[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by theducks

Enter modern Retail Greed. Higher Walls around their device (remember when they blocked the use of Kindle Collections PI in Calibre?).

This philosophy has led to the downfall of many retail giants.
I shop where I get the goods and services that have what I want. Not because you locked me into your ecosystem .

Remember Sears? They offered Good, Better, Best. Good was NOT junk, just lacking extras. MANY USA households had Sears (sold) items because they were decent and obtainable (delivered) almost anywhere. The folk at the top let the competition and newbies walk away with their business because they refused to modernize their backend.

Enshittification is the concept you're referring to.

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. 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, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

(emphasis mine)

To solve the problem, Doctorow has called for two general principles to be followed:

• The first is a respect of the end-to-end principle, which holds that the role of a network is to reliably deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers. When applied to platforms, this entails users being given what they asked for, not what the platform prefers to present. For example, users would see all content from users they subscribed to, allowing content creators to reach their audience without going through an opaque algorithm; and in search engines, exact matches for search queries would be shown before sponsored results, rather than afterwards.[10
  
• The second is the right of exit, which holds that users of a platform can easily go elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with it. For social media, this requires interoperability, countering the network effects that "lock in" users and prevent market competition between platforms. For digital media platforms, it means enabling users to switch platforms without losing the content they purchased that is locked by digital rights management.[10]