo's recent trajectory as being an example of "enshittification" to someone who was angry that they have to do even more "quests" this month than any previous one, to earn the monthly badge (merely a fun thing on your profile to look back on). Gotta drive that engagement and keep users in-app as long as possible...
to be fair, practicing is a pretty essential component to learning a new language. "increasing engagement" also means more practice. Its not an entirely selfish motivation.
Duolingo formerly had conversational language lessons, which were 100% audio (not even able to see text on screen). These were phenomenal for actually learning to speak <language>, compared to the generated garbage in the lessons.
Duolingo formerly had lessons that explain new concepts, like a particular verb tense. It doesn't seem to have any of them once changing over the to completely linear lesson tree.
I believe that Duolingo has fallen into a logical trap. They can easily track app engagement. It is known that regular practice is the key to learning a language, but they incorrectly forget the quality of the interactions. I've got my Duolingo 800 day streak still kicking, but I've learned almost nothing with the changes over the last year or so. I'm not terribly sure why I even use the app anymore, as there are plenty of anki decks with the same quality content. (The only thing I'd lose is the speech recognition, but that's so laughably bad that it reinforces incorrect pronunciation.)
Their learning experience has got progressively worse with each update. Literally every time they do a major change to the UI they remove something useful. At the moment the tree is now divided into multiple sections. It used to be divided into concepts so I could choose what to learn about. Not really possible anymore. The only reason I am still using it is to preserve my streak. If I ever forgot and break it I'm pretty sure I'll just give up. It stopped teaching me a long time ago.
If you ignore human psychology, ... well, you're probably not making a great app.
Why have vanity badges, or other kinds of gamification, to begin with?
Because it gives users an added incentive, through an added reward, a goal, which helps them get through something that could otherwise be too tedious or un-fun for them to endure.
And if everybody agrees that the added goal aligns with the user's actual goal, that's a great strategy.
But you get what you reward, because people like to get rewards. The dopamine rush of knowing you'll reach the goal.
If the rewards stop helping users towards their real goals, and you've trained them to work towards your goals already, you'll get people doing daily tasks to get daily rewards that they shouldn't really care about. But they do. Because you made them care.
And you might have replaced their intrinsic motivation, wanting to learn a language, with an extrinsic goal, wanting to get a reward. And if they then stop caring about the extrinsic goal, they just might stop entirely.
Messing with people's motivations is dangerous, and "driving engagement" is the absolutely most useless reason to do so.
The perceived significance of the reward is irrelevant and doesn't affect whether its degradation is "enshittification" or not. It's not excluded from that categorization because it's considered a "trivial" feature. In fact, I'd argue it's specifically a good example of enshittification because it's one of the very few things that's actually just "a nice thing" the developers added, that was previously a nice friendly thing to grant when someone gains 1000xp in a month. A cool badge. Fun. They didn't have to have this nice little thing, but they did. That's cool, right?
If you use the app regularly (as you "should" if you're learning a language), you will absolutely certainly get the badge. Well, that is, until recently, because some of the quests can be difficult to accomplish. No longer is it just a nice consistent monthly thumbs-up in the form of a fun little badge, it's now a source of uncertainty and perhaps even a source of anxiety for people who are driven by "collecting" (e.g. "achievement hunters"). Sure sounds like enshittification to me, regardless of how big a deal it is.
> The perceived significance of the reward is irrelevant
Completely false.
A vanity badge that's based on some effort, has a value equal to the effort required. Unlike increasing requirements for core functionality where you have increased effort for the same reward, increasing requirements for an effort-based vanity item increases its value in exact proportion to the effort.
> A vanity badge that's based on some effort, has a value equal to the effort required.
Completely false
Effort has no direct relationship to value in anything. See job wages for a few billion examples. There are high paying jobs that require little cumulative effort and little on-going effort. There are low paying jobs that require high cumulative effort and high on-going effort.
I think it's completely reasonable to describe the user-perceived degradation of a feature, regardless of its importance, for the purpose of benefit to the business and its profits, as "enshittification". Your opinion differs, but my opinion is not "false". I mean, believe what you want, but you're trying to invalidate my opinion by simply sharing your own, which I'm not sure has much purpose at all in a conversation.
