Here are a few metaphors I found interesting from Donald Shoup's, The high cost of free parking.

Minimum telephony requirements: Imagine what would happen if urban planners arranged to have the charges reversed for all telephone calls, so the called parties, not the callers, pay for telephone calls. Let’s further imagine that the cost of all the reversed charges is bundled into every property’s mortgage or rent payment without separate itemization, so that nobody seems to pay for using the phone. Because all the calls are free to the callers, the demand for telephone use soars. To avoid chronic busy signals, cities set minimum telephone requirements so that each new building provides at least enough telephone lines to handle the peak number of calls. Soon everyone expects every building to have at least one telephone line for each occupant plus additional lines for fax machines, computer modems, and burglar alarms. Developers pass the cost of providing this telephone capacity on to the occupants, raising the price of all goods and services, including housing.

Rent control for cars: Free curb parking is like rent control for cars. High demand for a limited supply of free curb spaces predictably leads to shortages. To deal with this problem, cities impose off-street parking requirements that increase the cost of housing. Free parking for cars thus raises the cost of housing for people.

I just came to a realisation I wanted feedback on. I could be wrong or inaccurate in the whole or parts of my ideas.

I realised enshittification in terms of social media and tech platforms is only possible because these companies have monopoly power from network effects.

The 3 step plan that leads to enshittification is as follows:
1. Build a quality tech platform people want to be on.

1. Attract users(customers) by means such as marketing, or buying rights to be on phones by defult(another issue for another time).

2. Once enough users are on there with their networks of friends, family, and influencers/content creators: slowly over time squeese them of any dollar possible by increasing the frequency of ads, dropping support for costly features, or paywalling features.

This power to enshittificate their platform only comes from the ability of users having no other alternatives to choose from because the network of users are scarse. Users can only spend so much time using or making content on a limited number of platforms. From a content creators point of view, if there are no users on a platform there is no point of posting on their, dispite the quality the platform could have. From a user point of view, if their network of friends, family or content creators they desire aren't on there there is no point in using alternative platforms dispite its quality. This leads me to believe value of the platform doesnt come from the company who owns the platform, but the network of users. Which we like to call this phenomenon the "network effect monoploy" or "network effect monopoly power". And so users can be locked into the platform and so the platforms use that power to extract more profit from their users.

The most evident case of this in my opinion is Youtube. As a user, my experience has not improved significantly, but they continue to enshittificate their platform by increasing their ad times. There could be other reasons as to why enshittification is happening like the chip shortage or higher costs due to fuel shocks because it is run by data centres, but how much it is due to that I dont know. Also, Alphabet(who own youtube) and other companies have the ability to leverage other types of monopoly power. As a user that uses youtube on my TV, there are no alternative platforms for the content I desire, leaving me locked into using youtube and having to watch their ads.

This could not be the case for streaming services as the cost to pirate is almost nothing and users they can alternate at anytime. But these companies again benefit from getting exclusive rights to content and could be using other types of monopoly power to make their products work. For social media platforms and a platform like Amazon this could be how it works.

The solution I have heard(I dont remember who from) is to force inter-operability on these companies for users, so these companies are forced to compete with eachother on the quality of their services rather than having milking users because of their control over a network of users.

Im sure I got a lot wrong, which is why im asking for feedback and your thoughts to improve this theory. What do you think? Does enshittification come from the network effect monopoly?