Good article.

The answer is capitalism and authoritarianism.

Enshittification follows a characteristic three-stage process. In stage one, a platform is good to its end-users, while finding ways to lock them in. Take Facebook, for example. At its inception, it showed you a feed-full of the things you’d asked to see: content posted by friends and family, artists, publications and participants in the groups you’d joined. Lots of us took Mark Zuckerberg up on this deal, and we users proceeded to take each other hostage. (In other words, it became really hard to convince your friends to leave Facebook at the same time and migrate to another site all together.) Once we were hooked, it was time for stage two, in which a platform makes things worse for users, in order to make them better for business-customers. In Facebook’s case, that meant reaching out to advertisers with offers to spy on us with targeted ads.

Then came stage three: clawing back all available surpluses in order to enrich shareholders and investors. On Facebook, advertising rates went up, even as the fidelity of ad-targeting plummeted and ad fraud exploded. Website publishers (like businesses and publications) also discovered they had to post ever-longer excerpts to reach audiences—even their subscribers—and were more or less reduced to commodity back-end content providers for Facebook. Thus, we reached the end-stage of enshittification: when a platform becomes a pile of shit, but we still can’t leave it. People love each other more than they hate Facebook (or Google, or Tinder, or X), so the zombie platforms, drained of value and vitality, shamble on long after they should have been planted in shallow graves.

Cory Doctorow always gets an upvote.

Guy’s got his own series on CBC and now an article in MacLean’s!

That’s how you know that what you’re saying has staying power.

Surprise! It’s Americans & Stephen Harper!

Maclean parent company is following the same path that Doctrow is writing about.