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Cory Doctorow on ‘enshittification’ and how to combat it

The writer and digital rights activist coined the term ‘enshittifcation’ to describe the deterioration of the internet and it caught on. I wrote about it a couple of times (see here and here). He now has a book with that title that I will get and read soon.

In this interview with Ronny Chieng on The Daily Show Doctorow explains succinctly how enshittification comes about and what can be done about it. It is an excellent informative interview.

Some days, the news is just too depressing to blog » « This guy really, really loves sleeping

Comments

  1. says

    He’s just complaining about capitalism and how venture capital and public markets ruin businesses. Those of us who were caught in that machinery have been making that complaint since 1990.

  2. says

    It’s refreshing to see someone call out the ‘race to the bottom’ mentality so clearly. The idea of shifting the burden of user advocacy onto consumers instead of companies is a huge part of the problem. What do you think would happen if regulations were introduced to mandate fairer treatment for users?

  4. JM says

    Reuters: Meta tolerates rampant ad fraud from China to safeguard billions in revenue

    Though China’s authoritarian government bans use of Meta social media by its citizens, Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers on the globe-spanning platforms. As a result, Meta’s advertising business was thriving in China, ultimately reaching over $18 billion in annual sales in 2024, more than a tenth of the company’s global revenue.
    But Meta calculated that about 19% of that money – more than $3 billion – was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content, according to internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters.

    To that end, Meta created an anti-fraud team that went beyond previous efforts to monitor scams and other banned activity from China. Using a variety of stepped-up enforcement tools, it slashed the problematic ads by about half during the second half of 2024 – from 19% to 9% of the total advertising revenue coming from China.
    Then Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg weighed in.
    “As a result of Integrity Strategy pivot and follow-up from Zuck,” a late 2024 document notes, the China ads-enforcement team was “asked to pause” its work. Reuters was unable to learn the specifics of the CEO’s involvement or what the so-called “Integrity Strategy pivot” entailed.
    But after Zuckerberg’s input, the documents show, Meta disbanded its China-focused anti-scam team. It also lifted a freeze it had introduced on granting new Chinese ad agencies access to its platforms. One document shows that Meta shelved yet other anti-scam measures that internal tests had indicated would be effective. The document didn’t detail the specifics of those measures.

    Another good example of the worst kind of enshittification. Meta tolerates scam from China despite Meta already not being allowed to sell in China, they are purely in China for the advertising revenue aimed at other countries. Meta has been trying to get access to China, up to the level of creating a backdoor moderation system so that the Chinese government could moderate content in China without Meta’s direct involvement. This likely also plays into their willingness to overlook Chinese scams.

    Meta pays a roughly 10% commission to agencies for ads purchased through these accounts and grants them special protections. For instance, under a system known as “whitelisting” or “mistake prevention,” Meta doesn’t immediately remove ads purchased via top-tier agencies when they’re flagged by automated systems for breaking Meta’s advertising rules, internal documents say. Such rules ban the advertising of scams, illegal goods and services, and certain other products such as sex toys.

    This is giving more tolerance to advertisers in China then to advertisers in the US.

  5. Dunc says

    @JM: It’s very much not just China -- Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show

    Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

    […]

    On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day. Meta earns about $7 billion in annualized revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states.

    […]

    Meta has also placed restrictions on how much revenue it is willing to lose from acting against suspect advertisers, the documents say. In the first half of 2025, a February document states, the team responsible for vetting questionable advertisers wasn’t allowed to take actions that could cost Meta more than 0.15% of the company’s total revenue. That works out to about $135 million out of the $90 billion Meta generated in the first half of 2025.

    […]

    Even when advertisers are caught red-handed, the rules can be lenient, the documents indicate. A small advertiser would have to get flagged for promoting financial fraud at least eight times before Meta blocked it, a 2024 document states. Some bigger spenders – known as “High Value Accounts” – could accrue more than 500 strikes without Meta shutting them down, other documents say.

  6. JM says

    The Register: GitHub walks back plan to charge for self-hosted runners

    Following publication of our original article, GitHub reversed its decision. The Microsoft-owned developer site has taken to X to admit it might have made a mistake by unilaterally announcing plans to charge people for using their own hardware to host runners.
    “We’ve read your posts and heard your feedback,” GitHub said. “We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach.”
    The company said that it still intends to do something to help offset the “real costs” in running GitHub Actions via self-hosted runners, but “we missed the mark with this change by not including more of you in our planning.”

    GitHub tried to charge people for having Git Hub trigger code running on the users computer. Git Hub is a code repository, where the source code for an application is kept. Git Hub Actions let Git Hub do things automatically when a condition is met, such as backing up the repository once a month or running code validation every time the code is changed. The key things is that these action can be running on Git Hub’s computers or they can trigger code that runs on your computers. Git Hub charges for using their computers but they wanted to add a fee per minute for something running on the repository owner’s computer. Since there is a trivial amount of CPU time and network bandwidth in starting an action it’s possible that a small fixed fee could be reasonable but how long it takes to run isn’t a problem for Git Hub.
    The whole thing was so toxic that as soon as word got out Microsoft had to back track. Notice that they didn’t say they wouldn’t charge a fee though, only that they didn’t present it well.
    Git Hub is a prime example of enshittifcation since Microsoft took it over. They are slowly moving it towards being a profit first venture at the expense of being a good code repository. They are adding complexity and more chargeable features without improving what it does. The things that could be improved in Git that couldn’t be charge for are ignored, bug fixes are getting slower.

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