In "Social Quitting," my latest *Locus Magazine* column, I advance a theory to explain the precipitous #VibeShift in how many of us view the once-dominant social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, and how it is that we have so quickly gone asking what we can do to get these services out of our lives to where we should go now that we're all ready to leave them:
https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/09/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks
2/
The core of the argument revolves around #surpluses - that is, the value that exists in the service. For a user, surpluses are things like "being able to converse with your friends" and "being able to plan activities with your friends." For advertisers, surpluses are things like "being able to target ads based on the extraction and processing of private user data" and "being able to force users to look at ads before they can talk to one another."
3/
For the platforms, surpluses are things like, "Being able to force advertisers and business customers to monetize their offerings through the platform, blocking rivals like Onlyfans, Patreon, Netflix, Amazon, etc" and things like "Being able to charge more for ads" and "being able to clone your business customers' products and then switch your users to the in-house version."
4/
Platforms control most of the surplus-allocating options. They can tune your feed so that it mostly consists of media and text from people you explicitly chose to follow, or so that it consists of ads, sponsored posts, or posts they think will "boost engagement" by sinking you into a dismal clickhole. They can made ads skippable or unskippable.
5/
They can block posts with links to rival sites to force their business customers to transact within their platform, so they can skim fat commissions every time money changes hands and so that they can glean market intelligence about which of their business customers' products they should clone and displace.
But platforms can't just allocate surpluses will-ye or nill-ye.
6/
No one would join a brand-new platform whose sales-pitch was, "No matter who you follow, we'll show you other stuff; there will be lots of ads that you can't skip; we will spy on you a lot." Likewise, no one would sign up to advertise or sell services on a platform whose pitch was "Our ads are really expensive. Any business you transact has to go through us, and we'll take all your profits in junk fees. This also lets us clone you and put you out of business."
7/
Instead, platforms have to carefully shift their surpluses around: first they have to lure in users, who will attract business customers, who will generate the fat cash surpluses that can be creamed off for the platforms' investors. All of this has to be orchestrated to lock in each group, so that they won't go elsewhere when the service is #enshittified as it processes through its life-cycle.
8/
This is where #NetworkEffects and #SwitchingCosts come into play. A service has "network effects" if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.
9/
"Switching costs" are what you give up when you leave a service: if a service is siloed - if it blocks #interop with rivals - then quitting means giving up access to the people whom you left behind. This is the single most important difference between #ActivityPub-based #Fediverse services like #Mastodon and the silos like Twitter and Facebook - you can quit a Fediverse server and set up somewhere else, and still maintain your follows and followers:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies
10/
In the absence of interoperability, network effects impose their own switching cost: the #CollectiveActionProblem of deciding when to leave and where to go. If you depend on the people you follow and who follow you - for emotional support, for your livelihood, for community - then the extreme difficulty of convincing everyone to leave at the same time and go somewhere else means that you can be enticed into staying on a service that you no longer enjoy.
11/
The platforms can shift the surpluses away from you, provided that doing so makes you less miserable than abandoning your friends or fans or customers would. This is the #FiddlerOnTheRoof problem: everyone stays put in the shtetl even though the cossacks ride through on the reg and beat the shit out of them, because they can't all agree on where to go if they leave:
https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf
12/
So the first stage of the platform lifecycle is luring in users by allocating lots of surplus to them - making the service fun and great and satisfying to use. Few or no ads, little or no overt data-collection, feeds that emphasize the people you want to hear from, not the people willing to pay to reach you.
13/
This continues until the service attains a critical mass: once it becomes impossible to, say, enroll your kid in a little-league baseball team without having a Facebook account, then Facebook can start shifting its surpluses to advertisers and other business-users of the platform, who will pay Facebook to interpose themselves in your use of the platform. You'll hate it, but you won't leave. Junior loves little-league.
14/
FB can enshittify its user experience because its users are now locked in, holding each other hostage. If FB can use the courts and technology to block interoperable services, it can increase its users' switching costs, producing more opportunities for lucrative enshittification without the risk of losing the users that make Facebook valuable to advertisers. That's why Facebook pioneered so many legal tactics for criminalizing interoperability:
https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures
15/
EFF has urged a San Francisco federal court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss Facebook's claims that criminal law is violated when its users opt for an add-on service that helps them aggregate their information from a variety of social networking sites. Power Ventures was a company...
This is the second phase of the toxic platform life-cycle: luring in business customers by shifting surpluses from users to advertisers, sellers, etc. This is the moment when the platforms offer cheap and easy monetization, low transaction fees, few barriers to off-platform monetization, etc. This is when, for example, a news organization can tease an article on its website with an off-platform link, luring users to click through and see the ads it controls.
16/
Because Facebook has locked in its users through mutual hostage-taking, it can pollute their feeds with *lots* of these posts to news organizations' sites, bumping down the messages from its users' friends, and that means that Facebook can selectively tune how much traffic it gives to different kinds of business customers. If Facebook wants to lure in sports sites, it can cram those sites' posts into millions of users' feeds and send floods of traffic to sports outlets.
17/
Outlets that *don't* participate in Facebook lose out, and so they join Facebook, start shoveling their content into it, hiring #SEO Kremlinologists to help them figure out how to please #TheAlgorithm, in hopes of gaining a permanent, durable source of readers (and thus revenue) for their site.
18/
But ironically, once a critical mass of sports sites are on Facebook, Facebook no longer needs to prioritize sports sites in its users' feeds. Now that the sports sites all believe that a Facebook presence is a competitive necessity, they will hold each other hostage there, egging each other on to put *more* things on Facebook, even as the traffic dwindles.
19/
Once sports sites have taken each other hostage, Facebook can claw back the surplus it allocated to them and use it to rope in another sector - health sites, casual games, employment seekers, financial advisors, etc etc. Each group is ensnared by a similar dynamic to the one that locks in the users.
But there is a difference between users' surpluses and business's surpluses. A user's surplus is *attention*, and there is no such thing as an "attention economy."
20/
You can't use attention to pay for data-centers, or executive bonuses, or to lobby Congress. Attention is not a currency in the same way that cryptos are not currency - it is not a store of value, nor a unit of exchange, nor or a unit of account.
21/
@pluralistic
I'm reminded again of the 3 principle freedoms Graeber and Wengrow bring up in Dawn of Everything. The freedoms to:
move
disobey
create or transform social relationships
These services cut moderation and support first (no feedback to platform = no chaging the relationship). They keep you from moving on.
Authoritarians have only ever had one overall strategy; today we call it "digital feudalism". Power for its own sake.
Starting about 5 years ago, I absolutely bristle if I bump into anything where their primary web presence is FB, or (like one I bumped into today) "Before contacting us for questions, check the Facebook Group for for answers."
I'm, like, "F U, maintain an FAQ on your website ya lazy twits."
It's almost an insta-block. I get that "Oh, you're one of THEM" feeling right out of the gate.
Cory Doctorow
Kim Z Dale
Ariel Richtman
Mike Whitney
The Chaotic Good 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🖖
Alex Galt 🧄
Darrel Plant
Codex ☯️♈☮
Kenny Smith
Lord Kelvin
Doug Toews
Tanquist
DavidJZaber
Muro Degrizeco
KLB