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Cory Doctorow on the "enshittification" of social media
I had the chance to go to a very interesting talk recently by a guy named Cory Doctorow who is mainly a sci-fi writer but has an interest in tech and the place of tech in society -- what I would call "broadly Electronic Frontier Foundation-type issues." He talked about a kind of typical lifecycle of tech/social media giants (a kind of preview, I guess, of his upcoming book), where benefits originally offered to users are gradually withdrawn in favor of being given to advertisers which are then gradually withdrawn in order to accrue to the company itself and its shareholders, a process he calls the "enshittificaton" of social media. Given that, uh, two major social media sites have had meltdowns in the last month (Reddit's CEO implementing new policies regarding third party apps leading to a protest and exodus, plus Twitter's extended ongoing shitshow, the latest development being that Twitter started capping how many tweets a user can load, possibly due to a shoddy code rollout or because Twitter refuses to pay its cloud computing bills (either way, some kind of cost-cutting measure no doubt led to this situation)) and that I generally like ranting about the sad state of modern social media, I thought I would write a DW post summarizing the talk / his points because it seems relevant!
Doctorow's basic point about how social media run by tech giants works is that:
First: Tech companies give a bunch of free goodies/services to users to attract them to using a platform in the first place and thus lock them in. The reason being: for social media, moving to a new platform is a collective action problem that many people have to coordinate on -- are people moving? If so, when, and which alternative are we moving to? As a result, once people are on a site, there is quite a lot of inertia involved in getting them to move off that site, which means that there is an opportunity to gradually make the site worse and worse while retaining your userbase, because finding an alternative takes a while to get off the ground and has a high cost associated with it.
Second: Once you've attracted a large userbase and then locked them into a site, they become prime fodder for advertising. So then you reach out to business/enterprise/paid customers and offer to sell them your users' data/attention/eyeballs/clicks/etc. These commercial customers then get locked into the site/platform in much the same way users did.
Finally: Once you've locked in paid users, you then bilk them by giving them less and less bang for their buck too. This part of the process includes practices like ad fraud (making up/exaggerating engagement numbers on ads that companies buy) and blocking the ability for normal users who like/follow corporate accounts because they're interested in their products to be able to see regular (non-paid) updates from those accounts even though they are following them like a normal account. The result is that the social media company is increasingly able to convert the money it gets from these paid customers into profits which it kicks back to its shareholders. Meanwhile, every user's experience on the site continues to get shittier and shittier.
I'm not sure if this model applies to every social media site, but for sure the paradigmatic ones seem to be Google and Facebook. In particular, it is noticeable (as pointed out by Doctorow) that Google's main draw used to be that (as a search engine) it was able to connect people with the content that they were searching for; similarly, Facebook at the beginning (like the old LiveJournal it was based on) was designed around people connecting with people they wanted to keep in touch with and wanted updates from. In short, it used to be the case that the whole point of these sites was to only show people the things that they wanted to see.
Welp, that's thoroughly gone and not only that, it's honestly hard to remember that time because social media and web services (from Google search to Tiktok to Spotify) are SO heavily tilted nowadays in favor of the model of pushing unrequested content on you, often in the form of unending "content discovery" recommendations. I've seen lots of complaints that Google Search is becoming increasingly unusable because the top hits are mainly filled with dodgy, search-engine-optimized, bloated, slow-loading websites with tons of ads rather than a lean, fast-loading website that has the information you need and nothing else, which is what you actually were looking for when searching.
Anyway, this isn't particularly surprising. Tech companies are essentially doing the age-old thing of exploiting a monopoly / non-competitive market situation in order to extract profit. Businesses typically look for these kinds of opportunities and squat on them for as long as they can once they find them. Insofar as there's something new about tech companies, it's just that digital products like websites/apps allow for making business model tweaks (e.g. tweaks to pricing, tweaks to content-pushing, etc.) (1) very quickly, and (2) in a very opaque way. (Compare this to brick-and-mortar businesses where making changes (e.g. to inventory, store layout, etc.) is both (1) very slow to roll out and (2) easy for people to detect/verify/talk about.) As a result, tech companies often have more corners to hide in on their quest to extract profit, and users/regulators often have to play catch-up in order to detect and punish this behavior.
