Highlights
- Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
- When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users.
- Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search.
- Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees).
- first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50% ads.
- 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.
- Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic.
- it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden.
- Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay.
- ou’ll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.
- The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:
- platforms allocate surpluses to key performers – as a convincer in a “Big Store” con, a way to rope in other suckers who’ll make content for the platform,
- TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count.
- You can’t use attention as a medium of exchange.
- You can’t use it as a store of value. You can’t use it as a unit of account.
- Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with “fiat” currency in exchange for it.
- The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios
- internet has devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:
- We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet.
- It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge.
- Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.
- policymakers should focus on freedom of exit – the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created
- They make more money when they take away our freedom – our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.