network effect (10. 609)

We’ve come across the adage before that “if the service is free, you are the product, recently reframed and encapsulated in Cory Doctrow’s resonate summation of ‘enshittification’—now examined and broadened to include sponsors, advertisers as social media platforms’ real clients. Beyond the walled-garden of on-site engagement and the difficulty of exporting one’s social graph to an alternative host, posters and advertisers are locked into a captive market, joining at first voluntarily and then kept locked in by peer-pressure with all of these platforms free to privelege engagement over news and updates from one’s circle of friends with license and motivation, subtle or blatant to engineer the site to maximise those ends—and whilst not inevitable, the scale continues.