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Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
clive@saturation.social ("Clive Thompson") wrote:

here, @pluralistic perfectly distils the mechanics of why, to beat back enshittification ...

... we need true competition

which, as Cory has pointed out for years now, why we need antitrust enforcement

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/25/gammamax/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

Text reading: "Disruptors" are best when they move value from existing companies to those companies' customers. The first TV remotes let people change the channel when an ad came on, making their TV better at broadcasters' expense. The broadcasters had to struggle to adapt, which is fine. They're not charities, after all: they're in business to make money for themselves, and they're only going to give you as much value as they have to. Competitors fight enshittification: any time a company that you do business with takes something away from you, a competitor can win your business by giving it back. If Youtube doubles the number of ads they expect you to watch – "charging" a higher attentional "price" – an ad-blocking competitor can bargain back on your behalf, allowing you to counteroffer with "how about if I just don't watch any ads?" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah Inside every company, there are fair, honest people, and there are greedy, shitty people. Companies that face competitors are more likely to listen to the workers who want to give customers a fair shake. But if a company has no competitors, those good people can no longer say, "This is a losing strategy because it will open the door to competitors who will make us poorer." Without competitors, the argument against enshittification becomes, "I would feel bad about myself if we did that." This argument always loses to the bad guys, whose argument is, "We will all get richer ..."