Twiddler: Configurability for me, but not for thee. (From the coiner of "enshittification")

Recent moves by Google on Youtube to squeeze the userbase for more ad-revenue reminded me of the term enshittification again, and while searching I found this essay by Cory Doctorow. I was surprised to see it wasn't shared on Tildes.

The essay builds on the concept of enshittification (first shared by Doctorow here). I think it's a worthy analysis of how social media platforms abuse the users and even the suppliers. Twiddling is the core concept. If I try to summarize it.

The shell-games that platform owners play with surpluses, clawing them back from one group and temporarily allocating them to another, are not a unique feature of digital platforms — every business has dabbled with hiding costs from purchasers (think of “junk fees”) and shafting suppliers (e.g. “reverse factoring”).

The difference lies in the ease with which these tricks can be tried and discarded. The faster the shells move in the shell-game, the harder it is to track the pea.

If you’re an analog grocer changing the prices of eggs, you have to send minimum-wage teenagers racing around the store with pricing guns to sticker over the old prices.

If you’re Amazonfresh, you just twiddle a dial on a digital control panel and all the prices are changed instantaneously.

A platform operator can effortlessly change the distribution of surpluses in an instant, while suppliers and customers have to engage in minute, time-consuming and unreliable Platform Kremlinology just to detect these changes, much less understand them.

The esssay analyzes how social media giants trap people by twiddling behind the scenes, and how they deny this freedom-to-configure to the users themselves. It also proposes solutions to deny the social media platforms this power.