Platforms are good to users to attract them, then abuse users to serve business customers, then abuse those too to extract value for themselves, and then die.
Doctorow's account turns on switching costs: each stage is available only because the group being degraded has become expensive to leave. The value flows to users, then to suppliers, then to shareholders, and the platform is left with nothing to offer anyone. The word spread faster than any of his arguments, which is itself a case of the thing Sailer's law of neologisms describes.
In practice
- A marketplace that buried organic results under paid placement did so after sellers could no longer reach buyers elsewhere.
- A service whose export function quietly stopped working has moved to the stage the model predicts.
- Standing
- A staged model built from cases rather than a tested sequence, and unusually well specified for a coinage of its kind: it names the order, the mechanism of lock-in at each stage, and what would falsify it.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Technology & Software
- Essay
- How technologies spread, scale, decay and frighten us