> you only care about yourself, not about your readership if you have any
Well, that’s how capitalism is supposed to work innit? :) Producers care about themselves and consumers choose, competition ensues, the producers are therefore forced to conform to the consumers’ preferences.
What I mean is “you only care about yourself”, in a business setting, is not an accusation by itself, however unvirtuous it sounds. The opposite of “capitalism” in the first sentence is not “social democracy” or “welfare state”, it’s “planned economy”, and I’d say that every ethical judgment that moves us towards that has to go.
Except this works only when there’s (a lot of) competition, which is exactly what platforms attempt to exploit: you (a producer) move according to your best interest at each point, like everyone else, only to find yourself in a mono- (or oligo-) psony market where you have to sell through the platform(s) or perish, and now the platform(s) can enforce whatever they wish on you. The consumers aren’t feeling that spiffy, either. The laws of competition no longer apply.
(Huh, is moving to a platform essentially a prisoner’s dilemma with the (defect,defect) state obscured by marketing?)