Have you noticed that social media platforms that you started with, enjoying sharing photos and funny thoughts with friends and family are now monetized hell holes designed to extract maximum dollars from every user? Well, that’s due to enshittification (aka deliberately making something “shitty”), a term popularized by Cory Doctorow who describes the degradation of online platforms as a three-step process:
Stage 1: Provide Value to Users. New platforms create a high quality, user-friendly experience that attracts people and grows the base of users. “Be good to the users.”
Stage 2: Attract Business Customers. When the platform has a large, captive audience of users, those users become a valuable asset which the platform then sells to businesses in the form of advertising or direct selling. “Sell the users to businesses.”
Stage 3: Extract Value from Both. Here’s where the (dark) magic happens. The platform abuses its consumer base and the business customers alike in order to claw back and extract all possible value from both to maximize shareholder value, in the process degrading the service quality and original premise of the platform. “Jack up prices for business customers to extract maximum value.”
Doctorow describes the final stage as “then they die,” unloved and unmourned. Well, detested really. After all, who doesn’t basically think Zuck, Bezos and Musk are among the worst humans?
Here are some things you have probably notice in using various social media platforms:
- Algorithms shift from showing the user content that enticed you to join in the first place to prioritizing paid promotions and ads. Organic reach of the content you were actually interested in is deprioritized to the point that you can’t even really find it. Sounds like every social media platform I’ve ever used: Twitter / X, Facebook / Meta, Instagram, and even TikTok.
- Search engines become cluttered with ads and paid placements making it hard to find relevant information. Yep.
- Sales platforms prioritize ads and increase their fees to sellers, negatively impacting buyers and sellers.
The driver behind enshittification is the pursuit of profit and market dominance at the expense of user experience and quality. Platforms nakedly seek to extract maximum value by prioritizing their own financial interests over that of their users and business partners. In theory, these platforms go too far and eventually are replaced by new ones that .. ruh roh .. go through the exact same cycle again.
College students were asked to close their eyes and raise their hands if they used TikTok for hours a day, and most raised their hands. They then were asked if they thought they would be happier if TikTok had never been invented, and a similar number of them raised their hands.
Paul Krugman thinks that Doctorow might be wishfully thinking that these platforms will suffer an ignominious death, though. He also expands the term of enshittification to encompass basically any business that becomes popular (or in business parlance has strong network effects). Once you have a large customer base, you are going to reduce their experience to get money and recoup your initial investment. You are going to raise prices, or you could reduce quality and create tiered pricing to get better quality, you could sell them to businesses, etc.
Krugman thinks that rather than dying off, these businesses will result in stagnation.
The monopolist increases prices and/or reduces quality enough that his base stops growing, but not enough to drive it away. For what it’s worth, that appears to be the story so far for Facebook, whose user base has plateaued but not crashed. Twitter is a somewhat different story, but this post is about enshittification, not Nazification.
Go, Paul. And Doctorow is no less critical:
Now, the guy who ran Facebook when it was a great way to form communities and make friends and find old friends is the same guy who has turned Facebook into a hellscape. There’s very good reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg was always a creep, and he took investment capital very early on, long before he started f*cking up the service. So what gives? Did Zuck get a brain parasite that turned him evil? Did his investors get more demanding in their clamor for dividends?
While both point out that enshittification messes with the minds of the users, it does the same with the minds of platform creators, some of whom have a deeply pathological need to be liked almost on par with their actual pathology. And to the users who hate it and want to leave, where else are they going to go? Where else can they easily interact with their aging relatives, high school friends, the rest of their charity group, or their children? If they do jump to a new platform, what functionality will they lose? Which people will they lose touch with?
Companies pursue profit at all costs, but while you may be tempted to focus on the “at all costs” part of that formulation, you musn’t neglect the “profits” part. Companies don’t pursue unprofitable actions at all costs — they only pursue the plans that they judge are likely to yield profits.
When companies face real competitors, then some enshittificatory gambits are unprofitable, because they’ll drive your users to competing platforms. That’s why Zuckerberg bought Instagram: he had been turning the screws on Facebook users, and when Instagram came along, millions of those users decided that they hated Zuck more than they loved their friends and so they swallowed the switching costs and defected to Instagram.
I just felt like the word “enshittificatory” needed to be included, although I think Doctorow’s point is salient. Eventually we do leave these platforms (or streaming services–you know who you are). But we’ve entirely given up on regulatory means to keep these creeps in line.
“Corporations are people, my friend,” is something Mitt Romney said during his most recent failed presidential bid, referring to the fact that corporations hold rights that can best be described as personhood. “If corporations are people, those people are psychopaths,” is Joel Bakan’s twist on that idea. His critique is that unlike people, corporations don’t feel guilt or empathy, and they can’t feel remorse for the harm caused by their actions. All they have to do to exist is to remain profitable.
All this is one reason that the Church has to be more than a corporation if it is to do good in the world, to promote human flourishing. Sometimes it does great good. Sometimes it fails disastrously. Is it behaving like a psychopathic corporation or a moral human when it limits liability by silencing abuse victims? When it fires people who refuse to sign documents they know are untrue? When it targets LGBTQ students and fires their allies at BYU? We all know that there are times when it fails to live up to a Christian ideal. Of course there are rationalizations for every decision. That’s how human minds work.
True, obvious enshittification would be if you were reading scriptures in the Gospel Library app and having to deal with pop up ads for Ponderize tee shirts, or worse, if the LDS tools app started giving you reels of tradwife content or how to make garment friendly blouses out of scarves. I really don’t see those things happening.
There are a few examples of the milder all-corporations-do-it style “enshittification” that I can think of in the Church context because any way you slice it, the church has very strong network effects (social pressure). You join in large part because you want to be part of this group of people or you were born into this group of people. When the Michigan shooting happened, ex-Mo internet spaces felt it as strongly as those who currently attend, that’s how strong the network ties are within the Church. And the Church can use that to create human flourishing by supporting people, providing welfare, positive connections and family-building infrastructure, or it can use that social network to control and extract value from the membership.
- Linking callings to holding a current temple recommend (which definitely was not always the case during my lifetime) means that you can’t be a Gospel Doctrine teacher if you don’t declare a full tithe payment. This is why some critics say it’s a “pay to play” church whereas most other churches don’t track donations this closely or expect 10% from everyone (nor do they get it, so there’s that).
- Using the church directory for Prop 8 calling trees.
- Making temple weddings the norm and linking attendance at your own child’s wedding to church membership is an extension of this same concept. It’s at least been dialed down recently in that someone can have a civil wedding and doesn’t have to wait for the temple sealing, but the social pressures are still strong.
- Missions are talked about as mandatory for men, and they pay for this themselves. If you don’t go on a mission (as a man) your marriage prospects might be affected. Psychologically, mission service increases sunk cost fallacy, making it harder to leave the church.
- Cleaning the church buildings using members as the “voluntary” workforce. Let’s be honest, if this really relied on volunteers, it would be immediately apparent that the churches are not going to get cleaned. People mostly only show up if they get guilted into it. We would all like to go back to janitors.
- Using church monies to host World Congress of Families events or pay Kirton-McConkie to submit amicus briefs to fight against gay or trans rights. Donating to hate groups designed to strip my own kids of rights aren’t why I paid tithing. I also didn’t pay tithing so the church could pay SEC fines with it.
Those are the closest examples I can think of, and if I want to draw a “rationalizing” parallel to these social media and other platforms (Uber for example), it would be that when these businesses started out, they required large up front investments. They were underwater financially, not profitable. In most cases, they had to start down the path of enshittification to get to profitability. That’s certainly the case for the Church’s tithing push, and boy did that pay off. But when is enough enough? My own business experience would say that it’s never enough if there’s more money to be made, and you don’t get a promotion for saying “Hey guys, let’s quit exploiting our customers since we have plenty of money already.”
- Do you agree with Doctorow and Krugman about the inevitability of enshittification?
- Is this a natural byproduct of capitalism?
- Do corporations make their owners do evil things or are they run by bad people?
- Is what the church does similar or different from how these other corporations work over time?
