Last year a tech blogger called Cory Doctorow coined the phrase “enshittification” to describe online platforms like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter etc. I can’t do better than the original description so here it is…
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.
Rags, you are the platform.