“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.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.” More from Cory Doctorow here.
Categories: Notes
The Cultural Gutter 
Thank you for sharing this essay. It helps to see everything I suspected about platform demise verified and centralized in one place. I left Facebook a few years ago, and I left Twitter last month. I was never on TikTok (though our daughters are near-addicts), which leaves only Instagram. Well, and YouTube, now that I have a video there. And therein lies the rub: I need to promote my work *somewhere,* at least until I find a proper literary agent. I refuse to desecrate my website with ads (for all the pennies I would earn from doing so). My website belongs to me, and to me alone. If you enjoy it, please throw a few bucks my way. If not, thank you for visiting anyway. 🙂
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