Fediverse

The basis of this article seems to be interpreting stage 1 of enshittification (“platform is good to users”) as being a “free rider”. However, that is incidental to users and not even necessarily known to them. Therefore it’s a flawed view to say users are trying to be a “free rider”. All the users know at that point is they are receiving a good deal.

I, a user on BlueSky or Threads or Facebook or Mastodon or whatever, have paid exactly zero of any currency to access it. Here, the user is almost definitionally a free-rider.

The platform may be paying to grow their business and advertise, essentially, or they may be using the customer as a source of data and audience as required to sell ads. So it’s quite wrong to look at it as if the user is acting entitled or taking advantage of someone.

If that right is restricted or they are expected to trade something for that right – even something ultimately immaterial and intangible, like seeing ads – they cry “enshittification” and push blame for this state of affairs onto the platform, then try and leave it for another platform that is willing to indulge free-riders… until their costs, too, become unsustainable.

This is all really so wrong as to be painful to read. As if Facebook doesn’t make money from people using their service?

Don’t tell me. The full bibliography of Ayn Rand adorns your bookcase?

The problem here is that people want a service and businesses want a product. The "free-rider" period is businesses masquerading as a service in order to accumulate a product: Us.

Because that is what they are selling. Our writing and our thoughts and our interactions. They are selling them to advertisers, to AI developers, and in the case of membership communities they are selling us to each other. But make no mistake, they are selling US.

The problem with the enschittification model is not that "it's from the point of view of a freeloader err, free-rider" but that "it applies to a poor business model." It can only be solved when the business model changes, when userbase is no longer a product, or consumers AND a product, but are treated as the recipients of a service and members of a community. Right now only the Fediverse model does that.

What's really killing the business end of this is the rot economy. Vampire capital keeps throwing money at companies that present their userbase as a product. The vampires want a profit, and they are told that the profit will come from a largue userbase creating user-created content. So they lure the product to the company by presenting it as a service, and then pull the rug out so that they can monetize the userbase and get endless growth. Things get progressively worse as they try to min/max the business: minimizing the costs and maximizing the revenue by rent-seeking from the users. Then the users, the PRODUCT, up and leave.

Enschittification is happening because companies see users as their product, their source of content, and their source of revenue all at the same time but have presented their business to the users as a service.

Their business model needs to radically change. And social media needs to shift to governments and non-profits providing it.