Enshittification, you'll recall, is the lifecycle of the online platform: first, the platform allocates #surpluses to end-users; then, once users are locked in, those surpluses are taken away and given to business-customers. Once the advertisers, publishers, sellers, creators and performers are locked in, the surplus is clawed away from them and taken by the publishers.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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#Facebook is the poster-child for enshittification. When FB welcomed the general public in 2006, it sold itself as the privacy-respecting alternative to #Myspace, promising users it would never harvest their data. The FB feed consisted of the posts that the people you'd followed - the people you cared about - published.

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FB experienced explosive growth, thanks to two factors: #NetworkEffects (every new user was a draw for other users who wanted to converse with them), and #SwitchingCosts (it was practically impossible to convince all the people you wanted to hear from to leave FB, much less agree on what platform to go to next). In other words, every new user who joined FB both attracted more users, and made it harder for those users to leave.

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FB attained end-user lockin and was now able to transfer users' surpluses to business customers. First, it started aggressively spying on users and offered precision targeting at rock-bottom prices to advertisers. Second, it offered media companies "algorithmic" boosting into the feeds of users who hadn't asked to see their posts.

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Media companies who posted excerpts to FB, along with links to their sites on the real internet were rewarded with *floods* of traffic, as their posts were jammed into the eyeballs of millions of users who never asked to see them. Media companies and advertisers went all-in, integrating FB surveillance beacons in their presence on the real internet, hiring social media specialists who'd do #PlatformKremlinology in order to advise them on the best way to please #TheAlgorithm.

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Once those business customers - creators, media companies, advertisers - were locked into FB, the company harvested their surplus, too. On the ad side, FB raised rates and decreased expensive anti-fraud measures, meaning that advertisers had to pay more, even as an increasing proportion of their ads were either never served, or never seen.

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