This internet was never going to stay fun
A New Yorker piece on the enshittification of social media misses the point
This New Yorker piece poped up on my news feed about the death of the “fun” internet and the death of the social media internet.
New Yorker- Why the Internet Isn't Fun Anymore
It’s a short-ish read, but doesn’t cover a lot of new ground here. However, I find that it finds an inflection point where social media started “going wrong”:
Choire Sicha, the co-founder of the Awl and now an editor at New York, told me that he traces the seeds of social media’s degradation back a decade. “If I had a time machine I’d go back and assassinate 2014,” he said. That was the year of viral phenomena such as Gamergate, when a digital mob of disaffected video-game fans targeted journalists and game developers on social media; Ellen DeGeneres’s selfie with a gaggle of celebrities at the Oscars, which got retweeted millions of times; and the brief, wondrous fame of Alex, a random teen retail worker from Texas who won attention for his boy-next-door appearance. In those events, we can see some of the nascent forces that would solidify in subsequent years: the tyranny of the loudest voices; the entrenchment of traditional fame on new platforms; the looming emptiness of the content that gets most furiously shared and promoted. But at that point they still seemed like exceptions rather than the rule.
It’s an interesting idea but I think it confuses the symptom for the disease.
I’m a big believer in Cory Doctorow’s idea of enshittification. I wrote about it in my original Elon Musk/Twitter article. Once you start thinking about it you start seeing it everywhere. The TLDNR version of the Internet 3-step is this:
First a company offers a service that is fantastic to it’s users. Think of the early days of Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, etc… It loses money but gains users fast and creates the network effect- where the value of the service is increased the more people use it. It locks users in and gets them addicted to/accustomed to the service.
Next, the company makes the experience as shitty as possible for users without driving them off, then makes the service extremely attractive to advertisers, sellers, etc… Think of Amazon’s great warehousing & fulfillment deals, the beginnings of Facebook’s aggressive ad & timeline manipulations, etc… The ads were cheap, deals were plentiful, and businesses flocked to the platforms to utilize them.
Finally, once users and advertisers are locked in, the company claws back all the surplus value on the platform from both the users *and* the advertisers/merchants. The platform is shitty for everyone except the platform owner.
There is a potential 4th step, where the system becomes *too* shitty and people start bailing, inducing eventually an anti-network effect where people leave because everyone else is leaving. Preventing this 4th step has been the goal of tech companies for the last 20 years now.
I won’t go too farther into the weeds. Googling Cory Doctorow and “enshittification” will give you dozens of articles he’s written and it’s worth reading through them to get an idea of the process. I’ll probably write about it more. Once you see it you can’t un-see it.
The important part about enshittification is that platforms that undergo the process are, and I argue will always, be unfun. They will be kind of miserable, and either inertia or a lack of other places to go will keep users and advertisers/merchants locked in.
Because “fun” is surplus value and is profit left on the table. Facebook learned a long time ago that happiness or contentment doesn’t drive engagement the way anger and frustration does. So it’s algorithm sorts stories based on how strong of an engagement and how long you’ll be on the platform. Trolling has always been a popular passtime after all. 2014 wasn’t the inflection point, it was a symptomatic outbreak of the underlying system metastasizing into it’s current incarnation. The disease had already taken root.
The article does touch on how passive the act of consuming social media is now. This is not a coincidence. Facebook has been pushing for example a far more passive engagement with the platform for years now- The removal of the ability to have a chronological timeline by default, and eventually the removal of the purly chronological feed (I think it’s still there but I know that it edits out posts from groups, businesses, and friends all the time.), was when I first realized that Facebook wanted a more passive user- someone who absorbed the feed but didn’t curate their feed. There’s money to be made by deciding what programming schedule is showing up in front of you. There’s stability in being able to shape popularity. Better to lean back and let the platform feed you content (There’s a whole piece there on the mass commodification of all things on the net).
The distressing thing about the article however is that there is a kind of fatalistic air to it. There’s no suggestion of solution, or options, or really anything. It seems to be more of a resigned dirge than a call to action or urging to do… well… anything. And I think there’s a reason for that.
