Amazon's enshittification is happening right on schedule
It has become a terrible user experience for reasons that are entirely predictable.
I am ashamed to admit my breakup with Amazon Prime was not for any morally principled reason. It was not in solidarity with the Amazon delivery drivers or fulfillment-center employees who have documented brutal working conditions. It was not to protest the billions of public dollars lost to tax breaks for Amazon facilities that create such low-paying jobs that additional public dollars are required to keep its employees from starving. It was not because Jeff Bezos has morphed into the world’s second-most cartoonish supervillain tech CEO.
It was because of the ads. Subscribers using the Prime Video streaming platform included in Amazon’s membership program recently began seeing “limited advertisements” during shows and movies. Viewers can opt out for an additional $3 monthly fee on top of the $140 an annual membership already costs.
Sorry, Bezos, that’s the last straw. We’re done.
Few experiences infuriate me more than being subjected to ads in places I’m already paying to be, which makes it difficult to be anywhere, but so it goes. And for a while, streaming services were a happy space devoid of commercial messaging. The premise was elegant and simple: in exchange for a reasonable monthly fee, users could enjoy movies and shows without the usual annoying interruptions.
The consumer upside was too self-evident for it to last. Today there are more platforms with ad-supported tiers than without. That’s because the streaming business model proved unsustainable, and companies are scrambling for ways to extract additional revenue from subscribers, which also explains the universally higher fees and crackdowns on password sharing.
This is part of a process that the writer and activist Cory Doctorow has memorably dubbed “enshittification.” It describes how a digital platform evolves from disruptive innovation to mainstream adoption to saturation and, eventually, to a self-induced collapse. Becomes shit, in other words. Doctorow outlined this idea about a year ago in a Wired magazine article about TikTok, but basically every major tech platform has experienced some version of this process.
“Enshittification” explains why digital user experiences degrade over time even as the technology becomes more sophisticated. It is why Google search is increasingly useless, riddled with sponsored links and hacked by worthless SEO content. It is why Instagram has become a bespoke outlet mall. It is why Facebook is nothing but flat-earthers arguing in all caps. It is why a version of Twitter operated by Elon Musk is somehow even worse than anybody could have imagined. It is why TikTok, which rushed in to fill the gaps as other platforms deteriorated, is itself showing signs of decay. “We’re all living through a great enshittening,” Doctorow recently wrote in the Financial Times, “in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.”
How it works is, a disruptive tech company will appear and offer a service that makes people’s lives easier or better in some clear, specific way: connecting with friends, sharing images, following the news in real time, having anything you want delivered to your house, etc. As it grows, the platform focuses intensely on its utility to possible users, directing all surplus capital toward building a better and more convenient product. Once the platform is widely adopted and its user base is entrenched, the platform shifts its focus to business partners — advertisers, publishers, brands — who understandably want to reach the platform’s captive user base. It then locks those partners in place by controlling that access, then turns on its business customers to divert profits to the only group it now cares about — the shareholders.
As Doctorow puts it:
It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms 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, there is a fourth stage: they die.
The platforms all suck now because the digital economy forces them to prioritize continuous growth rather than maintain a product people actually want to use, and these objectives tend to end up being mutually exclusive.
Facebook is probably the most visible example of this cycle. Here is what happened in each of those phases:
“Platforms are good to their users.” Facebook began as a more cleanly functional version of MySpace whose early draw was based on its initial exclusivity to college students. Before long the entire world was lured in by the novelty of connecting with people and curating online versions of our personalities.
“They abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.” Recognizing the value of all the content people were posting and all the data generated by other people’s interaction with it, Facebook introduced what, per my most tightly held tinfoil-helmet hobbyhorse theory, is the most destructive invention of the 21st Century — the algorithmic News Feed. In 2009 the company executed an insidious bait-and-switch, replacing chronological feeds with what exists now: a combination of ads with posts from a small fraction of a user’s friends, selected to maximize “engagement” — every click and like and comment, every time we ignore a post or hover over it before moving on — and produce data that allows advertisers to target us more effectively. Side effects include the destruction of countless industries, a plague of disinformation, the unraveling of democracy, ravaged brains and literal genocide.
“They abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” This part is why anybody who’s worked in the media business in the last decade or so, myself included, feels like a goddamn sucker. Suddenly the people every publication and brand wanted to reach were all on Facebook, so we followed them. Facebook became the leading news source in America, and media outlets relied on links in Facebook posts to generate traffic back to their stories. Facebook, which had courted publishers in its earlier days, has gradually made it harder to post links to external news sites in an effort to keep users on the platform. It pulled the plug on its News tab and stopped paying publishers for their content. It now actively deemphasizes posts from news outlets, and publishers’ traffic from Facebook has plummeted. It also forced the entire industry to “pivot to video” by falsifying data on viewership.
“They die.” Not yet, but we’re getting there.
Amazon is shit.
The Amazon version of the process has been underway for years. The company is a colossal pile of shit, even setting aside the aspects of its business practices that are repugnant on a human level.
Amazon began by selling products online at a loss to build up its customer base. Its efficiency drove prices down and shuttered god knows how many brick-and-mortar retailers. It then locked users in place with its Prime program — a staggering 82 percent of American households have a Prime subscription — and that customer base enticed smaller online sellers to conduct their business through Amazon exclusively. So Amazon started filling search results with ads, forcing those sellers to pay to get their products seen and squeezing them for billions’ worth of additional fees. The company then began cloning independent sellers’ most successful products and started directing search results to its own versions, putting those direct sellers out of business based on the data generated by their own work. Now an ever-larger portion of revenue goes to the only segment the company cares about now: that’s right, its shareholders.
A shitty user experience is not merely a byproduct of this process. Internal communications made public because of a Federal Trade complaint revealed that Amazon intentionally degraded the interface for customers and sellers, deliberately letting search results become overrun with junk ads and forcing sellers to pay more for their products to be seen.
And that’s how we get to a place where I need to pay an additional $36 a year to not see ads during episodes of “Catastrophe.” Having squeezed all available dollars from the rest of its operation, Amazon goes back to its users, whom it now assumes are too dependent on the platform to walk away rather than pay an additional luxury charge.
We don’t have to be! Paying $140 upfront to avoid a year of hypothetical shipping costs is not as good a deal as it might seem when you actually crunch the numbers. And it does not take a ton of research to find comparably priced equivalents elsewhere for almost anything Amazon is selling.
We’re still in the season for delusional gestures toward self-improvement, and ditching Amazon Prime might be the rare first-quarter resolution that could help deshittify the entire world.