> I mean, believe what you want, but you're trying to invalidate my opinion by simply sharing your own, which I'm not sure has much purpose at all in a conversation.
If they have a different opinion that's fine too. Discussion shouldn't have a first mover advantage.
If badges motivated learners to do things that benefited them, but now (they feel) badges motivate behavior that benefits the app maker more instead … that would be a clear example of enshittification.
Rule 34 needs a twin:
Anything can be useful.
Therefore, anything can be enshittified. And will be.
> If badges motivated learners to do things that benefited them, but now (they feel) badges motivate behavior that benefits the app maker more instead … that would be a clear example of enshittification.
But you don't know that the aggregate user base feels that way. In fact, it might actually be much better for learners, like the top comment says: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611749
The person I replied to talked about 1 person getting angry about the change, but that doesn't mean it is bad for everyone and is not evidence of enshittification based on data.
The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse incentives.
This seems to be universally true, and when it becomes apparent that advertising doesn't work and isn't profitable, dark patterns are the best that you can hope for.
Short of a company having the internal need for a generally useful distributed communications platform, as well as a willingness to release it relatively freely, I struggle to see how this gets resolved.
> The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse incentives.
Only because, despite their immense importance, those platforms are essentially unregulated.
Imagine water suppliers were unregulated. There would also be "perverse incentives", such as doctors paying them to add poison to the water so they get more patients and can make more money. But nothing like that ever happens, because there are rules such companies must abide by. Therefore, they simply sell water for money, and that's it. There are no incentives to extract more profits through other means, because anything else is prohibited.
I fail to see why analogous regulation wouldn't work for online communication platforms.
I find it weird that you think “regulation” is needed to stop people from committing crimes. That’s already illegal! Anyway your example is silly because no one would buy water from a producer that poisons it. The potential profit to doctors is low as well. At least you could have chosen something more realistic.
Water being regulated is probably the biggest cause of shortages in the US West. Prices are set too low (especially for certain buyers) and it causes overconsumption. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons that public management has failed to resolve.
Locality is one issue, and the fact that it's significantly less vital means that it's generally not a matter of life and death.
As far as doctors bribing water suppliers to get more customers, the law is seldom enough to discourage bad behaviour when you're expecting not to get caught or the fines are too low for criminality to be profitable.
> The need to have a for profit platform leads to perverse incentives.
The need to have profit is the goal of any business.
The problem isn't that. The need for profit has been entirely replaced with the need for continuous unimpeded growth. Which is decidedly not the same thing, but no one cares anymore, and profit doesn't even come into equation anymore.
> The need to have profit is the goal of any business.
This isn't true. A non-profit is still a business. Charities are businesses. Cooperatives can make profit. Also (almost) no-one thinks small businesses making modest profit and riding the ups and downs alongside others in a locale is a problem.
The problems arise in companies that choose to only or mainly focus on profit. Most capital funds don't make anything themselves other than money, which they extract from businesses that do make things. You can claim that they're market-correcting forces that allow money to easily move between different areas of human interest... but ultimately their product is their own enrichment. The speed and convenience they provide might be an illusion created by their apparent success. It might be better that our markets and locales develop more slowly; if more smaller scale investors made a wider range of decisions, rather than a handful of large ones making most of them.
I think part of the problem, but also reason for existing, of the growth whatever it takes mindset is, that as long as there is growth, no matter how artificial or not, you can keep up make-belief, that the business is viable and investors are going to belive either just that, or that they can enter now and exit before the bubble bursts. It does not matter to most investors, whether the business is actually viable in the long run, or makes any sense, as long as they see or believe there to be an opportunity to extract money out of the bubble.
A bit like trying to extract energy out of vacuum, except, that due to our believe system of economics, it can actually work for them.
When the goals of the customers and the goals of the company are at odds, things will never work out long term.
But I disagree that the continuous growth model is the cause, although I certainly believe that it frequently adds fuel to the fire (growing a company when it's making a loss on a per customer basis frequently leads to accelerating death spirals as well as all manner of desperate measures).
Maybe it is a sunk cost fallacy? I.e. not aiming for some stupid amount of growth is the same thing as telling the VCs you have failed and wasted their money.
