Cory Doctorow details the path to the enshitifications of Facebook and Twitter.
“This is what changed: the collapse of market, government, and labor constraints, and IP law’s criminalization of disenshittifying, interoperable add-ons. This is why Zuck, an eternal creep, is now letting his creep flag fly so proudly today. Not because he’s a worse person, but because he understands that he can hurt his users and workers to benefit his shareholders without facing any consequences. Zuckerberg 2025 isn’t the most evil Zuck, he’s the most unconstrained Zuck.”
I would love a deep dive on the mechanisms of enshittification. Why make the user experience worse on a product you are trying people to keep using? Do they lose an amount of users like a resource to gain more favorable things for themselves with deals wich end up impacting the users negatively and they know it will?
It happens when there’s no meaningful competition, and when the friction of switching to a competing product is too high. Companies want to make more money with less. If you can get away with doing less without losing a significant amount of customers, then you will do it.
For example, the problem with switching social media is that you have to rebuild all your connections. They can make it worse, because customers aren’t willing to switch.
Another example is Windows. If you’re dependent on a program that only works on Windows it’s hard to make to jump to Linux.
Keeping it brief but drilling down a level deeper, enshittification results in an increase in short-term profits which is a positive for publicly traded companies who are legally obligated to increase profits or risk litigation by shareholders. The vast majority of consumers, once in an “ecosystem” of a product (social media is a great example here) will not leave the ecosystem due to the mild inconvenience of leaving. The profit lost by the very few who have the wherewithal to leave the ecosystem is made up for by those short term profit gains.
It’s a cycle that continues on and on, sometimes saved by vast changes by the company to reel in those “lost” consumers. Or sometimes the company messes up so bad that they never return to their pre-enshittification days.
As long as companies have a duty to shareholders to increase profits at all costs, we will always see enshittification. This is a feature, not a bug, of capitalism.
Sort of. There is no law that requires corporations to maximize short-term returns to shareholders. It entirely depends on the corporate charter. There are corporate charters that include wording that quarterly profit optimization is not a goal. C-levels repeating the “fiduciary duty” mantra are generally blowing smoke, since their corporate charters can (usually) be amended with approval of a majority of shareholders. In other words, it’s the way it is because they set it up that way.