• 13 Posts
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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: April 18th, 2026

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  • Doctorows concept is talking about platforms and social media sites and not Netflix:

    Here is how platforms die: 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. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

    https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456

    There might be a lot of Netflix clones, but YouTube is the only video platform that is relevant. And you can see how they screwed over their users and the content creators then screwed over the advertisers.


  • You really should read Cory Doctorows original analysis where he coined the term “enshittification”. He has written a book about this and it really is great. The point is that for companies to be able to enshittify their products, they need to be in a specific position. Esp. in regards of competition - if there is a market and other companies are able to offer non-enshittified products, you can’t. If you are a monopoly, you totally can fuck over your users. So for an industry to un-enshittify, you need to break the monopoly structures there, kill regulatory capture, try to kill network effects and bring real competition into the industry.




  • We’ll see more initiatives organized end-to-end by small groups of smart people, with virtual teams/coalitions forming to bypass “archaic” processes and deliver meaningful results. We’ll see a lot of sloppy failures along the way too, but the overall trend seems clear.

    The thing is: It’s great to work in a small group of motivated smart people. But it’s really, really hard to hire a small motivated group of smart people and keep it motivated. And it’s even harder if you’re not located in one of those fancy towns where everyone wants to live or in a business that is really attractive. If your company is in a lesser known part of the country building important, but boring stuff, you will have to deal with not so smart and not so motivated people.