As monopoly exploitation is an old problem, the old solutions exist: you need to use antitrust law and the enforcement thereof in order to do things like break up/prevent monopolies and implement structural separation -- limiting what functions a single business can adopt i.e. limiting the capability of a business to cut out/subsume middlemen into its business (vertically integrate). Structural separation basically has the effect of creating new (competitive) market structures that wouldn't otherwise exist.
(Sidenote related to structural separation: this article has an interesting analysis of the writer's strike, Hollywood, and streaming platforms that discusses how streaming companies that also own the media they distribute (Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Paramount, etc.) are currently flailing right now because they have no ability to determine how much the individual content on their site is worth, because there are no markets. By creating limits on what parts of business a single business is allowed to operate in (e.g. content production has to be separate from content distribution; lending has to be separate from credit evaluation; etc.), you create markets at those boundaries and therefore exchange prices that help companies estimate the value of their commodities. I think social media functions a bit differently from streaming/content distribution platforms, but they share some properties like (1) they are a platform, which tends to have its own dynamics and also monopoly potential, and (2) there seems to be somewhat of a mismatch or misalignment between the costs of operating the website/service/platform and where/how you charge people money, which I think leads to odd phenomena. Essentially, the weird thing about platforms is that the platform itself and how widely it has been adopted by the public itself forms a source of value, but one that is difficult to put a price tag on...)
Anyway, Cory Doctorow also went into some tech-specific solutions. Legislation and regulation of the ability of social media to use monopoly to extract profit is important, but it is very slow. Alongside that, users themselves can also use rapidly-changing technology in order to thwart attempts of social media sites to lock them into monopolies and undesirable experiences -- some examples he listed are things like ad blockers, device jailbreaks, DRM removal, as well as interoperability (that is, creating standards that make it easier for a user to transfer their data (their created content, their friends lists, etc.) to a different website so that the barrier to exiting is low -- obviously, this has not happened yet when it comes to social media although it has happened with certain proprietary file formats e.g.). (Edit: Now that I think about it, I think interoperability played a significant role in helping users move from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth, so that's something worth noting.)
It was a very interesting discussion. Obviously, small companies like Dreamwidth really do not fit into the above model, being much smaller, not beholden to shareholders, and having a very different profit model from most social media sites (a freemium model where users pay for extra features and to support the site -- this aligns the usefulness and functionality of the website with its price a lot more, in a way that I think staves off this enshittification process).
Archive of Our Own / OTW is also an interesting case. It too basically now has a monopoly in the fanfiction space (given the decline and increasing irrelevance of ff.net) and has ALSO undergone a meltdown in the past month (more quietly, though, and in a way that largely hasn't negatively affected users' experience of the site, which makes it much less severe than the other meltdowns mentioned). It is not a profit-making endeavor, though, and its governance is much more democratic than any of the social media discussed above, which I think makes it significantly different from the previous cases. ...Also setting aside the fact that it technically isn't a social media site... but it kind of is, and in any case, it's still a major platform with a large userbase and one where you can see a high cost of leaving / no real alternatives is largely keeping that userbase locked in.
Tumblr is also an interesting case. I don't really know how to analyze it using the above framework. It is a profit-making venture owned by various... mid-sized tech companies in its lifetime... but one that has never managed to actually turn a profit. Possibly that's because the fannish-leaning userbase is very hard to monetize. It's certainly not immune to experiencing meltdowns of its own that send people running to the hills of other social media (see Tumblr porn ban), but overall it has managed to pull off the feat of "coming in first place just by managing to not fuck up." It is also a site that has been in a long-term technological arms race with user-created tools like xkit that keep the site usable when it very much does not want to be usable. Very possibly, the fact that Tumblr doesn't experience dramatic enshittification is simply because it was always, and still is, pretty shit. Over the past few months, I've seen a lot of smugness (in a self-deprecating way) from Tumblr users in response to all these social media refugees, this kind of amusement that all these social media sites are imploding and yet somehow Tumblr is still standing like this unkillable cockroach. I know that smugness is heavily irony-laced, but even still, I'm not really sure Tumblr users have much to be smug about here. In addition to the porn ban exodus, there is also the fact that Tumblr as a website nurtured the whole anti phenomenon and purity politics -- as far as I'm aware, it started there and we export it to other websites whenever Tumblr bleeds users. I feel like Tumblr users should at least feel a bit... wary of how unpleasant of an experience being on Tumblr can be, and also that it doesn't really have much in the way of defenses against site-initiated meltdowns, same as Reddit and Twitter. That Tumblr users happen to have it good for now probably isn't a guarantee they'll continue to do so in the future, although I agree it's been a long, long time of people trying to monetize Tumblr and utterly failing, so maybe that does suggest some special armor here. I don't know.
