Scatterbrain

Crab Meta

04/13/25

Yesterday, I found a blog post on enshittification entitled "But what if I really want a faster horse?". It's a short and worthy read, but this paragraph gives the gist:

Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok—which is basically TV with infinite channels. You don't control anything except the channel switch. It's like Carcinisation, a form of convergent evolution where unrelated crustaceans all evolve into something vaguely crab-shaped.

When every platform you use on a daily basis is actively competing for your time and attention, the result is a deafening barrage of noise. So what led to this digital cacophony?

Ads, the original sin of the Internet¹.

I won't bore you with a detailed history of digital advertisement (a topic so grim and dull it threatens to bludgeon my love of history altogether). However, the TLDR is that the internet was largely subscription based until the mid 1990's, and then tumbled down the slippery slope of commercial promotions until today: the age of native advertising².

Ads have a simple contract: in return for offering users "free" access to a platform, the users pay with their time and attention. Additionally, there's an unspoken rule that the amount of ads shown to a user linearly correlates with how much time the user spends on a given platform. For example, watching five YouTube videos generally costs five ads. The majority of internet users are satisfied with this deal, and platforms make an absolute killing. So everyone's happy, right?

Not quite.

Companies operate to profit. Profit is revenue minus costs. For a company to profit with an ad model, the composite value of the ads shown to a user must outweigh the value of the content which the user consumes (factoring platform costs and all that other jazz). If this ratio is positive, then congratulations! You've achieved a profitable business. Unfortunately, you also surfaced a critical, thermal exhaust port-sized weakness in your revenue structure.

Because of the unspoken rule mentioned above, one cannot simply show more ads to users to increase profits³ - users have a limit on the number of ads which they will tolerate before they migrate to a less demanding competitor. Free markets, baby. So, if you can't improve the ad-to-time ratio, how is a poor multi-billion dollar media company ever to increase revenue? Obviously by increasing the time users spend on the platform!

With better content and unique platform design, right?

.

right...?

You wish. The meta (er, crab) build for media platforms is a min/maxed glass cannon which spews endless shortform slop. Every KPI or metric these businesses have is based on retention and engagement, so each new feature they ship furthers their platform on its doomed evolutionary path.

Most insultingly, all of these companies know their powerusers hate ads. Their universal solution is to release "premium" subscriptions which remove ads from the platform. But if you eject ads from a shitty ad-powered platform, you're still left with a shitty platform. It's like picking maggots off a piece of rotting meat and being surprised when people still won't eat it.

The wake-up call for media platforms will occur when they all finish converging on the exact same UX - perfectly tailored algorithms paired with seamlessly delivered, endlessly captivating content garbage. Then, the last differentiation between the consortium will be their media producers and userbases. This will prove to be a shallow moat as the bigger crabs begin to claw apart the smaller. All the while, the victims will be wondering where they went wrong, ignoring that they intentionally dismantled every unique aspect of their platforms in pursuit of an optimal build.

Who would have guessed that despite all the innovations of the internet, the carcinized final form of any media platform is just good ol' cable TV with a personalization engine duct-taped to the side?