Social Media and Enshitification

There was a lot of frustration after Elon Musk purchased Twitter. He quickly eroded moderation on the platform, and made some questionable decisions. This month there was an uproar over third party app support in Reddit. What is going on? Both CEO’s are basing their decisions on the need to turn a profit. The platform is becoming less user friendly to drive costs down and increase revenue (The stupidity of harming the platform via ruined reputation aside).

Cory Doctorow talks about Enshitification in Chokepoint Capitalism. Enshitification is the process through which tech platforms extract money out of the two sided markets they operate on. Story is very familiar to all of us who grew up with internet and platforms. Platforms start nice, providing value for both sides of the market (e.g. Amazon has the buyers and sellers) the initial nice phase is often funded by venture capital and angel investors. The platforms don’t make much money in this phase. Over time once they sufficiently grow their user base, they are motivated to transfer the value towards the platform operator (themselves).

Social media, however warm and fuzzy it once made you feel, was never your friend. It is a business that needs to pay bills at the end of the day. Unregulated it will go on to enable all sorts of behavior (up to and including genocide) if it increases engagement in the platform (add revenue). We may debate the necessity of social media given the social costs we are observing, but there is no putting the genie back in the bottle at this stage.

Regulation is necessary but maybe we need something more. Maybe we need a business model that can’t trap the users. This is where fediverse (mastodon is the most famous example) comes in. It enables users to pick up and migrate without loosing their network when service becomes poor. A social media company that can’t lock users in will not be able to take away features with same abandon as we saw on Twitter and Reddit.

Long story short. Social media is not your friend. You need control over your data. Beyond regulation, we need business models that empower users.