Anyway, I hope this was interesting to read and helps make sense of recent social media implosions (and ones that could very well happen in the future).
Doctorow's basic point about how social media run by tech giants works is that:
First: Tech companies give a bunch of free goodies/services to users to attract them to using a platform in the first place and thus lock them in. The reason being: for social media, moving to a new platform is a collective action problem that many people have to coordinate on -- are people moving? If so, when, and which alternative are we moving to? As a result, once people are on a site, there is quite a lot of inertia involved in getting them to move off that site, which means that there is an opportunity to gradually make the site worse and worse while retaining your userbase, because finding an alternative takes a while to get off the ground and has a high cost associated with it.
Second: Once you've attracted a large userbase and then locked them into a site, they become prime fodder for advertising. So then you reach out to business/enterprise/paid customers and offer to sell them your users' data/attention/eyeballs/clicks/etc. These commercial customers then get locked into the site/platform in much the same way users did.
Finally: Once you've locked in paid users, you then bilk them by giving them less and less bang for their buck too. This part of the process includes practices like ad fraud (making up/exaggerating engagement numbers on ads that companies buy) and blocking the ability for normal users who like/follow corporate accounts because they're interested in their products to be able to see regular (non-paid) updates from those accounts even though they are following them like a normal account. The result is that the social media company is increasingly able to convert the money it gets from these paid customers into profits which it kicks back to its shareholders. Meanwhile, every user's experience on the site continues to get shittier and shittier.
I'm not sure if this model applies to every social media site, but for sure the paradigmatic ones seem to be Google and Facebook. In particular, it is noticeable (as pointed out by Doctorow) that Google's main draw used to be that (as a search engine) it was able to connect people with the content that they were searching for; similarly, Facebook at the beginning (like the old LiveJournal it was based on) was designed around people connecting with people they wanted to keep in touch with and wanted updates from. In short, it used to be the case that the whole point of these sites was to only show people the things that they wanted to see.
Welp, that's thoroughly gone and not only that, it's honestly hard to remember that time because social media and web services (from Google search to Tiktok to Spotify) are SO heavily tilted nowadays in favor of the model of pushing unrequested content on you, often in the form of unending "content discovery" recommendations. I've seen lots of complaints that Google Search is becoming increasingly unusable because the top hits are mainly filled with dodgy, search-engine-optimized, bloated, slow-loading websites with tons of ads rather than a lean, fast-loading website that has the information you need and nothing else, which is what you actually were looking for when searching.
Anyway, this isn't particularly surprising. Tech companies are essentially doing the age-old thing of exploiting a monopoly / non-competitive market situation in order to extract profit. Businesses typically look for these kinds of opportunities and squat on them for as long as they can once they find them. Insofar as there's something new about tech companies, it's just that digital products like websites/apps allow for making business model tweaks (e.g. tweaks to pricing, tweaks to content-pushing, etc.) (1) very quickly, and (2) in a very opaque way. (Compare this to brick-and-mortar businesses where making changes (e.g. to inventory, store layout, etc.) is both (1) very slow to roll out and (2) easy for people to detect/verify/talk about.) As a result, tech companies often have more corners to hide in on their quest to extract profit, and users/regulators often have to play catch-up in order to detect and punish this behavior.
As monopoly exploitation is an old problem, the old solutions exist: you need to use antitrust law and the enforcement thereof in order to do things like break up/prevent monopolies and implement structural separation -- limiting what functions a single business can adopt i.e. limiting the capability of a business to cut out/subsume middlemen into its business (vertically integrate). Structural separation basically has the effect of creating new (competitive) market structures that wouldn't otherwise exist.
