Enshittification

An article about online social platform getting worse: Social Quitting by Cory Doctorow. It could be a motivation introduction to a wonderful economic theory paper. I won’t be surprised if it hasn’t already been quoted somewhere.

The logic’s basically three phases:

• Platforms with network effects get more valuable as more people use them, which drives rapid growth. But the same effect creates high switching costs: leaving means losing access to all your relationships. Early on, platforms minimize switching costs to attract users; once dominant, they maximize switching costs to keep users trapped. Network effects + switching costs produce lock-in.
• Users unable to leave, platforms can subtract user surplus whatever they want. First, surplus is shifted from users to advertisers; later, once advertisers are also locked in, surplus is taken from them too. The platform degrades the service to extract maximum value from both sides.
• Eventually, degradation reduces benefits enough that leaving hurts less than staying. Switching costs fall, people exit, and inverse network effects kick in.

So, enshittification isß not a moral failure but a structural outcome of monopoly platforms optimizing value extraction under high switching costs.