So going for some unhealthy revenue target is the path of least resistance, since the failure still is in the future.
Oh it worked alright. FB could have a 6% gross margin and operate forever - but people wouldn’t bet phenomenally rich. Let’s not pretend they even had to pay anyone off at their profitability.
It only doesn’t work for outsized expectations after a decade of interest binge party.
The problem is decline in elitism(in the arts, in politics, in the academy..) but nobody wants to hear that in these populist times. Democracy+markets are working extremely well for the masses, giving them exactly what they want.
Ted Gioia the music critic has made a lot of good observations on these issues. In particular, artists, intellectuals and politicians of old used to lead, persuade, and pull their audience along with them. Today, everyone simply panders.
There is a possibly more general phenomenon where a brand gets good reputation and then begins cutting cost and people will still buy at the high price. I don't know if that one has a name or if it's the same concept as enshittification.
> he reduced his costs and increased his profits at the expense of poorer performance [...] so the Muntz TVs were adequate for a very large fraction of his customers. And for those [...] where the Muntz TVs did not work, those could be returned at the customer's additional effort and expense, and not Muntz's. He focused less resources in the product [...] and focused more resources on advertising and sales promotions.
While reading this I thought "This guy is a used car salesman if I've ever seen one", and he was! haha
Is this a product of the way modern MBAs are taught? Seems to be a standard playbook of building reputation, scaling and then aggressive optimisation and cost cutting.
That's what Doctorow literally says in the podcast:
> Facebook was going to be the social media service that never spied on you back in 2006. And once people were locked in, it, you know, did the Darth Vader MBA thing.
I’ve used Facebook practically since it launched and I don’t recall “not spying” ever being something that was a part of it. If anything the opposite—everyone thought it was creepy the level of personal details it revealed to others (but used it anyway).
I wonder what the people at the top of large corps (Pichai, Zuckerberg, Musk et al) think of this perspective and how its increasingly dominating the narrative about what they do. Are they mystified or perplexed by it? Worried? Or do they just think: hey, you figured it out in the end?
I think the latter. These guys aren’t consumers in the same way most of the public is. They are beholden to other bounds and checks which keeps them in place. I had the pleasure to go along for a week with a bunch of CEOs, one was a former billionaire and he had stories that really emphasize how insulated they are from the rest of society.
I mean imagine that traveling is all by jet, that everyone you meet is at least a millionaire, that work can be done everywhere on the planet.
I was listening to a programme on the radio the other day and they highlighted the same thing as you. Put a billionaire in a party with average people (with money, health worries etc) and they would be unable to relate to any of the other party goers. So removed they are from general life that they might as well be aliens was the conclusion.
The internet is so lame and boring now days, its become so predictable and routine. I remember the internet back in the 90s and 00s, it was a completely different place, it felt massive and mysterious like each door you opened led to a another universe with all kinds of stuff going on, discussions on any topic you could fathom were taking place 24/7 all the time. Now we have discord servers with hundreds of users but no one speaks.. the cool myspace culture that promoted individualism and self expression has been replaced by the souless uniformed facebook experience. Rather than being able to speak your mind you have to walk on egg shells everywhere you go now as to not upset the corporations or status quo mentality.
The internet was the mysterious wild west, Now its just a boring corporate meeting room.
This comes up frequently on HN and it isn't true. The internet has many more users than back then. You can still find your weird niche on the internet today.
Just posted today, private blogs of HN users:
https://dm.hn/
Then there's neocities, weird subreddits, 4chan, niche forums still running on phpBB discussing all kinds of stuff.
You seem to expect that niche communities should've scaled with the rest of the internet. Like, back then, there were a few million people online. Now it's billions, but the few millions still online in their niches aren't interesting enough for you. Why?
If there were millions or even thousands using 4chan the board would be moving so fast as soon as you found a thread to post in it would have been trimmed from the board. And 4chan is THE most popular image board.
I hate to be the bringer of bad news bud, but their isnt as many people online as you think there are.
I have also noticed this is as well. The discussion online has been double-stratified - it's either really low quality or really bland.
