The two factors that allow services to be terrible

From Pluralistic: Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital,

These are the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints. If your users can’t leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit.

My personal experience of this comes from the time I tried to quit WhatsApp.

This was back in 2021, when Meta changed its policies about how it shared WhatsApp data with Facebook. There was a lot of brouhaha, a supposed mass migration to Signal. Meta had to come out with FAQs, and full page ads in newspapers in India.

I felt that the time was right to push people to use Signal. I managed to move my one friend chat group to iMessage. I also managed to move one friend to Signal.

I had removed WhatsApp, and made it clear that I will be reachable on Signal only.

But it did not work. I was steadfast in my opinion and usage of Signal, but no one followed me to Signal. The storm passed. People continued using WhatsApp.

I was missing out on chats, both personal and work related. And so, eventually I reinstalled WhatsApp, and realised no matter what Meta does, no matter the privacy issues, or ads, or whatever, I will not be able to quit WhatsApp. It is an essential service.

That’s the thing, a lot of these essential services are controlled by private companies. Benevolent dictatorship is not a good model to manage essential services. And WhatsApp is that, for a big portion of the world. It is the de-facto support channel for a lot of businesses, small and big.

I have a lot of chats archived from businesses at this point. But there’s not much I can do. I just have to deal with this worsening service. Meta/Whatsapp have me captive.