Enshittification is a delightful neologism coined by author Cory Doctrow in 2022 to describe how things decline in quality and service. While it initially meant to describe how vendors would gradually change their services to move the focus from users to business interests, it has expanded to include the way Elon Musk has turned Twitter-aka-X-aka-Xitter into a fetid swamp of rightwing toxins: racism, misogyny, Russian disinformation, lies, and, of course, his conspiracy-addled pronouncements from the throne, which no user is allowed to block.
Ever click a link to a site and when it opens you get flooded by pop-ups, ads, offers, requests to subscribe, videos that play automatically, or those ugly little Google ad boxes? That’s enshittification.
Doctrow himself defined the term in a blog post, later expanded on in a piece published in Wired magazine, outlining the steps by which a product or service became enshittified: “…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.” In the Financial Times, Doctrow called the age we’re living in the “Enshittocene.”
Doctrow provides this example of enshittification:
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.
I’m sure everyone reading this is aware of how truly awful Amazon’s ad-dense search results is; full of paid promotions, crappy knockoff products, and irrelevant or unrelated results. It has been massively enshittified to benefit the sellers.*
Continued enshittification of Xitter under Musk’ss heavy-handed rule includes removing time stamps from tweets, removing the ability to block advertisers, an increase in scam ads and crypto scammers, “spamouflage” by foreign nations to destabilize democracies, allowing bots and troll farms to spew disinformation and lies — which our own Trump-wannabe Pierre PoiLIEvre has used to spread lies as recently as this past July — blocking posts that included links to other platforms like Mastodon, allowing blocked users to view your posts, reduced or eliminated moderation, and paid verification and subscriptions. Wikipedia reports: **
The changes led to a dramatic decline in revenue for the company. The increase in hate speech on the platform, particularly antisemitism and Islamophobia during the Israel–Hamas war, led to some organisations pulling advertisements. According to internal documents seen by The New York Times in late 2023, the losses from advertisers were projected to cost the company $75 million by the end of the year. Musk delivered an interview on November 29, in which he told advertisers leaving the website to “go fuck yourself.” By August 2024, revenue had fallen 84% compared to before Musk’s leadership.
Musk’s use of Xitter to influence the 2024 election brought Doctrow’s term back into frequent use on other social media, and helped drive millions of users from Xitter to other sites, mostly the new and still a work-in-progress, Bluesky. As Wikipedia notes, the Xodus has continued as millions leave Musk’s rightwing quagmire of Xcrement:
In the weeks following the 2024 United States presidential election on November 5, 2024, in which former president Donald Trump was re-elected for a second non-consecutive term, millions of Twitter users from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada joined Bluesky. By November 13, Bluesky had reached 15 million users, growing by around 1 million users per day and reaching the top of the Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store in the United States.
On November 19, Bluesky officially crossed 20 million users, tripling its userbase within 3 months.
The official count of the number of users keeps changing as more users migrate. Earlier this week, USA Today reported Bluesky has nearly 25 million, a figure taken from the live counter at Bluesky Users. The volume of posts on Bluesky can also be seen in realtime on the Bluesky Firehose site.
This week, ZDnet published a piece titled “7 things to know about Bluesky before you join – and why you should.” It noted:
Bluesky’s popularity has even pushed it to the top of Apple’s free app charts, ranking ahead of apps like Threads, ChatGPT, and TikTok. With new features rolling out regularly, Bluesky has something fresh to offer in a landscape full of algorithm-heavy platforms.
That phrase ” algorithm-heavy platforms” is tech speak for enshittified. And, if you are still on Meta-aka-Facebook, daily you get to experience the ongoing enshittification of that platform as the algorithm spews paid content at you, hides posts from “friends,” and, if you are a Canadian, blocks news content and Canadian media because Meta places profit before users or facts.
Bluesky CEO Jay Grabber is promising to keep the platform from enshittification. In an interview in Wired Magazine, she responded to a question:
Since Bluesky doesn’t plan to run ads, WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs asked, how does Bluesky plan to make money? “Subscriptions are the first step,” Graber said, referring to a plan to have users pay a regular fee for the ability to upload higher-quality video, for example, or access certain customization features.
Well, some of us might consider that enshittification, albeit not in the tsunami scale we see in Xitter, Amazon, or Facebook. Can such pocket-change funding like premium subscriptions or custom features pay for a service that is expanding at light speed? Methinks not. I suspect that, like all other platforms, enshittification through advertising will creep in, slowly but surely, especially since so many advertisers have left Xitter and need a platform. My only hope is that it never reaches the astronomical scales of other platforms. But for now, it seems populated with a lot of like-minded people who are concerned about democracy, dislike the convicted felon and serial liar Trump, don’t support PoiLIEvre and his Maple MAGA, have liberal values, and are friendly. That’s a nice change.
Yes, it has some trolls, spammers, porn garbage, fake accounts and MAGA cultists as do all social media, but they are few compared to, say, the masses of them on Xitter. Theya re easily reported and blocked. And there are no ads, at least not now. It is still being improved and features added so it keeps getting better (although it desperately needs a better account verification method to identify and block the trolls more effectively).
So come on over to the Bluesky platform and join us. Enjoy the moment before enshittification creeps in. I think you’ll like it.
Follow me: @cdncurmudgeon.bsky.social
Notes
* As the Techdirt site points out, enshittification spawned from the predatory-capitalist ideology of economist Milton Freidman (emphasis added):
And this, quite frequently, leads to the process that Cory lays out in his enshittification gravity well. Because once you’ve gone public, even if you have executives who still want to focus on pleasing users and customers, eventually any public company is also going to have other executives, often with Wall Street experience, who talk about the importance of keeping Wall Street happy. They’ll often quote Milton Friedman’s dumbest idea: that the only fiduciary duty company executives have is to increase their profits for shareholders.
On the California Local site, this note went further (emphasis added):
The so-called Friedman doctrine is at the root-nut of enshittification. Declaring that media corporations are responsible only to shareholders denies any obligation to other stakeholders. These include the users, the vendors, the communities in which the business entity operates, and of course, future generations.
This enshittified mentality is on full display in Twitter’s transformation under the new ownership, in an extreme form. Fire people with no logic or plan. Get rid of the janitors and make the remaining employees bring their own toilet paper. Stop paying rent for the building you make everyone work and sleep in, screw third-party developers with no notice, and so on.
To a lesser extreme, but still deeply shitty, are massively profitable corporations currently laying off thousands of people at a time. “I take full responsibility for the decisions which led us here.” declared Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai as he layed off 12,000 staff.
** From Wikipedia: “Spamouflage, Dragonbridge, Spamouflage Dragon, Storm 1376, or Taizi Flood is an online propaganda and disinformation operation that uses a network of social media accounts to make posts in favor of the Chinese government and harass dissidents and journalists overseas since 2017… In 2023, fabricated videos in which Chinese dissident Liu Xin is depicted via deepfake to be making baseless allegations of legal and ethical violations by Justin Trudeau, Pierre Poilievre and other Canadian politicians were posted by Spamouflage accounts.”
Words: 1,457
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
A site with stats for Bluesky. As of this morning (Dec.13 2024), current users = 25,025,293
https://bsky-users.theo.io/
More than 25 million users now…