> Early Amazon was pro-customer in a way that I think most people have forgotten. Maybe that was always the strategy? They were losing money for years, and maybe that was investing in the company, or maybe it was allowing really large losses to keep customers happy, planning all along to eventually clamp down when people were addicted. And here we are.
Yup. This is the playbook of the Enshittification[1] process as coined by Cory Doctorow.
> 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 enshittification, 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.
Yup. This is the playbook of the Enshittification[1] process as coined by Cory Doctorow.
> 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 enshittification, 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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification