That's when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon's shareholders. This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. That tempted in lots of business customers – Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the "everything store" it had promised from the beginning. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don't search anywhere else. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year's worth of shipping.
Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we'd have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon's customers. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. 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.
Tiktok's enshittification: The company manually allocates surplus to creators, and they can take it away again, too.
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