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2 minute read
The open web is threatened by myriad trends and actors. Do Publishers hold the key to blocking the sewage?
First, what is Enshitification?
Today, the Web seems to be hurling towards a frustratingly poor utility - a public commons filled with low-value, clickbaity content – and in the process, humanity is losing both a reliable signal and any semblance of objective truth.
A lot of this has to do with the current incentives on the ad-sponsored web….
From an AI summary of Ben Thomson’s thoughtful and prescient piece from 2015 called “Why Web Pages Suck”:
“The decline of the reader's online experience is a direct result of enabling advertisers to reach their target audience more efficiently. Ad networks and programmatic advertising have led to publishers being forced to compromise user experience to generate revenue, as they have little bargaining power against advertisers. This has resulted in bloated web pages with intrusive ads and trackers that sacrifice user experience for advertising profits.”
It’s also worth pointing out that a downstream sacrifice has damaged end-user privacy and led to losing control of user tracking data in the broader online advertising ecosystem. The result has been techno-regulation from Apple in the form of ATT or Google, which is sometimes serious but maybe not so serious threat of cookie deprecation, as well as regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
Again, the summary (this time from Cory Doctorow’s thesis on Enshitification) illustrates the slow conceptual trend to this state, which has already been creatively named Enshitification.
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshitification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”
If you squint your eyes, you can see how the digital advertising ecosystem ‘platform’ has slowly “enshitified” the user, advertiser, and publisher to the point where no one is winning except for megopolies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon:
- Users lose privacy and patience from endlessly enduring painfully slow, spammy experiences on websites
- Publishers lose their profitability (or their businesses) in the race to the bottom of commoditized content monetized by programmatic pipes that are filled with 3rd party data, which often lacks provenance and has been shown to have zero respect for users
- Advertisers lose faith in what they are getting for their budget, and it dawns on them that the promise of precision at scale isn't real and is going to have to be measured probabilistically after all
While the Open Web is technically not a private platform, the impact of private platform enshitification on the Open Web is significant. And to be honest, this is the best way of depicting what enshitification looks like on the Open Web with regards to advertising:
Meanwhile:
... the Megopolies siphon all the data onto their identity spaces, hoard all the intelligence about the user on a publisher’s properties and build deeper first-party data moats.
…and we all need to ask ourselves the critical question: are we comfortable with the national security risks of adversarial nations controlling enough data about Americans to further enshitify our democracy? (theoretically by Using TikTok for surveillance and influence)? More details here, here, and here.
Separately, read here for what enshitification looks like for journalism and truth.