Thread by @doctorow

In the #enshittification cycle, a #platform lures users with a good deal at first, then it lures business customers (advertisers, sellers, creators) by handing them the #surplus; finally, it takes all the surplus for itself, creating a pile of shit:

pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/pot… 1/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2023/01/27/ens… 2/

When a company is neither disciplined by #competition nor by #regulation, enshittification inevitably ensues. 3/

If a user or business customer can't jump ship - because of #LockIn, high #SwitchingCosts or #NetworkEffects - then companies are powerfully tempted to mistreat them - not out of sadism, but instead to harvest their surplus and goose the company's profits. 4/

Half the results on the first five screens of an Amazon search result are ads. Amazon's business customers spend $31b/year on #payola, bidding to be at the top of Amazon's search results. 5/

The top results aren't the best matches to your search, they're the matches that are most profitable for Amazon. 6/

But out of the remaining half, many of the results are Amazon's lookalike products: Amazon coerces sellers into shipping via Amazon warehouses (otherwise their products won't be #Prime eligible). 7/

This not only lets Amazon extract 45%+ out of every sale in #JunkFees, it also lets them see the bills-of-lading that identify the manufacturers of products, whom Amazon can approach to make a knock-off. 8/

These Amazon house-brand #copycat products are cheaper than the original, because Amazon doesn't charge itself >45% fees. 9/

It can allocate some of the surplus to shoppers - offering a discount on the price the OEM has had to inflate to cover Amazon's fees - but keep the majority for its shareholders. 10/

This is enshittification: Amazon is a place where buyers hold the sellers hostage (because Amazon is where all the buyers are, and the buyers are prepaying for shipping a year at a time via Prime), but the buyers can't leave either, because all the sellers are at Amazon. 11/

The sellers don't *want* to be on Amazon, but all the buyers are there, so...

Hypothetically there's another way to discipline Amazon's appetites as it gorges itself on all of us, buyer or seller: regulation. 12/

Much of Amazon's conduct falls under the broad terms "unfair and deceptive," which the #FTC has broad authority to prohibit and punish under #Section5 of the #FTCAct.

pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the… 13/

The FTC is undergoing a renaissance under @linakhanFTC, its most effective chair in forty years, and she is aggressively wielding her Section 5 powers to hold corporations to account. 14/

But the FTC has two generations' worth of #PolicyDebt to pay down, and enshittification is everywhere, so Amazon and other firms generally behave as though there was no threat of regulatory punishment for even the most egregious conduct. 15/

They don't have to outrun Lina Khan, they just have to outrun all the other firms she has in her crosshairs. 16/

Corporations, unfettered by competition or regulation, are free to pursue enshittification to the bitter end: once they have their users locked in, they use them as bait to lure in business customers, and once *they* are locked in, they can grab all the value. 17/

They can surf the line between "so useless everyone quits" and "just useful enough that everyone keeps holding each other hostage."

Enshittification is a dangerous strategy, and not just because that's a hard wave to surf. 18/

Woe betide a platform that enshittifies prematurely, before its users or business customers are too locked in to simply say, "fuck this, I'm out of here." 19/

That's an expensive mistake, one that can cost a company all the consumer and supplier subsidies it bought with its shareholders' cash. 20/

It's a mistake that @Spotify just made, with its podcast #exclusivity strategy, blowing more than $1B buying up podcasts and then locking them inside Spotify's walled garden, unreachable without Spotify's client - other #podcatchers need not apply:

variety.com/2022/digital/n… 21/

It's easy to see why Spotify liked this idea. Real podcasts are as open as you could want - encoded in the open #MP3 #standard, distributed over the open #RSS standard - and can be subscribed to and played back by any client. 22/

There's no practical way to spy on podcast listeners, nor to enshittify their experience in other ways, say, by blocking #AdSkipping.

For eshittification-thirsty corporate sociopaths, this user-centric openness is a bug, not a feature. 23/

Apple was the first company to try to enclose podcasts, but while it dominated the sector, it never controlled it fully, not least because anyone could leave Apple's walled garden and subscribe to the same podcasts using another client with just a couple clicks. 24/

Disciplined by competition and the ease of user switching, the podcast-encloser brigade have proceeded with caution. 25/

Even where they publish their own podcasts, they haven't tried to make them exclusive to their walled gardens, instead offering real podcast feeds that anyone could subscribe to. 26/

One notable - and shameful - exception is the @BBC, which has abandoned its leadership on open standards and open protocols and moved its flagship podcasts inside its proprietary #BBCSounds app. 27/

Presumably this will help it commericalize its offerings for non-license-fee-payers, continuing the long transformation of the BBC from a #PublicServiceBroadcaster focused on #Reithian values to a glorified streaming service for Americans. 28/

That's a transformation that started when the BBC killed the #CreativeArchive in favor of the #Iplayer).

Where others were cautious, Spotify was reckless. 29/

It bought popular podcasts and podcast networks, then severely enshittified their programs by locking them inside Spotify's walled garden. 30/

Audience numbers plummeted, demoralizing podcast creators who were uninterested in the future date when Spotify and its #MagicUnderpantsGnomes would figure out how to wring more money out of the tiny cohort that stuck around. 31/

Today, podcast advertising rates are falling off a cliff. Short on users and ad dollars, Spotify's enshittification plan is looking like a self-inflicted wound. 32/

Even the Obamas cancelled their deal and switched to #Audible, a monopolist that leads the world in enshittification but who had the good sense not to make its podcasts platform-exclusive:

variety.com/2022/digital/n… 33/

In @Variety, @tylervaquilina pens a eulogy for exclusivity, quoting @ParcastUnion and @GimletUnion, unions for Spotify's @Gimletmedia and @ParcastNetwork: "[exlusives] caused a steep drop in listeners — as high as three quarters of the audience."

variety.com/vip/podcast-ex… 34/

That is a hell of a rush for the exits. What's more, podcasts that *leave* Spotify's walled garden - after their exclusive deals expire - *gain* listeners (though not as many as they lost). 35/

Podcasting is an open technology built out of open technologies. We have damned few of those left. The openness of podcasts once allowed wild experimentation, with new kinds of audio made by new kinds of creators finding new kinds of audiences. 36/

The drive to enshittify, unfettered by regulation or competition, has allowed many of the world's largest, stupidest tech companies to unhinge their jaws and tempt podcast makers and listeners to traipse blithely onto their slathering tongues. 37/

They were *always* going to snap their jaws shut eventually - just because Spotify lacked the executive function to wait for a fully ripened enshittification before biting down, it doesn't mean we're out of the woods. 38/