Network lock-in

At The Overspill this week, veteran UK technology journalist Charles Arthur highlighted a blog posting at the venture capital firm A16Z by cyberethnographer and NYU adjunct professor Ruby Thelot claiming that “enshittification isn’t real”. Thelot’s main argument: “Simply put, more people use Instagram every year, they use it on average longer every day, year over year and, finally, their reported satisfaction has also grown over time, indicating no decrease in overall satisfaction, stated or revealed.” I immediately imagined a survey like this about the London railway node Clapham Junction. Thelot uses Instagram as an exemplar. No matter how much users complain, he says, surveys show they continue to spend more time on the site and indicate greater satisfaction. To him, swapping out chronological feeds for algorithms is just part of natural evolution as platform adapt to their evolving user base. Enshittification, he concludes, provides “absolution” for “platform narcissists” who need…