written on 2026-03-09 by aedhonk
When I started writing this article, I wanted to vent about the state of the monopoly of communication apps, which are slowly becoming an integral part of our lives, so much so that leaving one for any reason is a cost so great that you just cannot stop using them. This topic is not new at all, and a big part of the degradation of these services (which I’ll refer to with a term coined by Cory Doctorow: enshittification) revolves around the psychology behind the perceived cost of leaving. I’m not an expert in any of these topics, but I still wanted to share my thoughts on this matter because, as time passes and services slowly change, the topic seems more relevant every time I think about it.
enshittification 101
Let’s start with an example. I’ve used Discord for a long time now, be it for playing with friends or reading obscure documentation about a GitHub project because the developers did not bother making a wiki or even a simple README file publicly available. When I started my g@ming career, I heard about TeamSpeak, Mumble, or even Skype, which all provided ways for people to talk to each other. I’ve watched countless hours of Minecraft content revolving around players talking to each other via proximity voice chat, and I found this concept really entertaining. But when I started looking for a way to play like this myself, I quickly found that the services used to make it work were not free at all. And it’s not only money; you need to build (or rent) a server that hosts TeamSpeak or Mumble, install the plugins linked to Minecraft, plan a date and time during the week to gather everyone… And for younger me, this idea quickly went down as ‘a problem for future me’.
Fast-forward multiple years and now Discord provides free voice chat for everyone, without having to host a server or anything. You log in and boom, it works. (well, except for the proximity chat, but I didn’t really care about that anymore) You start talking about it to friends so you can play or just chat with them, and then you start sending memes or documents in servers used by the whole class, and then create hidden channels to talk with the homies. Then the pandemic happens, and everyone starts using Zoom or Discord for classes and overall socialising. So even responsible adults are now using Discord, even more messages are sent, and the community servers for games or fandoms are full of people looking to talk to anyone because they feel lonely. Even companies are using Discord as a way to send documents or plan meetings. TeamSpeak? Whazzat?
Anyway, now the pandemic is done, no one dies of COVID anymore (I’ve seen it on the news so it must be true, right?) and almost everyone still uses Discord. And I will skip the boring details but hey! Discord is going public on the stock exchange soon. It’s time to make money! So the sweet enshittification process starts, the subscriptions are pouring in by limiting features like streaming quality or file upload size, ads are added (even though something in the original documentation said they would never happen…?) and a marketplace of cosmetics is implemented. Everything is good to make money, and since the services are free, the users can’t complain too much, right? A very small percentage of the user base leaves the platform, but overall nothing happens.
Then the scandal revolving around age verification happens. Long story short (because it is not really related to the original topic, but I find it really important), new regulations and laws in Australia, the UK, and Brazil require social platforms to implement age verification for users that access restricted content. Discord complies with these terms and starts working with age verification providers k-id and Persona. A user now has two options: provide an ID card or any official document to certify that they are an adult, or use a “face verification procedure” that uses the camera of their phone/laptop to evaluate their age by using AI models. Either way, this is a big risk for privacy and (opinion time:) should NOT be generalised. I might write an article about this topic down the line. Seeing that the EU wants to push the same age verification agenda, Discord explains that they would deploy the age verification pipeline in the whole world. Brand communication about this was terrible; almost everyone thought that you would need to verify your age to even use Discord (which is false; only restricted content is impacted), and a lot of people are advocating for a mass exodus that should make Discord think twice before doing a global rollout. Did it work? Well, they changed their verification provider (apparently Persona had ties to a certain company named Palantir, who would have thought), delayed the rollout, and promised to add credit card verification. The issues are still the same, but hey, at least they listened!
honey pot
Now to get back on topic, why did the threat of losing a lot of users not scare the precious investors? Because they know the vast majority of the user base is trapped. I talked about Discord because, at the time of writing, it is the most recent example of public outrage against a social media company. But I have a lot more examples of this kind: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, even Windows in a way. All these services/brands/products have had issues related to how they treat customers. And a lot of these customers threatened to leave the platform, only to stay in the end. I’d say the reason is quite simple: almost everyone has something to lose.
