Note: The economics of social media platforms are based, on value-extraction, and the platform design decisions that modify who benefits from that value.
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Note: The end-goal for the platform companies is to move as much as possible of the value extraction in their favour, progressively making the service worse for end-users and businesses.
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Note: To keep users and businesses on the platform while their value proposition is weakened ("enshittification" as Doctorow eloquently puts it), the platform companies are skilled in exploiting network effects and switching costs.
Blocking interoperability with other platforms is a key and deliberate factor in this. The art is to keep users and businesses just happy enough that the pain of moving (and potentially losing their networks) is slightly more than the pain of using an increasingly enshottified platform
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Note: The platform lifecycle typically goes like this:
lure users with fun and satifsying features, and a minimum of pain points like ads, data collection, manipulation of what you see
at critical mass lure in businesses, trading the user attention surplus for revenue generators like targetted advertising, whilst keeping the hurdles for business low
the implicit side-effect of increasing value for businesses is reducing value for users as they see more and more ads, and their feeds fill with promoted content over the content they want
once a business sector is almost universally using your platform, start using that network effect against them by pushing up fees, forcing them to use your monetisation options etc.
the third phase is when enough business revenue is effectively locked-in through network effects and blocks on interoperability, and the service to businesses is progressively worsened to extract more value for the platform company
