I had the chance to go to a very interesting talk recently by a guy named Cory Doctorow who is mainly a sci-fi writer but has an interest in tech and the place of tech in society -- what I would call "broadly Electronic Frontier Foundation-type issues." He talked about a kind of typical lifecycle of tech/social media giants (a kind of preview, I guess, of his upcoming book), where benefits originally offered to users are gradually withdrawn in favor of being given to advertisers which are then gradually withdrawn in order to accrue to the company itself and its shareholders, a process he calls the "enshittificaton" of social media. Given that, uh, two major social media sites have had meltdowns in the last month (Reddit's CEO implementing new policies regarding third party apps leading to a protest and exodus, plus Twitter's extended ongoing shitshow, the latest development being that Twitter started capping how many tweets a user can load, possibly due to a shoddy code rollout or because Twitter refuses to pay its cloud computing bills (either way, some kind of cost-cutting measure no doubt led to this situation)) and that I generally like ranting about the sad state of modern social media, I thought I would write a DW post summarizing the talk / his points because it seems relevant!