Building in the era of enshittification

I joined Instagram back in 2012, and I will not bore you with the back then it was good speech, you can already hear it. There are examples of the other end of it everywhere, like Instagram testing unskippable ads.

Somewhere along the way the deal quietly changed, and it did not change all at once but as a slow drift where every step was small enough to shrug at. Cory Doctorow gave the pattern a name, and once you have the name you start seeing it everywhere.

First the platform is good to its users to build the crowd. Then it turns on the users to please the business customers who pay it. Then it turns on those customers too, because by that point everybody is locked in and leaving is more painful than staying. The value flows to the platform, and the people who made it worth using are left with the scraps.

The part that gets me is how rational each move looks from the inside. Nobody sets out to make the product worse. They are chasing engagement, or ad revenue, or the next quarter, and every individual decision can be defended in a meeting. The rot is not one villain. It is a thousand reasonable tradeoffs stacked on top of each other until the thing you liked is gone.

This is part of why I am building staaf.co. I am not interested in the pressure. I do not want the growth at all costs game, the squeeze on users, the slow turn against the people who made the thing worth using. Enshittification is a choice dressed up as an inevitability, and I would rather just not make it. Build something good, keep it good, and if that means it stays small, then it stays small.