Cory Doctorow on enshittification

Another good piece by Cory on enshittification, with details about Facebook, some on how A/B testing optimizes for enshittification, and updated with how Musk's Twitter is impatiently racing to enshittify. An excerpt from Cory's piece:

Enshittification is the process by which a platform lures in and then captures end users (stage one), who serve as bait for business customers, who are also captured (stage two) whereupon the platform rug-pulls both groups and allocates all the value they generate and exchange to itself (stage three).

It was a long con. Platform operators and their investors have been willing to throw away billions convincing end-users and business customers to lock themselves in until it was time for the pig-butchering to begin. They financed expensive forays into additional features and complementary products meant to increase user lock-in, raising the switching costs for users who were tempted to leave.

Tech platforms are equipped with a million knobs on their back-ends, and platform operators can endlessly twiddle those knobs, altering the business logic from moment to moment, turning the system into an endlessly shifting quagmire where neither users nor business customers can ever be sure whether they're getting a fair deal.

For users, this meant that their feeds were increasingly populated with payola-boosted content from advertisers and pay-to-play publishers ... Twiddling lets Facebook fine-tune its approach. If a user starts to wean themself off Facebook, the algorithm (TM) can put more content the user has asked to see in the feed. When the user's participation returns to higher levels, Facebook can draw down the share of desirable content again, replacing it with monetizable content. This is done minutely, behind the scenes, automatically, and quickly. In any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye.

If a user starts to wean themself off Facebook, the algorithm (TM) can put more content the user has asked to see in the feed. When the user's participation returns to higher levels, Facebook can draw down the share of desirable content again, replacing it with monetizable content. This is done minutely, behind the scenes, automatically, and quickly. In any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye ... This is the final stage of enshittification: withdrawing surpluses from end-users and business customers, leaving behind the minimum homeopathic quantum of value for each needed to keep them locked to the platform, generating value that can be extracted and diverted to platform shareholders.

But this is a brittle equilibrium to maintain. The difference between "God, I hate this place but I just can't leave it" and "Holy shit, this sucks, I'm outta here" is razor-thin. All it takes is one privacy scandal, one livestreamed mass-shooting, one whistleblower dump, and people bolt for the exits. This kicks off a death-spiral: as users and business customers leave, the platform's shareholders demand that they squeeze the remaining population harder to make up for the loss.

As much as Cory talks about it here, I do think the role of A/B testing in enshittification is understated. Teams can unintentionally enshitify just with repeated A/B testing and optimizing for the metrics they are told to optimize for. It doesn't necessarily take malice, certainly not on the part of everyone at the company, just A/B testing, bad incentive systems for bonuses and promotions, and bad metrics like engagement.