Stephen Downes

This is the first real pushback to Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" narrative I've seen. The argument, in a nutshell, is that platforms change because they're meeting the needs of a wider, more global, demographic, and the data says that user satisfaction has actually increased. Both arguments can be criticized. There are many reasons for change in platforms; user demographics is just one. The problems happen when change is motivated by increased monetization; this is what motivates increased focus on things like advertising and surveillance. And also, are people more satisfied? Author Ruby Thelot draws from American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) data to argue that they are. There's no link, but that's probably because if you actually look ACSI up and read what they say, you read things like "correlation between corporate profit and customer satisfaction is turning increasingly negative" and "customer complaints are at record levels" with "now looming pent-up customer defection".