Enshittification: How Platforms Die

[ProjectArcturis]

Costco has a fairly unique retail model: it charges a fixed markup on just about everything, and aims to basically make money only from its membership fees. That means if a supplier comes along with a hot new item that wholesales for $25, while other retailers will spend their energy trying to maximize the price they can extract from the consumer, Costco will instead work with the producer to get its price down even further, and pass along the savings.

Is there room for a similar model for internet-facing businesses? Could you have a company that focused solely on optimizing user experience, rather than short-term profit? What would Google, Amazon, Reddit look like if they acted like that?

[idiotsecant]

This will eventually happen, right now everything online has to be about growth above all else or it won't attract investment.

The internet is slowly becoming less wild west and more Ohio. I will be sad to see it go, but it has some perks too.

[impissedoff1]

There was, it was called woot.com They'd buy bulk, usually final inventory and resell, but the big grabs were "woot offs" where they fire saled all remaining inventory at discounted prices until sold out and then went on to the next.

But they too turned to shit and profit maximizing

[cyanydeez]

I'd say micropayments are the only real way to get content to the point that it can stave off enshittification as it becomes popular.

But, again, that requires the micropayments not to be enshittified as they'd have the same type of enshittification business purpose.

[Gunax]

I see people using enshittification incorrectly. It's not just that a service is poor.

The point is that people make a free and good service to cultivate users. Then, once people are established and moving to another platform is expensive, the bean counters reap from the disgruntled users.

[frr149]

Sounds just like reddit the last few years