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https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1682501248334061572
Look up enshittitication, it’s an interesting rabbit hole.
Basically, the idea is that there is a path companies go along where they first please users to build a user base, once you are bound to a platform and don’t want to leave (because “everyone” is there) they instead start to shift towards pleasing advertisers until they also feel trapped (because “everyone” advertises there). The final move is trying to squeeze as much as possible out of all these trapped people and companies. It’s not just social media, although this of course makes it most obvious at least for a trapped user base. But this also applies for any other big thing that “evryone” uses.
“Enshittification” isn’t a rabbit hole, it’s a term made up by a pretty hacky young adult sci-fi author like a few months ago for behavior that has been happening and documented in capitalism for at least a century.
Putting a name on a century-old concept isn’t the worst idea because now we can easily refer to it when it happens once again. And yes, the old age of that problem is why I consider it a bit of a rabit-hole. It’s not just something Twitter does now or that tech companies do now because they copy from each other. It’s a quite old concept you’ll hear about again and again and can read up on quite a bit, if you really are interested into more than the basic concept or why companies keep trying even though the outcome does not always see positive (from an outside, users perspective).
It already has a name. That’s my point.
It’s not “happening once again,” it has been happening constantly for a century. It’s just another form of rent seeking. People like yourself are so focused on tech that you can’t put it together and realize that this is something that happens everywhere in capitalism. Giving it different names due to slight variations, or depending on which market, makes it impossible to do anything about on a large scale because it keeps people fractured in their understanding of what is happening.
I’m glad a bunch of people are finally starting to grasp rent seeking, but it’s important that people realize that this is a long tradition that has been “enshittifying” their entire lives (and their parents’, and grandparents’, and great-great-… you get it).
As long as people believe that what they’re experience is a unique type of problem, and other industries don’t have that specific problem so therefore they have their own separate battles to fight, then nothing will ever change.
That sci-fi author is 52 “young” already, has spent like 25 years writing and active about the evolution of the Internet and how it impacts personal rights, so I’d give him the right to coin a new term for an old concept.
It doesn’t prevent anyone from calling it:
…or whatever other set of words doesn’t elicit a negative connotation in the business world at the particular moment in time.
Young-adult authors write books for young adults. The author’s age is irrelevant (actually, the older they are, the creeper writing books for pre-teens becomes).
They are seeking to increase their wealth without providing additional productivity, or anything of value. That’s rent seeking. Not a new concept, happening constantly around us, and nobody seems to want to call it what it is.
This looks more like trining to make it run in a stolen raspberry pi in Elon’s basement than trining to extract value.
Let’s be real, there is no value left to extract.
I didn’t want to say that Twitters execution of it is perfect, it’s just why Elon comes up with all these seemingly insane ideas. He has a huge userbase that won’t leave, he had advertisers who he thought wouldn’t want to leave and now he’s trying to squeeze. The problem is that he obviously didn’t have his grasp as tightly around the advertisers as he thought, which is why step 3 of Enshittitication entirely fails, at least from what is known to us. The idea is to keep everyone kind of hostage while you squeeze and while it seems to work with a huge chunk of the userbase, a bigger portion of the advertisers simply move on.
It’s not that huge of a userbase. Pinterest is bigger. Twitter just have a disproportionate amount of celebrities, politicians and journalists addicted to the instant feedback and drama.
Elon is hooked and high on his own supply, so he seems incapable of understand what Twitter actually IS for most users and that “ego boosting machine for the rich and famous” is not a business plan.
Enshitification implies a degree of planning and success that he seems incapable of right now. And you can’t jump to step three without achieving steps one and two. Never good for (most of) the users, never good for the advertisers. Nothing to squeeze.
I mean, it has gone to shit, but it doesn’t seem intentional. Even in the best of circumstances these changes would not be better for the bottom line than just doing nothing.