We Are Bad Consumers
Consumerism is like a muscle. And as a society in America it feels like we’ve let that muscle go flabby. We don’t haggle or bargain very well (I hate haggling or bargaining, I’m terrible at it), our normal heuristics for determining if a potential purchase is a good value is easy to hijack (Paid promotional/partnerships and fake reviews are legion online), and we have a lot of trouble with delayed gratification, so we take the expedient offer instead of asking if the offer is good or not.
Case in point, take AirBNB. It’s almost a cliche joke to point out that a lot of AirBNB’s offerings include so many cleaning fees, chores, tacked on fees, etc… that we would spend less money and have less obligations just staying at a hotel. But AirBNB is still extremely profitable. And the listings with the fees and cleaning fees and chores and all the things that make that listing a measurably worse decision than just going to a hotel don’t drive people away, and the system perpetuates.
Or take Twitter (I’ll never call it by it’s other name, I cringe every time I call it by it’s current name) from the article. The ecosystem that explicitly made the old hellbird site both terrible and yet utterly engaging has been hit repeatedly with wrecking balls. The naked clawing back of basically any systemic value on the platform in the name of trying to pay off it’s mind-blowing debt has arguably destroyed the value that most people got out of the site. But the mass exodus of people who have left has slowed and probably stopped by now, and the anti-network effect did not kick in. Musk may see a slow seepage of people leaving the platform, but those numbers are not reportable since the company is private, and they won’t be as visible to the rest of the platform’s users. Twitter has it’s remaining users, who don’t pay 8 dollars a month for their ego to be massaged by an algorithm, so locked in that even by the author’s own admission, the site is *not fun* any more and yet he still uses it enough to know the ebbs and flows of the algorithmic trends.
I won’t pretend that there was some golden age of consumerism where buyers were so shrewd that sellers had to provide quality or be run out of business. That’s never been the case. But we seem to be at a particular nadir. We value expediency and passivity frequently over other forms of value. We value parasocial relationships over quality. We arguably value everything except for the quality of the platform or product that we are consuming. This isn’t an accident- it’s easier to hire an influencer to wax poetic over a crappy or overly expensive product than it is to make a better product or take a profit hit and lower prices. It’s easier to go to Starbucks than to find a local coffee shop that you can become a regular at. It’s easier to be a passive consumer than it is to be an active consumer. It’s easier to just… absorb content.
The Weird Internet Is Still Out There
The article also laments the weird corners of the internet that used to be out there that you could discover new things, interact with new people, have fun. That internet is largely still out there- There’s some economy of scale issues going on with the billions of people and the orders of magnitude more traffic flying around out there, but much like letting our consumer muscles get flabby, we’ve let our Internet muscles get flabby too- We’re accustomed to content being on Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter. We’re used to the format and to being passive consumers of what the algorithms bring us. But there’s still weird corners of the internet you can find yourselves in if you get off the moving walkways and go exploring.
If you want the curtain pulled back on some crazy corners of the internet, go check out the subreddit HobbyDrama. It’s a nice board, full of friendly people, and they’ll post anecdotes, ongoing news, or analysis of… well… drama in hobby communities. Every now and again you’ll see a discussion on a subject or community you had *no* idea existed, like an ongoing controversy about a potentially poorly written book on Qing dynasty Chinese bureaucracy. Apparently there is a community that revolves around that. What are the odds that you’ll *ever* encounter that community on the guided tour that is the Twitter feed algorithm?
I might write something in the future here on how to dig up the corners of the Internet that are similar to ye olden days but I don’t think that’s a project for this article. I guess, my takeaway from the New Yorker piece is to not despair. You can get off that ride whenever you want. Quitting facebook was difficult- I lost a *lot* of online friends when I quit the platform. Quitting Twitter a year ago (almost exactly!) was a lot easier. Some social media platforms are easier to quit than others. I get that. But the design of these platforms means that they’re never going to get better. They’ll only ever get marginally worse, as their automation and ease of tweaking the platform allow them to approach a mathematical limit of your tolerance for their shit. And we need to ask ourselves if we really want to engage with a system that will treat us like shit, or abuse us, right up to just before the point where we decide to leave. We need the ability to say no to that and know and accept the consequences of that decision.
It’ll make for a more fun internet.