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posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 25 2023, @03:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the circle-of-life dept.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

[...] Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for "cat bed" are 50% ads.

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 26 2023, @01:52AM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 26 2023, @01:52AM (#1288628)

    The primary driver for anti semitism seems to be their financial success...

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Thursday January 26 2023, @08:19AM (1 child)

    by pTamok (3042) on Thursday January 26 2023, @08:19AM (#1288675)

    The primary driver for anti semitism seems to be their financial success...

    Well, yes; and there is a historical justification/apology for that.

    Usury [wikipedia.org] is a sin. And as that Wikipedia article points out "In many historical societies including ancient Christian, Jewish, and Islamic societies, usury meant the charging of interest of any kind, and was considered wrong, or was made illegal".

    In certain circumstances, Jewish tradition allowed Jews to charge interest on loans to non-Jews (more detail in the article), and the end result is that if you needed a loan, moneylending was dominated by certain people of Jewish faith. It's not hard to see how resentment would be fuelled by such a situation. If you needed money, you needed to go to (in your eyes) rich Jew, and if you failed to pay, you would be punished on behalf of the (Jewish) lender. A simpler recipe for (rich) Jews to be hated, and by extension, all Jews, would be difficult to find.

    Not all Jews felt that the exceptions/loopholes in the Jewish customs that allowed lending money with interest applied to lending to, for example, Christians or Muslims, but enough did that is was common practice. It seems to be human nature for some people to take advantage of such loopholes.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 26 2023, @01:34PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 26 2023, @01:34PM (#1288694)

      Good explanation, but it really points out how human nature is full of prejudice and drags the deep past into the present.

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