📚 Tiktok's enshittification: The company manually allocates surplus to creators and can take it away again.
🌐 Enshittification: Platforms abuse their users and business customers to claw back all the value for themselves before eventually dying.
🛍️ Amazon's enshittification: It initially operated at a loss, subsidizing goods and providing a clean search. Eventually, it shifted to exploiting business customers and harvesting surplus from them.
📈 Facebook's enshittification: It started by showing users content from loved ones but then prioritized media companies and introduced more ads. It defrauded publishers and forced them into a "pivot to video."
💰 Monetization of attention: Attention cannot be used as a medium of exchange or store of value. Platforms like Tiktok monetize attention by exchanging fake money (attention) for real money through deception.
🔎 Unraveling platform algorithms: Online creators and organizations try to understand platform algorithms, but the logic may shift based on the platform's priorities, causing frustration and wage theft.
💡 Tiktok's recommendation system: Tiktok's success was due to its powerful recommendation system, but it now manipulates feeds with a "heating tool" to lure creators and media companies.
💩 Google's search results have become increasingly useless due to enshittification, with self-preferencing links, low-quality ads, and parasitic SEO junk.
💥 Enshittification is a harmful process that can lead to the downfall of platforms and companies. Google's layoffs and panic over AI chatbots highlight the consequences.
🤖 Designing a non-enshittified chatbot for search is challenging due to incentives that favor enshittifying results and the fragility of maintaining an equilibrium.
🌍 Instead of preserving dying platforms, policymakers should focus on minimizing user costs when these platforms expire by ensuring rights like end-to-end and freedom of exit.
🎮 TikTok's algorithm was once good at recommending content, but it has fallen victim to enshittification and is unlikely to recover.
📚 The web page also includes various other links and updates from Cory Doctorow, including his writing progress, upcoming appearances, and recent books.
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- https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys