Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Cory Doctorow
“Platforms follow a predictable lifecycle: first, they offer their end-users a good deal. Early Facebook users got a feed consisting solely of updates from the people they cared about, and promises of privacy. Early Google searchers got result screens filled with Google’s best guess at what they were searching for, not ads. Amazon once made it easy to find the product you were looking for, without making you wade through five screens’ worth of ‘sponsored’ results. The good deal for users is only temporary. … Once those users are firmly in hand, the platforms degrade what made users choose the platform in the first place, making the deal worse for them in order to attract business customers. So instead of showing you the things you asked for, your time and attention is sold to businesses by platforms.” (05/09/23)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first