(Sidenote related to structural separation: this article has an interesting analysis of the writer's strike, Hollywood, and streaming platforms that discusses how streaming companies that also own the media they distribute (Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Paramount, etc.) are currently flailing right now because they have no ability to determine how much the individual content on their site is worth, because there are no markets. By creating limits on what parts of business a single business is allowed to operate in (e.g. content production has to be separate from content distribution; lending has to be separate from credit evaluation; etc.), you create markets at those boundaries and therefore exchange prices that help companies estimate the value of their commodities. I think social media functions a bit differently from streaming/content distribution platforms, but they share some properties like (1) they are a platform, which tends to have its own dynamics and also monopoly potential, and (2) there seems to be somewhat of a mismatch or misalignment between the costs of operating the website/service/platform and where/how you charge people money, which I think leads to odd phenomena. Essentially, the weird thing about platforms is that the platform itself and how widely it has been adopted by the public itself forms a source of value, but one that is difficult to put a price tag on...)
Anyway, Cory Doctorow also went into some tech-specific solutions. Legislation and regulation of the ability of social media to use monopoly to extract profit is important, but it is very slow. Alongside that, users themselves can also use rapidly-changing technology in order to thwart attempts of social media sites to lock them into monopolies and undesirable experiences -- some examples he listed are things like ad blockers, device jailbreaks, DRM removal, as well as interoperability (that is, creating standards that make it easier for a user to transfer their data (their created content, their friends lists, etc.) to a different website so that the barrier to exiting is low -- obviously, this has not happened yet when it comes to social media although it has happened with certain proprietary file formats e.g.). (Edit: Now that I think about it, I think interoperability played a significant role in helping users move from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth, so that's something worth noting.)
It was a very interesting discussion. Obviously, small companies like Dreamwidth really do not fit into the above model, being much smaller, not beholden to shareholders, and having a very different profit model from most social media sites (a freemium model where users pay for extra features and to support the site -- this aligns the usefulness and functionality of the website with its price a lot more, in a way that I think staves off this enshittification process).
Archive of Our Own / OTW is also an interesting case. It too basically now has a monopoly in the fanfiction space (given the decline and increasing irrelevance of ff.net) and has ALSO undergone a meltdown in the past month (more quietly, though, and in a way that largely hasn't negatively affected users' experience of the site, which makes it much less severe than the other meltdowns mentioned). It is not a profit-making endeavor, though, and its governance is much more democratic than any of the social media discussed above, which I think makes it significantly different from the previous cases. ...Also setting aside the fact that it technically isn't a social media site... but it kind of is, and in any case, it's still a major platform with a large userbase and one where you can see a high cost of leaving / no real alternatives is largely keeping that userbase locked in.
Tumblr is also an interesting case. I don't really know how to analyze it using the above framework. It is a profit-making venture owned by various... mid-sized tech companies in its lifetime... but one that has never managed to actually turn a profit. Possibly that's because the fannish-leaning userbase is very hard to monetize. It's certainly not immune to experiencing meltdowns of its own that send people running to the hills of other social media (see Tumblr porn ban), but overall it has managed to pull off the feat of "coming in first place just by managing to not fuck up." It is also a site that has been in a long-term technological arms race with user-created tools like xkit that keep the site usable when it very much does not want to be usable. Very possibly, the fact that Tumblr doesn't experience dramatic enshittification is simply because it was always, and still is, pretty shit. Over the past few months, I've seen a lot of smugness (in a self-deprecating way) from Tumblr users in response to all these social media refugees, this kind of amusement that all these social media sites are imploding and yet somehow Tumblr is still standing like this unkillable cockroach. I know that smugness is heavily irony-laced, but even still, I'm not really sure Tumblr users have much to be smug about here. In addition to the porn ban exodus, there is also the fact that Tumblr as a website nurtured the whole anti phenomenon and purity politics -- as far as I'm aware, it started there and we export it to other websites whenever Tumblr bleeds users. I feel like Tumblr users should at least feel a bit... wary of how unpleasant of an experience being on Tumblr can be, and also that it doesn't really have much in the way of defenses against site-initiated meltdowns, same as Reddit and Twitter. That Tumblr users happen to have it good for now probably isn't a guarantee they'll continue to do so in the future, although I agree it's been a long, long time of people trying to monetize Tumblr and utterly failing, so maybe that does suggest some special armor here. I don't know.
Anyway, I hope this was interesting to read and helps make sense of recent social media implosions (and ones that could very well happen in the future).