- Are there social media platforms you wish would just die? Are there some you’ve quit?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
The issue is not “Capitalism” but rather Corporatism whereby the interests of individuals are overwhelmed by the concentrated power of institutions. The economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted this outcome. Capitalism would produce enormous wealth and productivity gains and this would feed the growth and influence of both corporations and politics. The priority of these institutions would then turn to protecting their dominance.
Free-market capitalism requires competition and the allowance for new firms to topple established ones – Schumpeter labeled this “creative destruction”. The free-market fosters innovation and it elevates the entrepreneur and creator of new ideas and products. The free-market empowers the individual to demand providers of products and services to be responsive to consumer needs.
Established institutions (corporations, political parties and religions, etc) do not want competition. They use their market domination to protect their markets and to control competition.
Consider that the LDS church no more wants there to be another Joseph Smith just as much as Apple no more wants there to be another Steve Jobs. Established institutions do not want competition from outsiders! Furthermore, management at established firms are wary of the threat of insiders who may challenge their authority! The LDS church, going back to Joseph Smith, has always been controlling of who has authority to speak for the church. The centralization of control and of the church organization has become especially significant in the last 30 years.
As it concerns the LDS church, it is at a crossroads. The continued centralization / corporatization of the church makes the church more efficient, but also less alive. The church experience becomes more like joining a franchise business than starting a family diner. The franchise business is sleek and efficient but the workers have no skin in the game. A church that develops a culture where the members do not have skin in the game is a church in decline.
I think that the “enshittification” might be somewhat limited in scope to “products” that don’t have an immediate value proposition. It was pretty clear from the start that social networking-type efforts would have to mine their users to get any profit from it. Seems to be the biggest issue for “products” that have to rely on a large user base to even have a hope of profitability – like your Uber example, and again these social media platforms.
Other market areas would seem to be more resilient against “enshittification” because there are other options on the market: as simple examples, think of cars or any other kinds of somewhat-fungible nature. To me, that is a more natural result of true capitalism (different product options, like at a grocery store). I think “enshittification” IS a natural byproduct of monopoly or oligopoly, and that is more akin to what you describe regarding where else would I go to connect with friends/family members if not facebook or whatever. As a fundamental premise, I still hold out hope that healthy capitalism, with the options and choices it provides, can be a societal good (and I think the last 200 years has shown that, contrasted with highly-controlled economies when tried in various nations).
And about making people evil … seems to me it would be a mix of both. On the one hand, in our era it certainly seems that those that “succeed” the most with these businesses are ones that are willing to “take risks” (which, often these days, involves ignoring law and/or societal conventions to “break things” and “innovate”). In other words, not evil per se but these companies tend to be led by people that don’t have, or ignore, compunctions for compassion for their fellow human beings. On the other hand, even if good people get to leadership of corporations like your examples, I can’t help but wonder at whether they become so insulated from the “real world” (I am using so many scare quotes today!) that they lose their touch of how their corporate decisions can impact normal people.
Trying to draw parallels to the church as an organization seems like a stretch to me. I don’t think the church, as an organization, has as its primary motive to extract profit from the members (which is how I’m reading your “extracting value” concept). Just as a simple example, the tithing aspect all you have to do is declare you see yourself as a full tithepayer. After the SEC debacle, I’m sure we are all aware of people (if not also being that person ourselves) that has chosen to donate to other worthy causes instead, and see that as their tithe. Given how long the church has existed, and particularly for how long the church has had business types (think N. Eldon Tanner onward) in key leadership positions, if enshittification were to occur, we would have already long since seen it creeping in with respect to apostle compensation (e.g., to follow the same seemingly-exponential curve as CEO compensation), perhaps tweaking tithing asks (to get the numbers upward), ads like you mention (hah! that would be crazy if ads showed up in church resources for products), and at a fundamental level selling our information to other business entities for profit (going back to your original set-up with facebook and the others). I just don’t see that happening in the church. And it’s not like we don’t have other church examples to compare against – think the megachurches with their pastors that fell to scandals regarding opulent mansions and the like.
If we define extracting value more broadly as your list of examples trends towards (the calling tree, temple weddings, missions, cleaning the church), then I think if anything the church is trending in the opposite direction relative to its origins: being a member of the church at the start demanded everything of its members in terms of leaving homes, livelihoods, and the like.
