I think it's the same principle that led to the slogan "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM". It's a list of checkboxes that someone can present to investors and get money.

Because it works

It doesn’t work for you but it works for the casual user

Promoting shitty short rage bait content, charged headlines where no one reads the articles, etc drives traffic up with casual users who are far less likely to use ad blockers, far more likely to use native apps, far more likely to enable tracking features blindly, etc.

Power users don’t like it but power users don’t view ads, are more likely to be privacy focused, etc. they also are a very small demographic so they are simply ignored once they are annoying. Before they are annoying they are marketed to bc they can be milked with things like premium subscriptions for no ads or whatever.

Subscriptions don’t sell for social media, advertising doesn’t pay until you’re scaled wayyyyy up, and generally once advertising and outside funding gets seriously involved they start pushing you to get as many impressions as possible. So basically advertising is a cancer that ruins everything along with the capitalistic need for constant growth and endless profits

Because they care about one metric: time spent watching ads.

If they only show you chronological - for example - there is a risk you open the app, find that nothing has happened (or what happened is of low quality). Controlling what you see makes it easier to also ensure there's always a reason to visit the page. Leaving it all to recency or popularity or something means handing over the control of your time.

And it's always going to piss off people but the important part is what it does for the big masses (which likely is - more time spent watching ads)

The algorithm bullshit is to show you more content (and therefore more ads). The ideal for social media companies is like tik tok where you just scroll endlessly.

On twitter or Reddit I look at the posts from the accounts and subs I follow and then am done.

Inflation/cost of living/etc isn't singlehandedly increasing "enshittification" but rather the boundless greed of capitalism which seeks infinite growth of profit.

It's unsustainable so we'd better make more humans to buy more stuff from a handful of people.

Because VC money has dried up. For a very long time tech companies have had investors throw them basically infinite amounts of money and have proceeded under the idea “we’ll figure out profitability later”, now that money is starting to stop coming in and they are panicking and trying to reach profitability in the shortest amount of time possible.

this is not pooppost but idc

https://www.makeuseof.com/why-despise-tiktok-ification-social-media/ - Brad R. Edwards

"Enshittification of the Internet" - By Cary Doctorow
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Welcome to the "Enshittification of the Internet":

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification

(I know it's knowyourmeme, but it's probably the closest to a Wikipedia article on the subject)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Because you are the product. You are cattle in a factory farm. You exist to be consumed by the customer (advertisers and businesses). Your user experience will be actively worsened if makes the experience of the paying customer better. And all the factory farms have figured out that doing this is how they squeeze the maximum amount of profit out of you.

I guess in summary: it works (the users--cattle--accepts these worse conditions), and so far it is the most effective (profitable) solution.

It's like in competitions where suddenly someone discovers a way to consistently get better results, now everyone copies that technique to stay competitive.

There's the points others have made about the business model - for a long time, the "momentum" oriented approach was essentially a Ponzi scheme where investors would invest in a business that would take the risk of major losses so that they could destroy all competition in a space, then eventually, turn a profit by changing their tactics in user-unfriendly ways long down the line since you have the monopoly.

For this particular issue, though, I think we're seeing the Rotten Tomatoes effect en masse. If you want to make something bold and impressive, you need something people love or hate - not something between. With Rotten Tomatoes as an example, it's binary - Positive or Negative. This incentivizes movie production to produce things that are not controversial, just things that people won't strongly dislike.

With centralized platforms, the product models stopped being about providing high quality products and began valuing time spent on the platform. Produce a website/platform that most people are okay with and the majority aren't extremely opposed to. This means it won't do anything bold, but it does mean you'll pick up a critical mass and become the dominant force, as you're appealing to the majority.

In a content-driven economy, whoever has the users and the content rides that positive feedback loop to monopolies. More users = more content = more users.

Algorithms get worse because they're appealing to "Good Enough". If it gets bold and suggests something that you might either love or hate, then you might hate it and leave the site for a bit, but if everything is good enough, you'll stick around. Web design gets blander because things get familiar, and especially after the start of Facebook, we learned that people really choose familiarity over novelty. Movies, TV, and Music get blander because they are now driven by the same platform economics where sticking around on the platform is valued more than appreciating the content of the platform.

Companies mirror each other‘s actions, a form of social contagion, here is an article on that concerning layoffs, but it happens with all sorts of behaviours: https://www.futurity.org/tech-industry-layoffs-2844882-2/

Ain’t that why we on the fediverse now? Yea, I hate these corporate trends too.

A lot of websites use the same type of place like squarespace or WordPress. nd they use the same (or very very similar) layouts, colors, plugins and everything, for typically inexpensive prices. So you get a lot of same looking websites with similar ad placements, with similar ads and same articles. I mean there is an ongoing lawsuit with a "media company" that has like 200 websites that shovel out qanon lite news articles, that seem reputible because they're named like "The Akron gazette" and "The Tampa articles" sound good, are bad. It's just shitty people exploiting things, and we the average user suffer, while the below average suffer suffers more because they use all those ass sites, telling others, that it is the way.

Because an ad or a subscription is more obvious.

Algorithms are harder to prove and don't interrupt the flow of content, thus less people get pissed, which means less people leave, and they can charge higher rates to advertisers.

You're correct. Why on the shitpost channel though?

Executives get the majority of their income through shares and an increase in share price.

Whatever works for the year to increase share price makes you rich.

They're all chasing the lowest common denominator. That's why they all turn into copies of each other.