The situation is so dire that organizations like Tracking Exposed have enlisted an human army of volunteers and a robot army of headless browsers to try to unwind the logic behind the arbitrary machine judgments of The Algorithm, both to give users the option to tune the recommendations they receive, and to help creators avoid the #WageTheft that comes from being #ShadowBanned:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves
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Imagine if your boss made up hundreds of petty rules and refused to disclose them, but every week, your pay was docked based on how many of those rules you broke. When you’re an online creator and your “boss” is a giant social media platform, that’s exactly how your compensation works.“Algospeak”...
But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform's priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.
The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket.
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No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny *wants* them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:
https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html
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The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers - as a convincer in a #BigStoreCon, a way to rope in other suckers who'll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.
Which brings me to #Tiktok. Tiktok is many different things, including "a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones."
https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-fragments-of-media-you-consume
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But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, Tiktok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. *Eerily* good:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1093882880
By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, Tiktok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like Youtube and Instagram.
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Now Tiktok has the audience, it's consolidating its gains, seeking to lure away the companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to YT and IG.
Yesterday, Forbes's Emily Baker-White broke a story about how that actually works inside of #Bytedance, Tiktok's parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a "heating tool" that Tiktok employees use push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers' feeds:
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These videos go into Tiktok users' #ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos "ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app." In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience - the rest of the time, it's full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.
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"Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not."
In other words, Tiktok is handing out giant teddy bears.
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But Tiktok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. Tiktok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. 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.
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"Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "AttentionEconomy." You can't use attention as a medium of exchange, as a store of value.or 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.
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In the case of #cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and "projects" handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.
But deception only produces so much #LiquidityProvision. Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get *lots* of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion.
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Think of how US companies ended the #DefinedBenefitsPension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based #401K pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses
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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.
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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:
https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/
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For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by "heating" the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok's format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).
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Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: Tiktok will withdraw the "heating" that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven't asked to see their videos. Tiktok is performing a delicate dance here: there's only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users' feeds, and Tiktok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.
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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.
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This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its "monetization" changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it's hundreds, perhaps thousands.
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I just handed Twitter $8 for Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money. This is the latest battle in one of the internet's longest-simmering wars: the fight over #EndToEnd:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen
In the beginning, there were #Bellheads and #Netheads. The Bellheads worked for big telcos, and they believed that all the value of the network rightly belonged to the carrier.
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If someone invented a new feature - say, Caller ID - it should only be rolled out in a way that allows the carrier to charge you every month for its use. This is #SoftwareAsAService, Ma Bell style.
The Netheads, by contrast, believed that value should move to the edges of the network - spread out, pluralized.
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In theory, Compuserve *could* have "monetized" its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the "From:" line on email before you opened the message - charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening - but they didn't.
The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to #interoperability).
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Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn't want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off.
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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.
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The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was "#woke #shadowbanning," whereby the things you said wouldn't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter's deep state didn't like your opinions.
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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.
As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism. It's just too easy to turn the enshittification dial up to eleven.
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Twitter was able to fire the majority of its skilled staff and *still* crank the dial all the way over, even with a skeleton crew of desperate, demoralized H1B workers who are shackled to Twitter's sinking ship by the threat of deportation.
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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.
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Twitter is not going to be a "protocol." I'll bet you a testicle¹ that projects like #Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter's "monetization" strategies.
¹Not one of mine.
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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. The villages of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks' violent raids and pogroms for years, until they didn't, and fled to Krakow, New York and Chicago:
https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf
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For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. 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":
https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040
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With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don't pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies, like when Mark Zuckerberg noticed a mass exodus of Facebook users who were switching to Instagram, and so he bought Instagram. As Zuck says, "It is better to buy than to compete."
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This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of #AmazonSmile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon's own search tool to locate the products you purchased. This provided an incentive for Amazon customers to use its own increasingly enshittified search, which it could cram full of products from sellers who coughed up payola, as well as its own lookalike products.
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The alternative was to use Google, whose search tool would send you directly to the product you were looking for, and then charge Amazon a commission for sending you to it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/comment/j4znb8y/
The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house.
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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.
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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."
http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/
Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song.
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Today's Google results are an increasingly useless morass of #SelfPreferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren't good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.
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Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown "panic" over the rise of "AI" #chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool - that is, a tool that won't show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt
Now, it's possible to imagine that such a tool will produce *good* recommendations, like Tiktok's pre-enshittified algorithm did.
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But it's hard to see how Google will be able to design a non-enshittified chatbot front-end to search, given the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are *nearly* pissed off enough to leave, but not quite.
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Even if it manages the trick, this-almost-but-not-quite-unusuable equilibrium is fragile. Any exogenous shock - a new competitor like Tiktok that penetrates the anticompetitive "moats and walls" of Big Tech, a privacy scandal, a worker uprising - can send it into wild oscillations:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks
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Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That's fine, actually. We don't need eternal rulers of the internet. It's okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn't be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms.
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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:
https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-d6046dca366f
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And policymakers should focus on #FreedomOfExit - the right to leave a sinking platform while remaining connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
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.
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In this video, we discuss the forces that keep us using services like Facebook long after we stop enjoying them (hint, it's not because social media is "addictive") and we present a short "design fiction" explaining what it might be like to use social media in the near future, after big companies...
For many years, even Tiktok's critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn't resist the temptation to show you the things *it* wants you to see, rather than what *you* want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.
It's too late to save Tiktok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.
eof/
@msbellows @pluralistic
I took the long way 'round to this belief, but no, there are no such unicorns nor are they possible under capitalism. Organizing and worker militancy forcing companies to behave better is the best we can hope for under this regime.
An organization that is a community org first that also happens to leverage tech is excluded from this indictment, but I also wouldn't categorize that as a tech company.
My industry is unreformable. Better to try alternatives.
@CrazyMyra @pluralistic this makes me think of the Twitter engineer who in the November migration was saying "algorithmic timelines are what users want even when they say they don't, we have the stats to prove it"
...and I just thought: you're completely confusing "what users want" with "time they spend scrolling your app" there
@pluralistic wow. This gives such a clear insight into the arc that all these platforms take!
I've been observing other platforms like Twitter from a distance, but I was confused and dismayed when Medium somehow "stopped working" in a way I couldn't put my finger on. This helped me see the big picture and compare it to everything else!
Cory Doctorow
M.S. Bellows, Jr.
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