And I would love it if the leadership got to a point where they said that tithing isn’t necessary per se anymore, while still leaving open fast offerings and other things to alleviate the suffering of our fellow humans! That would be awesome.
Yes, I agree with Doctorow and Krugman. And yes, Facebook has become horrible and unsatisfying. The reels section in particular has become traumatic and unwatchable (a literal horror show) thanks to OpenAI ventures and the content being posted (bad actors in more ways than one). All that said, I’d like to risk empathizing/humanizing the Zuckerbergs of the world (without disagreeing with the OP).
Case in point: George Lucas had to start one or more companies to get Star Wars made. The outgrowth of that first beloved trilogy was Lucasfilm Ltd. At some point, Lucas, an indie-minded filmmaker looked around and realized that a whole bunch of people worked for him, counted on the company he made staying afloat to cover their mortgages, health insurance, and vital savings (kid’s college and retirement). Long story short, a Luke Skywalker-esque young filmmaker ended up being the Emperor of an Empire, not a scrappy rebellion. His Disney successor, Kathleen Kennedy, seems even more egregious in her heavy-handed, cash-cow over creativity management style. Same thing happened with Zuck, pretty early on in the development of Facebook. He looked around at employees buying houses, having kids, and realized this had damn well better payoff.
I’m not saying the above to overturn the character criticisms in the OP, only to say there is a very understandable human component of this. CEOs, even the seemingly narcissistic ones, are aware of just how much employees are counting on the company to become or remain profitable for their entire lives.
Here’s two sites that I’ve spent years with and watched go from vibrant communal spaces to bland, sanitized corporate platforms:
1) Goodreads.com
Now a glorified Amazon storefront with almost none of the member-driven content still in place. All the landing pages that pass for community are clearly backscratching enterprises between Goodreads and publishers/authors. I only stay because its where my hundreds of reviews are, my various shelves, my memory of once having been a part of something wholesome and special. It AIN’T that anymore.
2) NaNoWriMo.org
Now a glorified storefront for whichever published/writing self-help companies agreed to fund it this year. All the online writing events amount to paid advertisements or gladhanding trendy authors on publicity tours. The once-lively forums were shuttered, and to the extent they allow users to openly say anything anywhere on the platform, it’s only because they have paid moderators to micromanage and protect NaNoWriMo legally. It’s apparent all decisions are being made not to foster community, but to protect the bottom-line for people who make their careers there. As a grassroots creative space it is DOA as far as I’m concerned.
I no longer use social media. I care only about face-to-face social contact. Electronic social contact is fake.
I think the dominant market thinking that competition creates quality products needs to be rephrased. The inability of competitors to gain a monopoly due to natural circumstances of the market environment or due to government regulation is what is driving quality. The truth is that capitalists bitterly hate competition and their tendency is overwhelmingly monopolist in nature. Once a producer has no competition to worry about, the quality of the product will tend to go down. The libertarians are wrong in their assertion that we can rely on natural circumstances alone to create competition. Government regulation is every bit as vital to curving monopolism. But in the world of social media the government was late to the game. People in power simply didn’t and continue to not understand the internet and how to regulate it. Hence we find ourselves in the position we’re in and algorithms running the show. In cyberspace there is less and less natural space to create the competition to drive social media platforms to provide a better product and moderate their space.
Big fish eat little fish. I heard that in High School back in the 70s and didn’t really know what it meant, but I do now. Companies may advertise the family farm or a small business, but are there any family farms or small businesses left? What happened in the computer industry or the social media industry is just a repeat of what happened in the auto or oil industry. First, many small companies are bought up by more successful companies, and eventually, there are just a few companies that control everything in that industry. It is what happens when money is the key driver of any endeavor.
In many ways, the church has just followed suit. Wards and stakes used to be more independent. They had their own budgets that they raised from their members. They had their own programs (think girls’ camps or Roadshows, among other things) funded by their local funds. They even funded their own buildings. Slowly, that went away is smaller percentages needed for each local building until now it they are all built by the main church. Local budgets went away with allocations to the stake and then from there to the wards from the main church for their “programs.” But local programs went away then. Pageants, roadshows, even many camps and ward recreation areas were shut down or ended. The only ones that stayed were in areas where the members were more well-heeled than other areas, and they took it upon themselves to pay for it, somehow independent of the church.
