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.”
Enshittification is a result of capitalism…in which venture capital plays a huge part. So…
Lol. Agreed. I feel like Cory picked a controversial title for attention, and then did an odd logic dance to get there.
But I found some of his other analysis in the post thought provoking, anyway.
For some context, Cory is on a quest to change hearts and minds about Intellectual Property law
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?
Opinionated piece with no substance or analysis, author already has some answer in mind and is trying to spin everything around to support it.
Just to illustrate:
That’s why Zuckerberg bought Instagram: he had been turning the screws on Facebook users, and when Instagram came along, millions of those users decided that they hated Zuck more than they loved their friends and so they swallowed the switching costs and defected to Instagram. In an ill-advised middle-of-the-night memo to his CFO, Zuck defended spending $1b on Instagram on the grounds that it would recapture those Facebook escapees:
In this very link, in court-released emails Zuck states they’re buying Instagram because they have good growth and Facebook mobile usability is shit. It’s just 2 different types of social networks, back in 2012 you couldn’t even DM on Instagram, it wasn’t a replacement for Facebook by any means and vice versa. Zuck was just not happy that people spend their phone screen time outside of his reach.
