(2023-01-23) Doctorow Tiktoks Enshittification

Cory Doctorow on Tiktok’s enshittification. 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

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss

This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon's customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died

Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year's worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don't search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers – Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the "everything store" it had promised from the beginning

it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.

That's when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon's shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company's $31b "advertising" program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other.

Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon's "Most Favored Nation" requirement sellers means that they can't sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

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).

From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

This is why – as Cat Valente wrote in her magesterial pre-Christmas essay – platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to "stop talking to each other and start buying things." (03-01-ValenteTheGreatReplacementnotThatOneTheRealOne)

This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook.

it started to cram your algorithmic feed full of posts from accounts you didn't follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users' throats.

Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they'd stolen from you.

Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook's cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue.

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

It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won't rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook.

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology

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. (sharecropper)

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform's priorities?

If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'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.

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:

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers – as a convincer in a "Big Store" con.

Which brings me to Tiktok.

But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, Tiktok was really, really good at recommending things to its users.

Now that Tiktok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to Youtube and Insta.

Yesterday, Forbes's Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of Bytedance, Tiktok's parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a "heating tool" that Tiktok employees use to push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers' feeds:

Tiktok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora.

"Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "Attention Economy." 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.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and "projects" handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats

But deception only produces so much "liquidity provision." Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion.

For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by "heating" the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: Tiktok will withdraw the "heating"

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its "monetization" changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post.

This is the latest battle in one of the internet's longest-simmering wars: the fight over end-to-end:

In the beginning, there were Bellheads and Netheads

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability).

The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today

As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism.

The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability

Twitter is not going to be a "protocol." I'll bet you a testicle that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform

An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed.

Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four":

With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don't pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies.

This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of Amazon Smile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon's own search tool to locate the products you purchased.

The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house

Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin's landmark 1998 paper, "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which they wrote, "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."

Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song.

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That's fine, actually. We don't need eternal rulers of the internet. It's okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn't be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date.