@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ image ="https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/platform-decay-preview.png"
1616
1717The current model followed by almost all social media services is one of easy and free participation in exchange for advertising and data collection. If you’re a fan of decentralized projects like Urbit, or just someone who pays attention to the ongoing debate over social media incentives, you’re likely to be familiar by now with a central critique of this model. There are historical reasons for why we ended up here: ad-serving and user-tracking technology outpaced subscription and micro-payment models because of recalcitrance by banks and regulatory hassles that prevented ‘real money’ from easily integrating into websites. Instead, we pay in eyeballs and analytical data.
1818
19−When we take a moment to think about possible alternatives, we usually fixate on that original bad bargain-’free’ in exchange for ads—before lamenting that first-mover advantage, critical masses of users, and sophisticated algorithms have made it very hard to see successful challenges to the reign of sites like Facebook and Twitter. We’d be happy to pay a few pennies to have an ad-free, data-secure alternative. But this critique misses something larger. There are, in fact, plenty of colossal Internet businesses which actually do charge people money to participate: e-commerce platforms. Some of these enable the sale of virtual goods and content (Steam, Patreon, Spotify), some physical goods (Ebay, Etsy), and some both (Amazon, Kickstarter). Because these commercial platforms had to figure out how to make online payments easy and secure for mass audiences for their core business to work, they avoided the total dependency on ad revenue that social media sites have always had. Unfortunately, several factors have conspired to push e-commerce platforms closer and closer to a social media-style business model—by manipulating user behavior and prioritizing ad revenue and branding deals over providing a fair marketplace for ordinary buyers and sellers.
19+When we take a moment to think about possible alternatives, we usually fixate on that original bad bargain—’free’ in exchange for ads—before lamenting that first-mover advantage, critical masses of users, and sophisticated algorithms have made it very hard to see successful challenges to the reign of sites like Facebook and Twitter. We’d be happy to pay a few pennies to have an ad-free, data-secure alternative. But this critique misses something larger. There are, in fact, plenty of colossal Internet businesses which actually do charge people money to participate: e-commerce platforms. Some of these enable the sale of virtual goods and content (Steam, Patreon, Spotify), some physical goods (Ebay, Etsy), and some both (Amazon, Kickstarter). Because these commercial platforms had to figure out how to make online payments easy and secure for mass audiences for their core business to work, they avoided the total dependency on ad revenue that social media sites have always had. Unfortunately, several factors have conspired to push e-commerce platforms closer and closer to a social media-style business model—by manipulating user behavior and prioritizing ad revenue and branding deals over providing a fair marketplace for ordinary buyers and sellers.
2020
2121E-commerce platforms, as generally perceived by the public, operate on a simple ‘deal’: users (small or large, individual or corporate) can buy and sell goods and services on the platform, facilitated by search engines and payment processors, and augmented by reputation systems and safeguards for buyers and sellers. In exchange, the platform takes a small cut of the revenue that passes through. E-commerce platforms were a key part of the genuinely revolutionary effects of ‘Web 2.0’. As software ate the world, it uncovered siloed value that had been previously inaccessible. This was particularly true for items with a high potential value, but a small market-base. Just as social connection technologies—from Usenet to Facebook—enabled people with niche interests to find each other, mass-platform e-commerce sites allowed buyers and sellers of niche goods—physical or virtual—to find each other and transact, thus granting those goods actual value, and their owners revenue.
2222