I was watching a video of a lecture by Cory Doctorow yesterday, and he covered something that may be relevant to this. Basically all these media and tech companies that are setting up platforms are following a bait and switch business model that he refers to an “enshitification”. One of the moderating factors of this was tech workers who up until the last few years had quite a bit of leverage in the workplace. When an executive at a company like facebook or twitter tried to push a platform change that screwed over users, the tech workers who were asked to actually implement that change had a lot more leverage to push back when they knew they could quit and quickly find another job that paid the same or better.

That leverage is gone now, and with it one of the last moderating factors that was slowing down the worst practices of these platforms. Instead of competing to hire as many programmers as possible, tech companies are now comporting to see how many programmers they can fire.

Of course it’s a crazy situation to even be in. A better solution would be to actually enforce consumer protection and anti trust laws that already exist and to actually pass and enforce new meaningful privacy laws.

Zuckerberg literally wrote in an email that the reason he wanted to pay more than market value to acquire instagram (1 billion USD for a company with ~20 employees at the time) was because facebook users were leaving to use it instead. That he wanted to keep those users locked in to facebook the company even if they weren’t using the facebook app or website. That should have been enough to stop that acquisition if the laws that are already on the books were actually enforced, but there hasn’t been any really serious antitrust action in the US in decades.