Most people are afraid to say anything interesting or different from the popular things/status quo, because social media conditions people to not rock the boat too much because they'll get downvoted/banned. Niche or interesting things just die.
The remainder of places have become incredibly toxic due to the remaining people's frustrations with everything as well.
Am I on the same internet? If social media taught people one thing, it is to rock the boat as hard as possible, because only this gives them attention. Twitter is called the hellsite for a reason.
What is it that you want? Intelligent discussion, but not too strange, but interesting, not too toxic, but you wanna say what you think and you feel like you can't say what you think, because then "the others" come with their toxic bullshit?!
The flamewars on social media are fundamentally outraging and shocking, but I don't find them any strange. Maybe my usage of "rocking the boat" was a bit inappropriate, I apologise. I definitely didn't want to say I don't want "too strange" stuff.
It's just that the topics people talk about are very narrow, and even on the most heated twitter thread it's mostly the same stuff. There is nothing novel in there.:(
I espouse a belief that apps have two cycles, one of growth, another of exploitation.
In the first, cash is burnt/used to give free goodies and provide good quality services. Rents are a byproduct and not a goal during this phase of the operation, the goal here is to build goodwill and market share through measures that the competition can't match. All in all, it is a good experience to use the service during this stage.
The second stage of the operation is all about rent-seeking. Portions get smaller, ads are deployed in full force, all of the bridges in and out are lifted so value can stay inside the ecosystem. Prices in general go up and it is time to cash out all of that goodwill and market share for money. Owners and founders generally sell during or before this stage, as the business will lose consumer confidence and competitors will gnaw at its heels until it becomes just another bad app/store in a very saturated market.
I remember reading a multiwork series on The Office (US) and it used terms like 'psychopaths' and 'sucker' to describe how organizations grow and die when the 'psychopaths' at the top decide to cash out, I'd point to their exit as the turning point in my text.
I can't back up what I feel with books or research, just what I've seen by looking at the progression of big businesses in my country. Apps, burger boutiques, consulting firms, even the furniture builder guy that lives around the block, all of them went through this cycle.
I’ve been burned by this often enough that the more investment a new product takes on the less likely I am to use it. Take notion, 300 million in funding at a 10 billion valuation. At an average $10 a month they need a billion user months to make back that valuation. Let’s say they have a time horizon of ten years to do that, that means they need at least 10 million paying users, but that is ignoring operating costs, acquisition costs. So in reality it is more like 20 million users paying for a decade. How do you get that many paying users? Lure them with a “free forever” product then force them to pay once their data is locked into the product. That’s how evernote got my wife to pay up, as all her recipes are in there. That’s why I will never use notion, no matter how nice it is.
I don’t think it’s realistic to expect to get useful stuff for free. However you’re right that having all your data locked in with a provider that can arbitrarily raise prices is unappealing. Still, many people do find Notion valuable so they probably think it’s worth the risk. In the end it’s still possible to migrate elsewhere even if it’s annoying.
Your calculation is roughly correct but a p/e of 10 is kinda low so probably you can halve the numbers at least.
Reforge talks about your cycle - I can't find the exact artcile but you can see it with marketplaces a lot - i.e. Facebook creates APIs for events, 3rd parties build platforms on these APIs, Facebook kills the API access. This is the closest article I could find related to "tactics" https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-loops
How much of enshitification can be explained by rampant managerialism?
Managers need to feel powerful, hire more managers.
Managers need to meet their performance targets or just want to carve their own little Mt Rushmore face in the product, wacky user hostile decisions ensue.
The problem is, essentially, all of the wealth and power is concentrated inside of venture capitalists and rich stock holders. These are people who invest in a product without actually using or caring about the product, so it leads to perverse incentives to infinitely grow or corner a market at all costs.
Family owned businesses, employee owned businesses, privately owned businesses etc all manage to better avoid this problem because they don't have to listen to outside voices telling them grow or die.
It's not enough to be profitable and successful, but also you need to siphon as much value out of consumers as you can so you can pass along the money to these vultures. Then once the company has picked everything dry, they write it off as a failure and move on.
Aside: Someone recently complained about the use of the term "enshittification". It first appeared on HN 6 months ago[0], coined by Cory Doctorow and has since shown up in over 400 comments.
