Cory Doctorow

It's just the collective action problem, right?

You love your friends, but they're a pain in the ass, and if the six people in your group chat can't agree on what bar to go to this Friday, you're never going to agree on when it's time to leave Facebook or where to go next, especially if some of you are there because that's where the people with the same rare diseases you are hanging out are.

And if some of you are there because that's where the people in the country you emigrated from are hanging out, and some of you are there because that's where your customers or your audiences, or just that's how you organize the carpool for the kids of Little League.

And so we are locked in.

And so that ushers in stage two, making things worse for end users to make things better for business customers.

So think about advertisers.

Advertisers are told, you know, do you remember we told these rubes that we weren't going to spy on them?

Obviously that was a lie.

We spy on them from asshole to appetite.

Give us pennies and we will target ads to them with exquisite fidelity.

So the advertisers pile in, publishers pile in too.

They become locked to the platform.

They become very dependent on it.

And in stage three,

Advertisers find that ad prices have gone way up.

Ad targeting fidelity has fallen through the floor.

Ad fraud has exploded to levels that are almost incomprehensible.

Publishers famously now have to put their whole article there, not just an excerpt, and woe betide the publisher that has a link back to their website because Facebook's downranking off-platform links is potentially malicious.

And so they don't have any way to monetize that except through Facebook's own system.

And we've got a feed that's been basically denuded of the things we've asked to see.