The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok

A lot of good observations, context, connection-making, and generally clear thinking in this piece about social media and platforms in general and how they inevitably (?) destroy themselves through their “business models.” Or rather, perhaps, how “montetization” destroys digital “products” built around or for online coomunities.

This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

Great summary paragraph about Facebook in particular:

Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you’re a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It’s a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a “pivot to video” based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves.

(The phrase “pivot to video” still makes my blood boil.)

I’m always interested in what Cory Doctorow has to say, but had missed this piece from January until yesterday afternoon when I heard him discussing it and related concepts with Brooke Gladstone on On the Media yesterday on WBEZ. Part of the discussion on the show: how the current regulatory environment facilitates bad outcomes by tipping the scales in favor of big companies at the expense of consumers and innovation.

A good read with lots of prerequisites to understand before imagining alternative ways of building sustainable platforms.