Cory Doctorow: "Twiddler: Configurability for …" - Mamot - Le Mastodon de La Quadrature du Net

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Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Twiddler: Configurability for Me, But Not For Thee

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

The shell-games that platform owners play with surpluses, clawing them back from one group and temporarily allocating them to another, are not a unique feature of digital platforms - every business has dabbled with hiding costs from purchasers (think of "junk fees") and shafting suppliers (e.g. "reverse factoring").

The difference lies in the ease with which these tricks can be tried and discarded. The faster the shells move in the shell-game, the harder it is to track the pea.

If you're an analog grocer changing the prices of eggs, you have to send minimum-wage teenagers racing around the store with pricing guns to sticker over the old prices.
If you're Amazonfresh, you just twiddle a dial on a digital control panel and all the prices are changed instantaneously.

A platform operator can effortlessly change the distribution of surpluses in an instant, while suppliers and customers have to engage in minute, time-consuming and unreliable Platform Kremlinology just to detect these changes, much less understand them.

That power starts with twiddling those sliders and knobs that change search results, pricing, recommendations and other rules of the platform.

Online performers know this well. If you're a Youtuber or a Tiktokker, you invest money and time into producing material for the platform, but you can't know whether the platform will show it to anyone - even the subscribers who explicitly asked to see it! - until you hit publish.

For an online creator, the platform is a boss who docks every paycheck and tells you that you're being punished for breaking rules that your boss refuses to explain, lest you figure out how to violate them without him noticing.

Part of Tracking Exposed's remit is to unravel these secret rules so that creative workers can avoid their bosses' hidden penalties. These secret rules were behind the #audiblegate scandal, where Amazon stole hundreds of millions of dollars from independent audiobook creators who used its Audible Content Exchange (ACX) platform to post their work.

Amazon hid the fact that it was clawing back royalties, withholding payments, and flat-out lying about its royalty structure. The key to hiding these financial crimes from Amazon's victims was velocity, the ability to change accounting practices from minute-to-minute or even second to second, allowing Amazon to stay one step ahead of the writers it stole from.

Undisciplined by competition or regulation, the platforms can't keep their fingers off the knobs.

Remember when Facebook conducted its infamous voter turnout experiment ? 61 million FB users were exposed to a stimulus the company predicted would increase voter turnout.

The resulting controversy was an all-too-typical exercise in tech criticism, where both side completely missed the point. Facebook's defenders pointed out that this kind of experiment was a daily experiment for Facebook's knob-twiddlers who adjusted the platform rules all the time.

Rather that focusing on what a fucking nightmare it is for 3,000,000,000 people to be locked into having their social lives mediated by tech bros who couldn't stop twiddling the knobs, the critics of the Facebook experiment focused on the result.

It was textbook criti-hype. The Facebook experiment increased voter turnout by 280,000, which sounds like an impressive figure. But the effect size is only 0.04% (remember, the experimental group had 61 million users!).

Rather than focusing on how badly Facebook's ads perform (and how advertisers are getting overcharged), or how the company's compulsive twiddling changes the rules constantly for tens of millions of users at a time, critics of the Facebook voter turnout experiment instead promoted Facebook's ad-tech market by repeating Facebook's hype around this unimpressive result.

While it remains technically possible to reconfigure the technologies that you rely on, doing so is now a legal minefield. "IP" has come to mean "any law that lets a company control the conduct of its competitors, critics or customers," and that's why "IP" is always at the heart of maneuvers to block platform users' attempts to wrestle value away from the platforms.

When Facebook wants to stop you from reading your friends' posts without being spied on, it uses IP law. When Facebook wants to stop you from tracking paid political disinformation, it uses IP law. When Facebook wants to stop you tracking the use of Facebook in fomenting genocide, it uses IP law. When Facebook wants to stop you from re-ordering your feed to prioritize posts from your friends, it uses IP law.

The platforms don't just twiddle with every hour that God sends, they also hoard the twiddling - twiddling is for platform owners, not platform users.

#platformEconomics #enshittiffication #critihype

Feb 19, 2023, 10:07 PM··Web

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