Ancestors

Written by L. Rhodes ⁂ on 2025-01-21 at 15:44

I have a few quibbles with this: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/ One being that I think most everyone who has been here for a decent amount of time has had the experience of trying out Mastodon and realizing just how bad their relationship to some other social media platform had gotten.

Yes, there are absolutely people who are locked into other platforms by real, material things, but platform stickiness is a real thing, and it's really, really hard to acurately assess from the inside.

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Written by L. Rhodes ⁂ on 2025-01-21 at 15:49

I don't think it's helpful boiling the choice to stay on a toxic platform down to one cause. Some people are there because they can't build the same support networks elsewhere, and some people are there just because they enjoy the daily dopamine hit of seeing what the brands will do next. If we try to argue that it's one or the other exclusively, then we'll miss opportunities to help people shift to networks that are better for them.

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Written by L. Rhodes ⁂ on 2025-01-21 at 15:52

"Critics of zuckermuskian media claim those services are so terrible because they're for-profit entities, capitalist enterprises hitched to the logic of extraction and profit above all else. The problem with this claim is that it doesn't explain the changes to these services." A big part of the explanation is VC capital, which lets startups work on building scale first, but inevitably requires a shift toward maximally extractive behaviors. I talk about that a bit here: https://destructured.net/bluesky-enshittification

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Written by L. Rhodes ⁂ on 2025-01-21 at 16:00

I agree with Doctorow that good regulation is necessary to curb the abuses of the corporate social media platforms, but the implication of his argument appears to be that the major platforms have gone especially bad mostly because they're run by creeps, and I think the truth is that they're run by creeps mostly because there's really only one model that could make those businesses profitable, and you have to be a bit of a creep to embrace it.

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Written by L. Rhodes ⁂ on 2025-01-21 at 16:06

Doctorow's not alone here, though. The perception that those companies would be fine if they were run by better people seems pretty pervasive. It's why a lot of people see Musk's purchase of Twitter as THE turning point in that platform, rather than the culmination of a enshittifying trend that had been in progress for a very long time. The implicit lament is: "If only someone better had bought the company…" But better ethics wouldn't make a different business model sustainable.

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Written by L. Rhodes ⁂ on 2025-01-21 at 16:17

My biggest quibble is with Doctorow's thesis that "the profit motive itself is not sufficient to cause enshittification." The other necessary component, in his telling, is policy that creates opportunities for creeps to take over.

Yes, bad policy can amplify enshittification, but the profit motive leads to abusive behavior with or without external policy. Good policy is a negative pressure on the profit motive. It's there to check the internal logic of profit as a categorical imperative.

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Toot

Written by L. Rhodes ⁂ on 2025-01-21 at 16:35

Structural explanations do more to help us understand the enshittification of global, single-operator social media platforms, IMO. They're massively expensive to run, but the initial value proposition was too untested for anything but a free-to-use model, which all but guaranteed an extractive business model. And the resource that was most available to them was user data, which ensured that design decisions centered on exclusivity and surfacing more data.

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Descendants

Written by L. Rhodes ⁂ on 2025-01-21 at 16:42

That's why decentralization (that is, node-to-node, rather than mediated, decentralization) and grassroots funding are genuinely disruptive models for social media. They open up a space where the structure of the network doesn't logically entail data extraction as a means of paying for the costs of the network—to say nothing of providing profits to motivate the construction of that network. We need good policy to ensure that those features remain viable.

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