TikTok's Enshittification

An interesting article in itself, but more importantly how have I never heard about these two (in my opinion) damning facts about Amazon? Assuming these are true, this is astounding.

1. Amazon's search results are essentially a payola schema. How high you rank in search results is mainly based on competition on who bid the most to be ranked first. Each company needing to bid higher to regain lost position and more profit going to amazon. To the point that 45% of sales price going to sellers is now collected by amazon in various fees and payola style bidding.

2. Assuming the above is true, then Amazon is running such an inefficient rent seeking market place and sellers are losing so much money that clearly a competitor would pop up and sellers could both make more money and consumers could get goods for cheaper. A true, win-win. But Amazon blocks that competition by saying you're not allowed to sell goods anywhere else for cheaper than you do on Amazon. Meaning customers can't benefit from swapping to a site that doesn't do all of this rent-seeking, so Amazon can keep rent-seeking.

These are both incredible descriptions of what Amazon is doing. Can someone confirm these? If so, how has anti-trust not already been passed against them?

> That's when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon's shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company's $31b "advertising" program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

> Searching Amazon doesn't produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon's "Most Favored Nation" requirement sellers means that they can't sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

> "Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "Attention Economy." You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. … You have to "monetize" it – that is, you have to exchange the [attention] for real money.

I very much appreciate this paragraph as an explanation of a certain frustration with the so-called Attention Economy. It is a grift in which the grifter convinces their victim that something the grifter has is valuable and they’re willing to provide that value to the victim for a modest fee.

Not, despite the title, about TikTok in particular.

> 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.

Downloadable pre-21st century MP3s (or even CDs) are a fine example. My own recent search turned up none with a catalog within an order of magnitude of Amazon's size.

Injury to insult, the ability to play a few-second sample before buying is long gone. A smallish competitor in Czechia will do this, but all text on the website (except content titles) is Czech-only.

Solid article by the always interesting Doctorow, but it's a bit much to say, "Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was "woke shadowbanning," whereby the things you said wouldn't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter's deep state didn't like your opinions. The real risk..."

As of the date this was published we had confirmation that this is exactly what was happening, and might still be.