All of this happened in the name of efficiency, but in reality, it was about money. Focus on the “mission” of the church, and there’s more money to invest churchwide or in some date when the church will need it, like if society breaks down. Bottom line your ward is your community until it isn’t, because there aren’t enough members and you are merged with another ward in some other building and your old one is torn down. Unless, of course, you move to a bright, shiny suburban location with a new cookie-cutter building and a ward/stake boundary that constantly changes as more people move in. Just ask the old members who have lived in the same house for 60 years and been in 8 wards and 3 stakes or the new members who just bought a new house and are in their third ward in five years.
Airlines are no exception to this phenomenon. I remember the early 2000s when JetBlue was new, and there was a lot of excitement and buzz about the airline being a “disruptive innovator” that was going to revolutionize the industry. I flew JetBlue frequently in those days, when I was in college, because it offered a very affordable direct flight between my hometown area and my college city, and I was very satisfied, especially during holidays. I didn’t think of it as a low-cost airline then, but an innovative gamechanger that was on the verge of beating Southwest at its own game. By the late 2000s, I had graduated, started my career and then relocated to a new city not served by JetBlue; I had moved on from JetBlue, and I suppose by then most of its original customer base had too. In the years following, the airline had declined remarkably in quality and reliability, and lost their competitive edge, especially in pricing, while weathering some high-profile negative publicity. Today, JetBlue is in a perennial race to the bottom for U.S.-based budget carriers. Interestingly, JetBlue was founded by David Neeleman, a well-known Sucessful Mormon Businessman™, who has founded a string of airlines that repeat this familiar “enshittifactaory” cycle: start a new, innovative overhyped low-cost airline, ride it to it’s peak of success, then bail (or get forced out) as it begins it’s decline, then rinse and repeat. It is because of Neeleman and entrepreneurs like him that the traveling public is awash in mediocre Great Value brand airlines that have well-deserved reputations for poor customer service, poor performance and poor treatment of their employees.
I agree that the LDS Church is experiencing its own version of enshittification, but for somewhat different reasons. For better or worse, the modern Church is completely unrecognizable from its original version from the early 19th century. But the bigger it has grown, the more unwieldy it became for a cabal of elderly (mostly) white (mostly) American men to keep control of it, which results in a more diluted, banal experience for everyone. This is exacerbated by the Church’s senior leadership being now more geriatric than ever, especially when compared with the Church’s energetic founding generation of people mostly in their 20s and 30s. Despite the fact that the Church is now obscenely wealthy, I would like to think that the Q15 are not primarily motivated by the accumulation of wealth, though they still seem awfully miserly with their funds, opting to spend on dozens of new temples rather than on worthy humanitarian endeavors.
Enshittification could be a by-product of late-stage capitalism. Or it could just be that with any new innovative thing (platform/company/organization/institution) the shine eventually wears off, and the “magic” that made it special in the beginning can no longer be maintained in a sustainable way. Nothing lasts forever.
Part of the issue here is the failure that plagues “Stage 3” of this process. I don’t mind seeing ads, and over the years have encountered well-targeted ads that offered services or goods I was actually interested in. I purchased some of these and had satisfactory experiences.
The targeting has gone all to Outer Darkness now. The ad servers often do that creepy “We’re totally not listening to you” thing and serve me ads based on recent verbal conversations, but they’re not even good as: I don’t need another roof on my home (already replaced), I don’t intend to travel overseas (I was talking about how hard it is to do so right now), and I resent getting ads for therapy every time I mention that I or someone in my family is feeling down. Either that, or the ads are wildly mistargeted: I’m not dating hot singles in my area, I’m not looking to adopt children, I don’t want to buy an SUV, I don’t want a monthly box of stale snacks from Asia, and I’m not looking for online language lessons. This has been going on for ages–back when I publicly expressed support for gay marriage around 2009, Facebook decided I would *only* do this if I were myself a gay man, and showed me gay dating ads for years. It only stopped when I ran in a themed 5K race, and then for the next few years I got ads with hot ladies running obstacle courses. (No beef with gay folks, but I definitely preferred the latter batch of ads.)
