This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a “service” or a “portal,” but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for “catching up with your friends,” because that’s no longer what they do. These platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of “content discovery,” a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are “good for you.”
From the post: “As a result, these platforms were (and are) a form of bait-and-switch, the underpinning philosophy of Cory Doctorow’s “Enshittification” theory, where platforms build massive monopolies based on offering good, useful services, and then slowly turn the screws on the customer to seek ever-growing profits. Yet as I’ve noted before, I feel that enshittification misses one crucial thing — that these companies aren’t doing this out of a lack of profitability or failure of their business model, but because the modern internet has become somewhere between a social experiment and a human mining operation.”