[Zak]

I read through the whole series, and there's definitely some thoughtful analysis in there. I'm pretty skeptical of the proposal at the end though.

What's proposed is a centralized platform with some sort of identity verification and no community moderators. It presumably aims to avoid many of the issues the series describes as being wrong with other platforms but doesn't say how it's going to handle the enshittification problem. Many of the issues mentioned are related to the only business model we've seen work for large social platforms; good intentions at the start won't keep them from popping up later when the incentives are aligned in their favor.

Decentralization is my favorite solution to that problem, but it's not compatible with the ideas of one account per person for life and no community moderators. I'm interested to see what comes next in this series.

[eggbrain]

Thanks Zak, appreciate your thoughts.

I hope to have some of the followup posts soon, although you are right that my idea is based around a centralized platform with ID Verification.

RE: How to solve for enshittification, I'd mention two things:

1. I think a good product can _stay_ good over time with strong centralized leadership, aka a "benevolent dictator". Think Steve Jobs at Apple, DHH at 37 Signals, etc.

  - Once that power structure changes, however (new leader, etc), that can quickly fall apart, so it's definitely not a bulletproof solution.

2. If incentives from the start are built into your platform to make the "user" the biggest customer on your platform, incentives will make sure that you keep those users happy.

  - If you have to choose between customers who give you $0/month and advertisers who will give you $1000/month, you'll eventually choose the advertisers to the detriment of the users.