How The Enshittification Of Social Media Is Decreasing The Switching Costs And Enabling Something New
In the last few weeks I've written about how Elon Musk's changes" to how Twitter is running have done an amazing job convincing people to join Mastodon. And I've also noted how many more people (including myself!) are realizing how much better social media can be when it's decentralized, rather than owned and run by a single entity. And I say that as someone who has advocated for more decentralized social media for many years.
Recently, Cory Doctorow encapsulated much of this, in a manner only Cory is really capable of, in a piece for Locus Magazine where he talks about the value of social quitting. The key points: social media tends to have a lifecycle. They start, they grow, they become viral, then they become annoying, and they die. It's happened with many. The latest cycle seems to have lasted longer than those earlier ones, but the gravity of collapse is not easily avoided.
However, as Cory details, part of the reason for this was that, in the past, the switching costs were low - often in a way that the new upstarts helped use to bootstrap their own growth:
When you leave a system, you have to endure switching costs'' - everything you give up when you change products, services, or habits. Quitting smoking means enduring not just the high switching cost of nicotine withdrawal, but also contending with the painful switching costs of giving up the social camaraderie of the smoking area, the friends you've made there, and the friends you might make there in the future.
For social media, the biggest switching cost isn't learning the ins and outs of a new app or generating a new password: it's the communities, family members, friends, and customers you lose when you switch away. Leaving aside the complexity of adding friends back in on a new service, there's the even harder business of getting all those people to leave at the same time as you and go to the same place.
As he notes, Facebook helped convince people to move from MySpace not just by being a friendlier to use platform, but by providing a tool to make it easy to switch:
Facebook addressed this problem by giving MySpace users who switched to Facebook a bridge between the two services. Simply give this tool your MySpace login and password, and it would use a bot to login to your MySpace account, scrape all the waiting messages in your queues and inbox, and push them into your Facebook feed. You could reply to these, and the bot would log back into MySpace and post those replies as you.
Facebook attacked MySpace's high switching costs head on, lowering them for users and unleashing network effects and rapid growth.
But, of course, as we covered in detail, just a few years later when others sought to do the same thing to Facebook, Facebook sued. And won. And effectively put up a wall against the very activity it used to lower the switching costs from MySpace.
Cory argues that by enabling the platforms to put up these giant walls, it enabled the enshittification" of social media. Even as the services treated users terribly, your friends were all there and it was too difficult to leave.
This enshittification was made possible by high switching costs. The vast communities who'd been brought in by network effects were so valuable that users couldn't afford to quit, because that would mean giving up on important personal, professional, commercial, and romantic ties. And just to make sure that users didn't sneak away, Facebook aggressively litigated against upstarts that made it possible to stay in touch with your friends without using its services. Twitter consistently whittled away at its API support, neutering it in ways that made it harder and harder to leave Twitter without giving up the value it gave you.
When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they've made things for you, you'd have to endure worse if you left.
However, he notes, this is also the downfall of those sites. They've gotten ever worse in particularly dumb ways (mostly based on the whims of their two billionaire primary shareholders).
And then.... Stuff happened. Mark Zuckerberg got worried about losing users and decided we were all going to live as legless low-polygon cartoons in a metaverse that no one wanted to use, not even the Facebook employees who built it. Twitter got bought out by a low-attention-span, overconfident billionaire who started pulling out Jenga blocks to see whether the system would fall over, and when it did, we all got crushed by the falling blocks.
These services had been shaved down to the point where most of us were only a hair's breadth away from quitting, because all the surplus had been transferred from us and from business users to the companies.
Once things got just a little worse, advertisers and users started to quit, and the long-delayed MySpacing of Facebook and Beboizing of Twitter began.
There are some really interesting lessons in there (and there's a lot more in the article that is well worth reading!). But, on the whole, switching costs are important. But, so too is the quality of the product. As the quality gets worse, the switching costs actually become lower in a weird sort of way. And, as more people leave, you start to get the kind of reverse network effects: the reasons to stick around decrease as well.