Is LinkeIn on its way to Enshittification?

"Enshittification," also termed "platform decay"[1], was first introduced by writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022 to articulate the trend of diminishing quality noticed in online platforms and products like Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, Twitter, Bandcamp, Reddit, Uber, Unity, etc.

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This concept earned the accolade of 2023 Word of the Year from the American Dialect Society. Cory Doctorow also refers to this phenomenon with the alternative expression “platform decay”[1].

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In a subsequent 2024 article published on ft.com, Doctorow elaborated on the term with "enshittocene," declaring that "'enshittification' is on the verge of affecting everything.

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The principle of enshittification [1], now apparent to many of us, operates as follows:

????????? Initially, platforms attract new users by offering beneficial services and products at a loss. After reaching a critical mass of users, these platforms then entice suppliers by offering them access to their large userbase at a loss. Once the suppliers are reliant, the platforms divert profits to their shareholders.

????????? At this juncture, the focus shifts towards shareholders' interests, with the users and suppliers effectively trapped. The quality maintenance becomes non-essential, allowing enshittified platforms to potentially monopolize services and dominate their customers through a monopsony [2], bolstered by high switching costs [3] that discourage both groups from seeking alternatives even when they technically exist.

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Doctorow explains that enshittification results from "twiddling" – the continual tweaking of system parameters aimed solely at small-scale profit enhancements, disregarding other considerations.

This could be viewed as a form of rent-seeking [4].

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To address this issue, Doctorow proposes adherence to two primary principles:

1. The first is respect for the end-to-end principle [5], a core concept of the Internet ensuring networks merely transmit data from willing senders to willing receivers without interference. When applied to platforms, this means delivering to users exactly what they have requested, circumventing any platform biases. For instance, subscribers on social platforms should see every post from those they follow without algorithmic filtering, and search engines should prioritize direct query matches over sponsored content.
2. The second principle emphasizes the right of exit [6], facilitating users' ability to move to other platforms if they are dissatisfied. This involves ensuring interoperability [6] for social media, which would counter the network effects [7] that bind users and stifle competition among platforms. For digital media services, it entails allowing users to switch platforms without forfeiting access to content restricted by digital rights management (DRM) [8].

All details and terms are sourced from Wikipedia.

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

2. In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. The microeconomic theory of monopsony assumes a single entity to have market power over all sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service. This is a similar power to that of a monopolist, which can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, where multiple buyers have only one seller of a good or service available to purchase from…

3. Switching barriers or switching costs are terms used in microeconomics, strategic management, and marketing. They may be defined as the disadvantages or expenses consumers feel they experience, along with the economic and psychological costs of switching from one alternative to another. For example, when telephone service providers also offer Internet access as a package deal, they add value to their service. A barrier to switching is then formed as swapping internet services providers is a time-consuming effort…

4. Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline…

5. The end-to-end principle is a design framework in computer networking. In networks designed according to this principle, guaranteeing certain application-specific features, such as reliability and security, requires that they reside in the communicating end nodes of the network. Intermediary nodes, such as gateways and routers, that exist to establish the network, may implement these to improve efficiency but cannot guarantee end-to-end correctness…

6. The right of exit is ensured by data portability, a concept to protect users from having their data stored in "silos" or "walled gardens" that are incompatible with one another, i.e. closed platforms, thus subjecting them to vendor lock-in and making the creation of data backups or moving accounts between services difficult. Data portability requires common technical standards to facilitate the transfer from one data controller to another, such as the ability to export user data into a user-accessible local file, thus promoting interoperability, as well as facilitate searchability with sophisticated tools such as grep…

7. In economics, a network effect (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale) is the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products. Network effects are typically positive feedback systems, resulting in users deriving more and more value from a product as more users join the same network. The adoption of a product by an additional user can be broken into two effects: an increase in the value to all other users (total effect) and also the enhancement of other non-users' motivation for using the product (marginal effect)…

8. Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM), such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM technologies govern the use, modification and distribution of copyrighted works (e.g. software, multimedia content) and of systems that enforce these policies within devices. DRM technologies include licensing agreements and encryption…

The accompanying image (DALL·E A visual depiction of the concept of 'enshittification' or platform decay in digital platforms.jpg) was created by GenAI based on my propt and is, according to the space-time-difusion algorithm “the visual depiction of the concept of 'enshittification' or platform decay in digital platforms. The image transitions from a vibrant and bustling digital marketplace to a gloomy and inefficient one, illustrating the process as described.”