And despite all this, I know millions of dollars are changing hands. I’ve mostly stopped using Facebook in part due to this, and I know the companies shelling out for advertising can’t be getting a lot of clickthroughs. What gives?
To bring this back to a Church context: the Church has been selling me stuff I don’t want for decades. I wanted community, shared purpose, and opportunities for service. The institution offers monolithic culture, soaks me for financial and personal support, and wonders aloud why my special needs kids want to be anywhere in the world but LDS youth meetings. I feel like nobody got what they wanted.
1. Do you agree with Doctorow and Krugman about the inevitability of enshittification? Yes! (At least for the types of businesses described in the OP, like social media companies).
2. Is this a natural byproduct of capitalism? Yes!
3. Do corporations make their owners do evil things or are they run by bad people? There are good people/owners running corporations that do not-so-good things. Big corporations are large, complicated beasts that take on a life of their own. A leader of a corporation who stands in the way of optimizing profits probably isn’t going to be able to stay in that position very long.
4. Is what the church does similar or different from how these other corporations work over time? We can see cases of the Church sometimes operating similarly to corporations, but since the Church claims a monopoloy on “the truth”, I’m not sure it is always trying to optimize profits like most corporations do.
I can think of another way that the Church enshittifies members’ experiences over time. Think of the experience that children, youth, and young adults have with the Church until the point they are married, graduate from BYU, and/or age out of the YSA program. The Church invests so much more money into youth and young adult programs. My daughter is at BYU, and I am just amazed at how much the Church spends on BYU students (beyond just providing the college education). I think the idea is to provide these young people with a very positive experience and to get them to marry each other with a commitment to always remain faithful members. Once that happens, then boom, married people (or people who fail to marry at a sufficiently young age) are immediately moved into the enshittified adult Church program that has almost no funding (other than buildings and lousy lesson materials) and demands a lot of time without providing much in return.
I didn’t understand all the post. ,sorry hawk, my problem not yours. But I think you are talking about unfettered big business.
If you believe in small government it means you support unfettered capitalism.
Large multi national corporations (usually american) have been operating throughout the world and paying no tax. The free world (including america) agreed they should pay 15% tax on their income in the country it is generated in. Trump scrapped this when he came in but it still applies elsewhere. So I think trump is for unfettered capitalism. Giving them tax cuts at the expense of the rest.
From 10 December 2025, children under 16 won’t be able to create or keep accounts on platforms where age restrictions are likely to apply, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X and YouTube. This is to help protect kids from harmful content and give them more time to learn safe online habits.
This has just been passed in Australia because the platforms were being used to bully, and torment children.
We prefer our companies to show corporate responsibility/morality.
An example; fortescue metals is an Iron mining company. It is at present building a green steel plant. It is also installing an undersea cable so it can supply solar generated electricity to Singapore.
Don’t know about the church. How many Mormons would have been involved in the no kings marches?
Our seasons are reversed so just coming into summer. It is 36C here today and parts of the state have have had 45c for more than a week breaking records for October, and have high fire danger in most of the state. So expecting an extreme summer. We believe in climate science, and are not impressed with trump pulling America out of the climate agreement.
Let me put on my business hat for a moment. For a long time, what companies sold was a product, a physical thing. A company sold *things.* Increasingly in the postmodern economy, what businesses are selling is a *service* or even just an app. We used to talk about a product life cycle. Now we are talking about a service cycle, but the same dynamic seems to be emerging. And that makes the discussion a lot more relevant to churches and the LDS Church, which, apart from Deseret Book and LDS distribution centers, are “selling” services, not products. And just like products, most branded services seem to decline over time as well.
Have changes in the last decade or the last generation amounted to stepping back from being a “high investment church”? That is certainly a change that ought to get our attention. Two-hour church. Home teaching has pretty much gone away. Scouting (which required a lot of $ and time support from the adults) has gone away. It’s like the only people in the system who still have to work hard are LDS missionaries and local leadership. Everyone else is either just sliding by these days (to some relief) or on the payroll, in which case it’s not high investment volunteer work, it’s your job.
