# Pluralistic: Tiktok's Enshittification  ## Metadata - Author: [[Cory Doctorow]] - Full Title: Pluralistic: Tiktok's Enshittification - Category: #articles - Summary: The document discusses the concept of enshittification, where platforms initially cater to users, then pivot to benefit business customers, ultimately maximizing profits for themselves. It explores this pattern through examples such as Amazon, Facebook, and Tiktok, detailing how platforms evolve and exploit their users, suppliers, and shareholders. The article delves into how Tiktok utilizes tactics like "heating" to manipulate video views, attract influencers, and control content distribution to retain and monetize user attention. It also touches on the broader implications of enshittification in the tech industry and the dynamics of attention economies. - URL: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ ## Highlights - 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 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hryyw31j9j155np496dapk2k)) - When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost *and* shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results. This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon's customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we'd have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year's worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don't search anywhere else. That tempted in lots of business customers – Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the "everything store" it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them. This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers *had* to sell on Amazon. That's when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon's shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company's $31b "advertising" program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search. Searching Amazon doesn't produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon's "Most Favored Nation" requirement sellers means that they can't sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at *every* retailer ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hryz2zf7hhkcjk23r0xjgcxy)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hryz659fcq0w2h3457yhvzeb)) - Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you'd have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can't agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it. Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn't follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users' throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines and blogs. Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook's walled garden. This made publications truly dependent on Facebook – their readers no longer visited the publications' websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to "boost" their articles to the readers who had *explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.* Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they'd stolen from you. Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook's cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrz04mmw01w7bejd35zhmhqx)) - I don’t know why. They "trust me" Dumb fucks. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrz06vhwdsb1tbp723tgn5zp)) - Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won't tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you'd figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrz0mt0n2wpbqgbkv0x01tb2)) - Tiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrz1pjhd1125r3596axh0mw5)) - "Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "Attention Economy." You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it – that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money. In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrz2072c28ny021dwdhsstg6)) - But deception only produces so much "liquidity provision." Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get *lots* of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrz21v3zz7cy4hhchvz4tsn3)) - Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money. The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the hodlers hoped to convert their tokens to real money ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrz27rkh5pv431ym3znd2jac)) - Tiktok won't just starve performers of the "free" attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you *asked* to see, it loses a chance to show you a video *it wants you to see*, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrz2bsaz4mjp7gnzv0hy6sez)) - They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers' messages would be delivered to willing listeners' end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data *it* wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data *you* wanted to see. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrzfjttbh86p0xf48742bhkh)) - The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrzfhp9xnywqc0bpxpq4qnzh)) - The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrzfpp3g1xb8edrzdq9rgzzp)) - An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrzfvzbrzd8b7nbcmkan3jn2)) - Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four" ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrzfvf3a1mh4zhq4r5hfq4mv)) - The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile; while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies' products, like Chrome. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrzg0v34bm4qwc2czpgx6fdm)) - Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin's landmark 1998 paper, "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which they wrote, "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers." ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrzg1fz64ahj76abgthk7pqe)) - Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to *users* when these firms reach their expiry date: enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrzg53dr6wvaf5c04b9kbwdx)) - And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit – the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrzg5ffq12vz4bm8ywm44316)) - The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom – our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrzg62xvhn0hkr1k8k6v5vxr))