Cory Doctorow wrote a frankly incredibly insightful piece on what he termed "enshittification," or the natural evolution of the website experience to worsen (for users, advertisers, and everybody but shareholders) as a result of economic forces. Basically, websites that sell access to eyeballs for advertising start by focusing on user experience, then they focus on advertiser experience, then they focus on shareholder experience once they become a necessity for advertising.

Think about Facebook - almost nobody can quit it, not because it's a fantastic user experience or platform, but because all our photos, videos, memories, and chats are there...so even though it sucks, we can still get ads sold there...and it sucks for advertisers too, because it is optimized to take money. And then if there is competition, it gets bought up, so the internet is more accessible and smaller than ever before: "For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into 'five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.'"

This article below is one of the few reads that has shook me in the last year. If you are feeling disaffected or confused about recent changes in online experience, I encourage you to read it.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys