For the platforms, surpluses are things like, "Being able to force advertisers and business customers to monetize their offerings through the platform, blocking rivals like Onlyfans, Patreon, Netflix, Amazon, etc" and things like "Being able to charge more for ads" and "being able to clone your business customers' products and then switch your users to the in-house version."

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Platforms control most of the surplus-allocating options. They can tune your feed so that it mostly consists of media and text from people you explicitly chose to follow, or so that it consists of ads, sponsored posts, or posts they think will "boost engagement" by sinking you into a dismal clickhole. They can made ads skippable or unskippable.

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They can block posts with links to rival sites to force their business customers to transact within their platform, so they can skim fat commissions every time money changes hands and so that they can glean market intelligence about which of their business customers' products they should clone and displace.

But platforms can't just allocate surpluses will-ye or nill-ye.

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No one would join a brand-new platform whose sales-pitch was, "No matter who you follow, we'll show you other stuff; there will be lots of ads that you can't skip; we will spy on you a lot." Likewise, no one would sign up to advertise or sell services on a platform whose pitch was "Our ads are really expensive. Any business you transact has to go through us, and we'll take all your profits in junk fees. This also lets us clone you and put you out of business."

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Instead, platforms have to carefully shift their surpluses around: first they have to lure in users, who will attract business customers, who will generate the fat cash surpluses that can be creamed off for the platforms' investors. All of this has to be orchestrated to lock in each group, so that they won't go elsewhere when the service is #enshittified as it processes through its life-cycle.

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This is where #NetworkEffects and #SwitchingCosts come into play. A service has "network effects" if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.

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"Switching costs" are what you give up when you leave a service: if a service is siloed - if it blocks #interop with rivals - then quitting means giving up access to the people whom you left behind. This is the single most important difference between #ActivityPub-based #Fediverse services like #Mastodon and the silos like Twitter and Facebook - you can quit a Fediverse server and set up somewhere else, and still maintain your follows and followers:

pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/sem…

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In the absence of interoperability, network effects impose their own switching cost: the #CollectiveActionProblem of deciding when to leave and where to go. If you depend on the people you follow and who follow you - for emotional support, for your livelihood, for community - then the extreme difficulty of convincing everyone to leave at the same time and go somewhere else means that you can be enticed into staying on a service that you no longer enjoy.

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The platforms can shift the surpluses away from you, provided that doing so makes you less miserable than abandoning your friends or fans or customers would. This is the #FiddlerOnTheRoof problem: everyone stays put in the shtetl even though the cossacks ride through on the reg and beat the shit out of them, because they can't all agree on where to go if they leave:

doctorow.medium.com/how-to-lea…

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How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms - Cory Doctorow - Medium

(without ditching your friends). “How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms” is published by Cory Doctorow.

^{Cory Doctorow (Medium)}

So the first stage of the platform lifecycle is luring in users by allocating lots of surplus to them - making the service fun and great and satisfying to use. Few or no ads, little or no overt data-collection, feeds that emphasize the people you want to hear from, not the people willing to pay to reach you.

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This continues until the service attains a critical mass: once it becomes impossible to, say, enroll your kid in a little-league baseball team without having a Facebook account, then Facebook can start shifting its surpluses to advertisers and other business-users of the platform, who will pay Facebook to interpose themselves in your use of the platform. You'll hate it, but you won't leave. Junior loves little-league.

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FB can enshittify its user experience because its users are now locked in, holding each other hostage. If FB can use the courts and technology to block interoperable services, it can increase its users' switching costs, producing more opportunities for lucrative enshittification without the risk of losing the users that make Facebook valuable to advertisers. That's why Facebook pioneered so many legal tactics for criminalizing interoperability:

eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power…

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Facebook v. Power Ventures

EFF has urged a San Francisco federal court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss Facebook's claims that criminal law is violated when its users opt for an add-on service that helps them aggregate their information from a variety of socia…

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

This is the second phase of the toxic platform life-cycle: luring in business customers by shifting surpluses from users to advertisers, sellers, etc. This is the moment when the platforms offer cheap and easy monetization, low transaction fees, few barriers to off-platform monetization, etc. This is when, for example, a news organization can tease an article on its website with an off-platform link, luring users to click through and see the ads it controls.

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Because Facebook has locked in its users through mutual hostage-taking, it can pollute their feeds with *lots* of these posts to news organizations' sites, bumping down the messages from its users' friends, and that means that Facebook can selectively tune how much traffic it gives to different kinds of business customers. If Facebook wants to lure in sports sites, it can cram those sites' posts into millions of users' feeds and send floods of traffic to sports outlets.

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Outlets that *don't* participate in Facebook lose out, and so they join Facebook, start shoveling their content into it, hiring #SEO Kremlinologists to help them figure out how to please #TheAlgorithm, in hopes of gaining a permanent, durable source of readers (and thus revenue) for their site.

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But ironically, once a critical mass of sports sites are on Facebook, Facebook no longer needs to prioritize sports sites in its users' feeds. Now that the sports sites all believe that a Facebook presence is a competitive necessity, they will hold each other hostage there, egging each other on to put *more* things on Facebook, even as the traffic dwindles.

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Once sports sites have taken each other hostage, Facebook can claw back the surplus it allocated to them and use it to rope in another sector - health sites, casual games, employment seekers, financial advisors, etc etc. Each group is ensnared by a similar dynamic to the one that locks in the users.

But there is a difference between users' surpluses and business's surpluses. A user's surplus is *attention*, and there is no such thing as an "attention economy."

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You can't use attention to pay for data-centers, or executive bonuses, or to lobby Congress. Attention is not a currency in the same way that cryptos are not currency - it is not a store of value, nor a unit of exchange, nor or a unit of account.

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Turning attention into money requires the same tactics as turning crypto into money - you have to lure in people who have real, actual money and convince them to swap it for attention. With crypto, this involved paying Larry David, Matt Damon, Spike Lee and LeBron James to lie about crypto's future in order to rope in suckers who would swap their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money for unspendable crypto tokens.

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With platforms, you need to bring in business customers who get paid in actual cash and convince them to give you that cash in exchange for ethereal, fast-evaporating, inconstant, unmeasurable "attention." This works like any Ponzi scheme (that is, it works like cryptos): you can use your shareholders' cash to pay short-term returns to business customers, losing a little money as a convincer that brings in more trade.

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That's what Facebook did when it sent enormous amounts of traffic to a select few news-sites that fell for the #PivotToVideo fraud, in order to convince their competitors to borrow billions of dollars to finance Facebook's bid to compete with Youtube:

doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-…

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“Metaverse” means “pivot to video” - Cory Doctorow - Medium

Fool me twice, we don’t get fooled again.. ““Metaverse” means “pivot to video”” is published by Cory Doctorow.

^{Cory Doctorow (Medium)}

This convincer strategy is found in every con. If you go to the county fair, you'll see some poor bastard walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that he "won" by throwing three balls into a peach-basket. The carny who operated that midway game let him win the teddy precisely so that he would walk around all day, advertising the game, which is rigged so that no one else wins the giant teddy-bear:

boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigg…

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Rigged carny game: The Scissor Bucket | Boing Boing

This weekend I looked at a ball toss carnival game from the 1930s. It belongs to a woman who works at O’Reilly (publishers of Make). She got it from her grandfather who used it in carnivals i…

^{Boing Boing}

Social media platforms can allocate giant teddy-bears to business-customers, and it can also withdraw them at will. Careful allocations mean that the platform can rope in a critical mass of business customers and then begin the final phase of its life-cycle: allocating surpluses to its shareholders.

We know what this looks like.

Rigged ad-markets:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blu…

Understaffed content moderation departments:

dw.com/en/twitters-sacking-of-…

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Twitter's sacking of content moderators raises concerns

Elon Musk has fired a large number of staffers who used to monitor Twitter for toxic content. A former contract worker told DW that she expects abuse to surge on the platform as a result. Experts are alarmed.

^{Janosch Delcker (Deutsche Welle)}

Knock-off products:

techcrunch.com/2021/12/08/twit…

Nuking "trust and safety":

reuters.com/technology/twitter…

Hiding posts that have links to rival services:

makeuseof.com/content-types-fa…

Or blocking posts that link to rival services:

pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/bet…

Or worse, terminating accounts for linking to rival services:

blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/12/…

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The Types of Content Facebook Hides From Your News Feed (and Why)

Here's what Facebook's mysterious News Feed algorithm looks like.

^{Keyede Erinfolami (MUO)}

That is, once a platform has its users locked in, and has its business customers locked in, it can enshittify its service to the point of near uselessness without losing either, allocating *all* the useful surplus in the business to its shareholders.

But this strategy has a problem: users and business customers don't like to be locked in! They will constantly try to find ways to de-enshittify your service and/or leave for greener pastures.

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And being at war with your users and business customers means that your reputation continuously declines, because every time a user or business customer figures out a way to claw back some surplus, you have to visibly, obviously enshittify your service wrestle it back.

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Every time a service makes headlines for blocking an ad-blocker, or increasing its transaction fees, or screwing over its users or business customers in some other way, it makes the case that the price you pay for using the service is not worth the value it delivers.

In other words, platforms try for an equilibrium where they only leave business customers and users with the absolute bare minimum needed to keep them on the service, and extract the rest for their shareholders.

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