Cory Doctorow

Turns out that the secret is you let people swear.

And suddenly, they become very engaged with the subject.

Yeah, works for me.

Everything I do, yeah.

So chitification is this dirty word I came up with to describe how platforms go bad.

And I don't know if you want me to go through like the stages of and shitification.

Yeah, sure, I think it'll help.

I like to use Facebook as an example.

They're kind of the canonical example here.

So in stage one of and shitification, a platform is good to its end users, but it locks them in.

So Facebook in 2006 opens up to the general public and they say like, look, I know all of you have an account on MySpace,

But I don't know if you realize this.

MySpace is owned by this evil, crapulent, senescent, immortal vampire Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.

And the last thing anyone should ever want is to be on social media owned by a billionaire that spies on you.

Come to Facebook, and we'll never spy on you, and we'll just show you the things you asked to see.

And so we pile in, and we lock ourselves in, because you love your friends, but they're a pain in the ass, and you can't agree on what board game you're going to play this weekend.

So you definitely can't agree on when it's time to leave Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg knows this, and he understands that so long as you love your friends more than you hate him, he can make life worse for you, and you'll stay there.

So that's stage two, making things good for business customers by making them bad for end users.

So it goes to advertisers, and he says, do you remember, we told these rubes we weren't going to spy on them.