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Tiktok's "Enshittification"

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

owl writes:

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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Friday January 27 2023, @01:55PM (3 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 27 2023, @01:55PM (#1288908) Journal

    Fire is necessary too, but look what happens when fires run out of control.

    Nothing is technically out of control yet. And sorry, with all these controls on capital (including a bunch of market based ones), I don't buy that it'll be the first to go out of control.

    You're either deliberately strawmanning what the GP said, in which case you're evil, or you're too dumb to understand it, in which case you shouldn't be posting here.

    Nonsense. The post I replied to was a real, brazen straw man. They even capitalized Capital. Here's the obvious rebuttal to that post. If the rich really were as bad as that poster claimed, then why would we want to make everyone else like them via UBI? There's inherent contradictions in a lot of these narratives that happen because people aren't thinking, just like that poster was.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday January 29 2023, @09:30PM (2 children)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Sunday January 29 2023, @09:30PM (#1289208) Journal

    "We" do not want to make "everyone else like [the rich]" via UBI you disingenuous little shit. "We" want people not to have to fucking worry about homelessness, death by freezing in an unheated home, or lack of food via UBI. Go to Hell.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...

    • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Sunday January 29 2023, @09:43PM (1 child)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 29 2023, @09:43PM (#1289211) Journal

      "We" do not want to make "everyone else like [the rich]" via UBI you disingenuous little shit.

      Well, I guess the original poster shouldn't have written:

      If you are born correctly, you already have UBI and more. Apparently those with genetically-endowed UBI like nothing more than... fucking over people who do not. It seems to be an acquired taste, or perhaps a psychiatric affliction, of the useless idle rich who need validation in the form of seeing other people suffer more than them, since that proves how much better off they are.

      On your post:

      "We" want people not to have to fucking worry about homelessness, death by freezing in an unheated home, or lack of food via UBI.

      Given that most people don't have to fucking worry about homelessness, death by freezing in an unheated home, or lack of food, I'm going with needs-based entitlements as being better tools. Particularly I bet we'll still see a lot of people make the sort of bad decisions, like borrowing against their UBI income for frivolous stuff, that will cause such worries.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday January 30 2023, @04:26AM

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Monday January 30 2023, @04:26AM (#1289241) Journal

        You really have no idea how bad it is in this country do you? Shut up and go away already. You don't know what you're talking about, as usual.

        --
        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...