Let’s look at some examples:
- A friend group or MMO guild plays video games almost every day, and they use a social media platform to talk. One of the friends here wants to use another platform because of whatever, but the platform is so convenient that no one wants to bother using anything else. The g@m3r won’t leave the platform because they know they will lose something.
- An employee of a big company or startup needs some information that’s posted in a server hosted on an online platform, and the company they work for has used the service for years now; the data needed for it to run smoothly is stored here. The employee/company won’t leave the platform because they know they will lose something.
- A parent who uses a platform to communicate with their child can’t make them understand the reasons why it would be better to use another service for whatever reason. The parent won’t leave the platform because they know they will lose something.
I personally know people who fit these examples. Be it friends, data, or even convenience of use, once you’re in too deep, you can’t get out without leaving something behind. Everyone can have ideals, but not everyone can do everything to stand by them.
time is money
Okay, now that we’ve had enough doom-posting and corny sentences, let’s try to add some coherence to all of this. As I wrote before, enshittification is real, and it has been demonstrated with services like Uber or Netflix. A service provides incredible value for a small price, gathers a very large user base, and then degrades the service and/or increse the price to extract as much money as possible. The last step really depends on the quality of the trap that’s been laid out first.
- If the service gets bad too quickly or does not have enough user retention power, it will slowly die with public indifference. > “After all, they deserved it.”
- However, if the service becomes bad, but not so much as to be unusable, OR if the retention power is too great, a vast majority of the user base will certainly complain a lot, reminisce about the old days when everything was much simpler, but won’t leave. > “It is what it is, deal with it.”
But it shouldn’t! We almost always talk about services failing, killed by their creators or indirectly by investors because they do not create as much money as wanted, but we almost never talk about the services that continue to run based on retention only.
We’ve seen the public backlash against video games like ‘Concord’ or even recently ‘Highguard’ that closed in less than a month because the expectations were too high and could not be met in a single week. Even if the service is bad (which I won’t say because I haven’t played either of these two), the management didn’t give the game the chance to perhaps get its player base. Think about Among Us, arguably the most played game of the pandemic era, which released TWO YEARS prior and had less than a hundred players per day before getting multiple hundred of thousands PER DAY. That alone does not mean that every game or service will be successful, but an organic player base is not gathered in a day.
Unrelated, but we could also talk about 'The Crew'.
This game was based on a server-only approach, so when the game closed, all buyers simply could not play the game they bought anymore. Like, never again. It was so bad that a whole petition to the EU Council (the Stop Killing Games initiative) was started. In this case, the game was successful and had its player base, but got shut down because it was too old and it had sequels. If only the company behind it provided a way for players to still play offline, maybe they would not have had the backlash they got.We’ve seen public outrage when WhatsApp got caught changing its privacy policy, Instagram added an AI assistant, Facebook added AI “friends”, and Twitter became X and started pushing Grok everywhere. Alternatives were mentioned; people switched to them for a while, then came back. Bluesky was meant to be the next big thing, and it is still used by a lot of people, don’t get me wrong, but we just don’t talk about it anymore. And we still complain when Twitter X does something bad. Even so, the user base still stays almost the same (be it with bots or real users).
let’s talk about it
I’d like to say that the best course of action is for everyone to rally AND MAKE OUR VOICES HEARD, but we’re not in a movie and the vast majority of people do not care, or even know about these things. And it’s totally okay!
Personally, I find that social media are a pain. I have accounts on the big platforms and use some of them regularly, but it’s more of a ‘need’ than a ‘want’. I never post anything anywhere (or only if really needed) and I try to keep my footsteps hidden. I’m a big advocate for privacy in general, and I’m scared that this basic right becomes yet another thing that will be put to the side when using services pushed by companies that genuinely care more about money than their customers.
But I understand that, for the vast majority of the population, there are way bigger issues in life. I’ve expressed my concerns to my family, explaining alternatives and ways they can act to protect their rights and data. And while it sometimes made an impact, the vast majority of them just told me that they didn’t care or that it was a pain to follow through. But at least they thought about it, and made their choice with, I hope, as much information as they could have had.
For me, the best way to tackle this issue is to talk about it. It might not change much, as we are still prone to the fear of loss, but at least we can make our choice with the issue in mind.