No point to this comment, other than that I find it interesting how these things spread.
It spreads because it's a political term that is acceptable on Hacker News (or, at least, I haven't seen dang cracking down on it), so those trying to make HN political are very enthusiastic about using it.
When is this from? A few days ago (when it was already posted with a different url) or earlier in the year Februaryish when Doctorow wrote his stuff on enshittification of TikTok etc? Is this actually new?
I felt like I wasn't going to write this comment again, but here we go:
I don't like the word enshittification. People glom onto it because they like shaking sticks more than solving problems, and Corey Doctorow is excellent at exploiting that desire. It's annoying how he enables that sense of defeatism when he's obviously aware of resilient and game-changing alternative software (like FOSS) that has revolutionized the world in his lifetime. Putting pearls before swine makes for nice fiction, but it's a bad tool for explaining real life phenomena like this.
"Enshittification" is a very fun and usable thesis. It also obfuscates the problem and fetishizes it's own victimhood instead of enabling users to resist lock-in.
Given that he actively promotes said alternatives that "he is aware of", I find your claim of him enabling defeatism more than a little disingenous.
For example, he's the reason I'm supporting the devs of pidgin despite not even directly using that software myself, because he wrote a thread on how nobody donates to it even though it apparently is important enough for bad actors to post bounties for sharing zero day bugs that lets them break into it.
More importantly, the term "enshittification" does the exact opposite of "obfuscating the problem". It comes with a very concrete description of a pattern of how things are made worse that most people have felt but had no word for until now. It can also seen to be played out over and over again. It even has predictive powers.
Which means people can now describe a problem without having to write five paragraphs explaining the issue. Or needing the skill to write it in the first place. That's what words are for. That's what sharing ideas is for. Are you going to blame people for relying on a doctor's diagnosis instead of studying medicine themselves too?
And by finally being able to quickly identify an issue, people can start taking active steps against it. Which is the exact opposite of what you are claiming.
But hey, how dare people speak up about issues that affect them them without immediately knowing how to solve/having the means to solve a large systemic problem that other people with more power and money inflict upon them, I guess.
Naming things is not easy. Naming things is hard. I am glad that we have this word now and it is catching on. Because all of us know and see and understand what the problem with platforms are.
I don't think it obfuscates the problem.
Step 1 to fixing a difficult problem. Give it a good name.
The Traveling Salesman problem could well have been called "The NP-hard problem" but TSP is a good name.
Unfortunately most people that become popular by whipping up outrage only really know how to continue doing that to stay visible. It's much easier to identify open problems than to solve them; this is why they remain open problems. Stallman is actually a very prominent exception to this. Not only did he whip up outrage but he then created a principled movement behind his outrage and push forward progress in his ideas. While I do think he lost the plot a bit recently, most don't even get half as far.
(I always found that a bit ironic about Doctorow. He identifies problems with social media but uses its preferred form of virality to spread his own message.)
I think it's a good term in that it describes what's happening from the users perspective instead of from the businesses perspective, so more people can identify with it. It's the outsiders view of what happens to a business that sees itself as "milking the product".
(I'll say it again). I like the term "enshittification" - it implies a deliberate intention that is missing from degradation. And regression merely implies reversion towards a previous state.
Enshittification is a deliberate process: provide a (typically cheap/free) service, (dominate the field,) lock users into it, and exploit to the maximum possible in the short term, ultimately destroying the service.
Corey is just an anomaly. Sometimes those "twee neologisms" like the GNU Public License do their job, and bring platforms to their knees. When applied well, great thinkers can use the system to their advantage and come out on top. Doctorow is a good-natured person who just loves to languish in his own helplessness, and it feels like none of us are the better for it.
The question is: can / will something be done about anytime soon. The age of innocence is long gone. The textbook on surveillance capitalism has been written. The importance of sane digital interactions and its role in helping solve other more stuborn problems is also obvious.
Airline travel has certainly become a lot shittier since I first began flying in the 1970s. In fact, it used to be comfortable, cool, fun, and glamorous, and the stewardesses used to be beautiful and polite.
