Enshittification. What it is and what one may do about it.

Read today a really good article on Medium which reminded me of this phenomenon.

Definition by Cory Doctorow who coined the term in November 2022:

1. Create a user centered innovative product that everybody loves.
2. Exploit their users to make things better for business customers so that they can make money.
3. Abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves and their shareholders.
   

The result? The product becomes horrible, no one wants to use it anymore, and the company dies a slow death.

Well, I have not seen any of these platforms die yet, but there is always hope!

Which are these platforms? Amazon, Airbnb, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Reddit, Twitter / X, Uber are the notable ones.

What can we do?
At the personal level: We can say no. We can leave! One platform at a time!

At the society level, Doctorow has called for two general principles to be followed:

The first is a respect of the end-to-end principle, which holds that the role of a network is to reliably deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers. When applied to platforms, this entails users being given what they asked for, not what the platform prefers to present. 

The second is the right of exit, which holds that users of a platform can easily go elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with it. For social media, this requires interoperability, countering the network effects that "lock in" users and prevent market competition between platforms. For digital media platforms, it means enabling users to switch platforms without losing the content they purchased that is locked by digital rights management.

PS. I try to keep the post as small as possible. The links provide additional information.