I’ve read a few books recently about start-up busts like WeWork, Theranos, some of the crypto implosions. Everyone wants their company to be a “unicorn” that makes billions of dollars and makes all their initial investors rich. They need the astronomical profits to justify the billions upon billions poured into unprofitable companies. And the golden touch is software companies. Once you’ve developed software, or a game, then you can create downloads that propel the profits to the stratosphere. Pay the developers; create the game; now the game costs $60 forever even though the marginal cost of a download is just a few cents.
Companies that make goods in the real world never get to that steep return on investment. Same thing with real world services. There is more of a cost with real world goods and services than with something that can be infinitely downloaded like a video game. And somewhere along the line, consistent profits (which should be a good thing) have been rebranded as stagnant profits (which are a bad thing). It’s all about making the profit line go up. Bring in more from customers and spend less in costs. That creates enshittification. If companies could decide that making an 8% profit every year for two decades is enough to pay the bills and make a modest return on investment, then they can just stabilize and keep doing what works. instead, if profits are 8% one year, they need to go up to 14% and then 18% because your CEO is a failure if profits hold steady.
It’s greed.
The Church had a membership boom a few decades ago, and that just isn’t going to happen again. Slow progress, consistent numbers, not explosive growth. It looks like stagnation and withering, and maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. Who cares if the numbers don’t go up forever?
As far as social media goes … I barely used Facebook for a few years and left a decade ago. Facebook made me REALLY nervous and unhappy. My only social media is Tumblr. There is no algorithm (there is, but we all turned it off); you see content from people you follow and that’s all. No one uses their real name and even if you accidentally found out that your sibling or coworker is on Tumblr, you NEVER connect. Of course, as we all say: “this website is free but we pay in other ways.” That gets added to any post about something totally ridiculous or reprehensible. And it helps if you fall into one of three categories: queer, neurodivergent, obsessed with fandom stuff. Tumblr is Instagram’s weird cousin that no one wants to talk to.
I act normal here, but the truth is that I’ve written over 120,000 words for fandom over the past year. Compare to the 110 posts I’ve written for W&T over the past two years (average of 1000 words per post is about 11,000 words so my fandom writing is ten times more than my W&T writing). What can I say? I like fictional worlds. And now that I’ve ditched religious worlds, all that energy and attention goes into the fictional worlds created by humans.
Tumblr’s days are limited. It has never been profitable and probably never will be. I pay $9 monthly for ad-free Tumblr. It’s worth it to me, but most can’t afford that. Tumblr sells ads, but it isn’t a profitable place to advertise so that doesn’t pay tumblr’s bills either. Tumblr resists enshittification because there are no profits to be had. It’s always been a shitty place and that’s held steady as the rest of social media has gotten so much worse.
Oh hey! While I’m talking about fandom. We have a fanfiction archive. It’s called Archive of Our Own and it’s entirely funded by donations. There is no advertising. None. And you can’t put anything commercial on the site — like you can’t link a Patreon or ask for a ko-fi tip for writing fanfiction. Fanfiction has to stay free or we’re violating copyright laws. Ergo, no enshittification at AO3 either.
Enshittification goes away if profit motives are taken out of the picture. Pretty rare nowadays.
Jake C.
I’m a Star Trek person, not Star Wars. But I do like it for the most part (I have a Darth Vader shower head. I don’t know what that means) But what corporation will spend a billion dollars on a set of films and have no plan? I am not a business person, so I don’t understand it. And those films are that bad.
Much of the criticism of Kathleen Kennedy is generated and amplified by Hate Watchers who want to Make Nerdom Great Again. Which means I get kicked out of the treehouse.
This brings me to Andor. A Masterpiece. And even though I am a Star Trek person, Andor is one of the best shows I’ve seen. And Tony Gilroy has nothing but praise for Kathleen Kennedy.
Janey
Thanks for reminding me of. AO3. Writing what you love, instead of for profit. Unfortunately when it comes to reading, I need a hard copy book in front of me. Preferably in front of a campfire. But I have read top notch stuff there.(maybe I should break down and get new glasses)
Do corporations make their owners do evil things or are they run by bad people? Yes.
As for the Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, no comment.