Airports are not much nicer than they were before -- at least not in the US. Also, the fact that friends and family cannot go through security basically outweighs any number of luxury goods stores dotting the terminals.
I like the term as it's very specific and relatable, especially when applied to two-sided markets facilitated on a centralized platform.
None of this should come as a surprise though and we can merely see it as one mode of capitalism working as intended. The problem wouldn't be nearly as bad if the companies were family owned rather than by venture capitalists and investors.
Institutional isomorphisms (to use a more technical term) are far older than current platform capitalism and are often a reaction to uncertainty. I'd see the current phenomena as a natural extension of the original concept.
Really, isn't this just all corporations?
Walmart has long "Enshittification" of small towns.
It is Moloch again, driving to lowest common denominator, what is the worst thing we can do (cheapest), that people will still buy.
Twitter was never a bastion of democratic free speech, and was never going to be, they were always a corporation selling advertising.
For a brief time when Trump was on twitter, a lot of people got riled up and though it was supposed to be a free 'town square' of discourse. But, it's just advertising and eye-balls. I think Musk got caught up in this 'free speech and democracy' hype and thought Twitter was more than it was.
I like the term "enshittification" - it implies a deliberate intention that is missing from degradation. Regression merely implies reversion towards a previous state.
Enshittification is a deliberate process: provide a (typically cheap/free) service, dominate the field, lock users into it, and exploit to the maximum possible in the short term, ultimately destroying the service.
We do need a word for reduction in quality for the purpose of increasing profits. For liquids and foodstuffs, the terms are "denatured" or "adulterated", and for solid materials "ersatz". None of those are applicable to services.
"Enshittification" captures the concept of reducing quality to increase profits not by reducing product cost, but by degrading the user experience to make the product more profitable. It's not the same as "quality fade", where the product keeps getting worse and the seller hopes no one will notice for a while.
If you turn that judgemental eye on your own post I'm sure you'll be able to see which internet stereotypes you're conforming to and why it's being downvoted into oblivion.
No, that means I'm right. It's almost always the case that when I post real valuable information that I get paid to know in real life, or else unreported but true things about the insides of major tech companies, it gets voted to -2-ish or people argue with me and tell me it's impossible. This is called job security.
What gets you upvoted is common knowledge you were already ready to hear.
Expert advice. This is very important information to know if you run an Internet forum, social media site, gaming convention, etc, anything where a lot of guys show up who call women "females" in conversation.
Back in the day it was a comic about a guy wearing a fedora who made overly smart quips about everything, and there were some rather embarrassing comics where the author pined over a woman named Megan in a way that made it seem like he was either an incel or not over his ex.
I think OP is probably miscategorizing him. Randall Munroe (xkcd) is still in his 30s and is a millenial, while Cory Doctorow is in his 50s.
Are there some xkcd comics that were somewhat fringe or haven't aged as well as one would hope? Sure. But if OP is complaining about grown men in their 30s acting like they're trying to impress college friends, well, Randall was in college when he started writing xkcd.
At any rate, Cory Doctorow is a professional spokesperson and spends his life doing ideological marketing. Coining a more memorable term like "enshittification" that clearly gets more mindspace and traction than something like "regression" is just an example of him doing his job properly.
Dumbifying and polarizing the debate, pro-business or anti-business (no matter what the "business" is up to), pro-government or anti-government (ditto) is the pattern of our times. Its part of the enshittification process and ultimately a tool for control.
Informed people who understand the nuance, tradeoffs and choices involved are, in a sense, the enemy.
I said "with anti-capitalist opinions" not "is an anti-capitalist" or "anti-business" -- maybe I should have made it clearer: has some anti-capitalist opinions?
In any case, it's not meant as a slur but a compliment, in my case.
> Most Twitter users barely tweet and don't care about followers - a "heavy user" tweets on average less than three times a week. So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good.
> It is exactly that content that Twitter's new model relies on promoting - and those newly-minted blue ticks are quickly learning that there is no magic behind the checkmarks. New followers are not magically heading their way. The problem wasn't a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good.
> That means lots of blue ticks stop paying - but everyone else is forced to read the low-quality content that the remaining blue ticks produce. This is what is powering the enshittification of Twitter.
(From: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitt...)