Cory Doctorow

And I assume the other 4% were like either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees, which makes sense because I would be drunk all the time if I worked at Facebook.

But I think it's hard to deny that people really don't want to be spied on if they can avoid being spied on.

I think that's a good setup to in shitification.

Yeah.

In shitification, it's really a label I hung on both an observation about a characteristic pattern of how platforms go bad, but I think much more importantly, why they're going bad now, because we didn't invent greed in the middle of the last decade.

So something has changed.

My thesis is that some exogenous factors have changed.

So the pattern of platform decay is that platforms are first good to their end users while locking them in.

That's stage one.

And once they know that the users have a hard time departing when they face a collective action problem or when they have high switching costs, you can make things worse for the end users, safe in the knowledge that they are unlikely to depart, in order to lure in business customers by offering them a good deal.

And so far, so good.

I think a lot of people would echo that, but they would stop there.

They would say, oh, you're not paying for the product, so you're the product.

So this is about luring in users and then getting in business customers will pay for it.

But that's not where it stops because the business customers are also getting screwed because the business customers get locked in and this power that the platforms end up with over their business customers is then expressed in stage three, where they extract from those business customers as well.

They dial down the value left behind in the platform

to the kind of minimum homeopathic residue needed to keep the users locked to the platform, the businesses locked to the users, and everything else is split up among the executives and the shareholders.

And that's when the platform's a pile of shit.

But the more important part, as I say, is why this is happening now.

Broadly, my thesis is that platforms used to face consequences when they did things that were bad for their stakeholders.