And once you’ve got them locked in then (Rule Three) you’re in a seller’s market – and have a licence to print money. Rule Two: once you’ve got them locked in, you turn them into a captive market for your real customers – advertisers and vendors.
You do this by offering “free” services (Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram), or loss-making reduced prices (Amazon). Rule One for any online venture is to acquire large numbers of users quickly so that you can harness the power of network effects to keep them inside your walled garden.
So are we stuck with enshittification? For the time being, probably yes “First,” he writes, “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.” Enshittification results from the convergence of two things: the power of platform owners to change how their platforms extract value from users and the nature of the two-sided markets – where the platforms sit between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other and then raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. Thanks to Cory Doctorow, the great tech critic, we now have a term for this decay process in online platforms – enshittification. Instagram has become a machine designed to keep you in constant scrolling mode. Once upon a time, Facebook and Twitter showed you stuff from your friends and followers now you get a torrent of things that the platform’s algorithms think might increase your “engagement”. Try shopping for “the best multimeter” on Amazon – once a byword for an efficient online experience – and you are immediately confronted by four “sponsored” results (ie ones the vendor has paid Amazon to highlight).
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