The account concentrates scrutiny on Amazon’s incentives: merchants bear more of the cost of visibility and platform access while shoppers face noisier discovery.
Third-party sellers and shoppers are the immediate affected groups if search results, ads, and lookalike listings increasingly favor monetization over relevance and differentiation.
Second-order effects
Merchants have a stronger incentive to build demand outside Amazon or spend more on platform tools and advertising to preserve visibility, raising the cost of competing with low-quality listings.
Amazon faces a trade-off between revenue from seller services and advertising and the trust required to keep shoppers using its discovery surfaces; tighter quality enforcement could constrain the volume that feeds those businesses.
Third-order effects
If this pattern persists, large marketplaces may increasingly function as paid-distribution systems rather than neutral discovery venues, concentrating bargaining power with the platform.
The spread of cheap AI-generated inventory makes verification and ranking quality a core market-structure issue: platforms that cannot separate useful supply from synthetic clutter risk weakening the flywheel they monetize.
The trend: This is part of the broader synthetic-supply paradox, in which abundance lowers the cost of content and listings while making trusted distribution and quality control more valuable.
“This moment we're living through, this Great Enshittening, is a material phenomenon, much like a disease, with symptoms, a mechanism and an epidemiology.” by Cory Doctorow https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
How did Amazon get so rubbish? Enshittification: 1 platforms are good to their users. 2 abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. 3 abuse customers to claw back all the value for themselves - and become a giant pile of shit. https://www.theguardian.com…
Everyone who uses Amazon should read this: “Now Amazon is in the terminal stage. We're all still stuck to the platform, but we get less and less value out of it.” Bad for customers, sellers, business (and definitely bad for fair taxes) https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
.@Doctorow on a topic I've covered here too: how major consumer sites like Amazon lure us initially w/good service & prices, then purposely get shitty & expensive over time. Amazon WAS a pleasant curated well-priced site respecting the culture—not no more. https://www.theguardian…
In our Radical Abundance book we argue what @doctorow calls the ‘enshitification of the internet’ is part of a wider trend in which private provision is becoming increasingly shit or even being withdrawn entirely for some. We call it Bullshit Abundance https://www.theguardian.com…
Great article as always by @doctorow and (hint, hint) this is what our next play is all about! Look out for in December. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
The 3 phases of “enshittification”: 1) Platforms are good to their users. 2) They abuse users to make things better for their business customers. 3) They abuse those customers to claw back all the value for themselves - and become a giant pile of shit. https://www.theguardian.com…
Interesting piece here from Cory Doctorow about enshittification, particularly as it relates to Amazon (US). Amazon AU works a bit differently, from what I gather, but it's still full of sellers with names like my cat walked over the keyboard. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
‘Corporations, being artificial, immortal colony-organisms that use humans as their inconvenient gut flora, do not have consciences to appeal to.’ — Cory Doctorow on The Great Enshittening - and what to do about it
Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? — Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? The author and activist behind the term ‘enshittification’ explains what's gone wrong with the internet - and what we can do about it
We're reaching end-stage enshittification. — I've been saying this forever and nobody seems to care but Amazon is the devil and it a scourge that needs to be fired into the sun. Bezos doesn't need anymore of your hard earned. — Buy local, people. www.theguardian.com/technolo…
“Top results in a product search aren't the best matches: they're the matches that pay the highest fees to be top of the list” — “The #internet is not the most important issue facing us. But it is where fights against genocide, inequality & racism will be waged” — #enshittif…
This is so good from Cory Doctorow on all the tricks Amazon uses to get both consumers to pay more, and how businesses on the platform end up paying it 45-51 cents on every dollar. — Plus he rightly calls for regulatory change, not just individual consumer action — www.thegua…
“This moment we're living through, this Great Enshittening, is a material phenomenon, much like a disease, with symptoms, a mechanism and an epidemiology.” Via Guardian
If you're still using Amazon to buy stuff, this extract from a forthcoming book by Cory Doctorow (he of “enshittification” coinage) might just convince you not to. — /... www.theguardian.com/technology/ 2...
It's not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They're all turning into piles of shit, all at once. This is infuriating. Frustrating. And, depending on how important those services are to you, terrifying. — www.theguar…
“Most of the rightwing policies for which we remember Reagan started under Carter, who was hoping to woo conservative voters. He failed” — Funny how this never works, always makes things worse and yet remains a dogma in sensible politics... www.theguardian.com/technology/ 2..…
Amazon is a predatory company and they are taking advantage of you. Prime is for suckers. Cancel it. Amazon should be your last resort for online shopping. — www.theguardian.com/technology/ 2...
If you're not familiar with @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy's work here is a great primer. Who broke the internet and why. From capitalism to surveillance to AI and the broligarchy... it's a #TrueStory Time to fight back. — Join the resistance #optout #reclaimtech — www.thegua…
“Here's the natural history of enshittification: — 1. First, platforms are good to their users. — 2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. — 3. Next, they abuse those customers to claw back all the value for themselves - and become …
Cory Doctorow is in today's Guardian explaining how Amazon's relationship with its sellers motivates this sort of behaviour. www.theguardian.com/technology/ 2...