Enshittification
Why social media platforms become shit.
Every great concept begins with the coining of a new term, and this one may just be one of my favourites.
Coined by the Canadian-British author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow in 2023, enshittification refers to social media platforms' eventual, inevitable decay.
“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.”
It’s not simply an observed phenomenon but also an active, measured strategy used by platforms like TikTok (they don’t call it that, though).
Doctorow explains it using the example of Facebook: You joined Facebook because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there, until we (the end users) were all in a “mutual hostage-taking that kept them [us] glued to the platform.”
Facebook exploited this — it sold our data to advertisers, who paid dirt-cheap prices for their ads to be shown to us. Simultaneously, to publishers, Facebook offered a way to drive traffic to their websites through link-posting and making the posts appear to ‘interested’ users determined by an algorithm. Users, advertisers, publishers — everyone was locked in.
Then, Facebook pulled the rug. For users, very little content from accounts that you follow, but mostly ads and boosted content; for advertisers, jacking up prices; for publishers, deprioritising news and links. Till the platform that mattered to us — rebranded as Meta — turned into shit.
There are four main forces that (could) prevent this from happening — forces that “discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses” — competition, regulation, self-help (on users’ end), and (the power of) workers. But, in the present day, Doctorow notes,
“One by one, each of these constraints was eroded, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittocene.”
I leave you with a question: What would it take to create a non-enshittified algorithm?
We need to know because, as Doctorow writes,
“The internet isn’t more important than the climate emergency, gender justice, racial justice, genocide or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we’ll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it’s joined.”