Blogger, Twitter and the Enshitification of Internet Platforms

Until a few months ago I was both an active blogger and an active Twitter user.  The two activities seemed complimentary - Twitter was good for making short comments about Japanese baseball cards and connecting with other people making short comments about the same.  Blogger in contrast was good for writing longer pieces that couldn't be summarized in under 280 characters.  There was a lot of overlap between the two, most people who blog about baseball cards also Tweet about them (though the reverse is not necessarily true, so being on Twitter allowed me to get in touch with a wider range of people it seemed).  

Like everyone else on Twitter I watched last year as the Elon Musk parade took over that platform.  I didn't really care at all about the culture war politics or whatever that was animating a lot of people in relation to that. The political views of whoever is running the platform is not my concern, I just want to use it to talk about baseball cards.

Despite having found it so useful, in December I decided to delete my Twitter account and completely walk away.

The straw that broke the camel's back for me was Musk's plans to basically switch Twitter's business model towards a form of "pay to play" system.  The future vision he has for Twitter is clearly one in which people who pay 8$ a month have a "good" Twitter experience with their posts reaching an audience and people interacting with them and following them, while those who don't will find their content buried by the algorithms and don't get much interaction from it. 

I wasn't going to pay 8$ a month and I didn't see much point in sticking around as a second tier user, so I walked away.

I'm sure many Twitter users out there who still use it without paying 8$ a month will tell me that not much has changed for them.  But it will change simply because it has to for Musk's business plan to make any sense.  If the free version continues to work fine, they won't get enough people signing up for the paid version.  In order to incentivize people to do so, they pretty much have to make the free one suck.  If they did it all at once then everyone would simply walk away from Twitter completely, so they haven't throttled the user experience in a drastic form yet.  But slowly, over time, people using free Twitter can expect it to start sucking a little bit more over time, almost as if it was designed  to not suck enough that they would walk away completely, but just enough to make them think about paying 8$ a month to try to halt the slide to suckiness.  

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about how platforms evolve like this, in a process he calls "enshitification".  He describes it like this:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

This tracks pretty closely with my experience with a lot of social media platforms.  Facebook was great when I signed up in the 00s.  Now it sucks.  Twitter I've already explained.  Other examples abound.

But one social media platform hasn't really done that, and that is Blogger.

The Blogger that I use today is pretty much exactly the same as the Blogger I used in 2008 when I started my first blog.  In 15 years the only changes I've noticed are cosmetic, they made one significant update to the way blogs look a few years back, but all the features and functions have remained basically the same.  Whereas my Facebook feed has been taken over by ads and promoted content that I hate, my blogger experience is completely ad free and the only blogs I see are ones that I deliberately added to my blog roll.  Blogger has never required me to host ads.  Blogger has never forced me to pay for anything.  I really like Blogger a lot, its the only social media platform that I signed up for in the 00s that hasn't turned on me and become a useless mess.

Still though, I worry.  I don't understand how Google makes money off of me as a Blogger user.  Blogger doesn't allow Google to use algorithms to manipulate me the way Facebook, Twitter or Youtube do.  This is great, but at the same time Google is not a charity and I worry that at some point the same thing that has enshitified the rest of the internet is going to infect this platform too, simply because they want to monetize it more.  Google is after all no different from other platforms and a lot of its other, bigger things like its search engine have gotten progressively more useless and awful over the years as they turned them into advertising delivery devices to make money.  In fact, I suspect the latter is one way in which enshitification is indirectly creeping into Blogger.  My old blog (Famicomblog) used to get a ton of traffic in the late 00s/early 10s from Google searches because it ranked high in some search term results.  That doesn't happen anymore, searches for those terms now lead you inevitably to businesses selling stuff rather than people writing about stuff.  

Likewise this blog which started later, in 2013, has never gotten any significant traffic from search results, despite being dedicated to an extremely niche topic that only a handful of other places on the internet have information about.  Searches for the stuff that I write about inevitably lead you to Amazon or Ebay sellers, rather than to actual articles written by people about those things.  I note that a common lament among baseball card bloggers is that the traffic they used to get 10-15 years ago has dried up.  They often chalk it up to people losing interest in blogs, but I think that a more likely explanation is that changes to how Google and other search engines direct traffic have de-prioritized blogs because they aren't money makers. Just a theory, but it makes sense.

Anyway, despite that I'm still quite happy with blogger because, whatever the search engines do, this platform itself is still the same one I've always used.  I hope it stays that way.  Unlike Twitter, Blogger isn't something I can easily walk away from.  Tweets are almost designed to be thrown away.  My blog in contrast is a repository of hundreds of articles I've invested a non insignificant amount of time in creating.  Its not something easily discardable.