Twenty years online have left me wary of platforms. From Facebook to Twitter, Tumblr to Kinja, nearly every platform I’ve been a part of has either actively betrayed me or decayed beneath my feet.
I spent eight years writing thousands of articles for Gawker Media, whose parent company eventually went bankrupt and was sold to a series of new owners. Subsequent platform changes have left most of my work mangled and without images.
I had a front row seat to the infamous 2015 Pivot To Video, as my bosses, along with most other online publishers of the era, overcommitted to the Facebook Video platform and paid a steep price when it all came crashing down.
I built up a pretty healthy Twitter following during the 2010s, and we all know how that turned out.
I’ve watched friends and colleagues go independent, only to find that, because they were exclusively publishing to platforms like YouTube or Spotify, they weren’t independent at all.
I’ve benefited from platforms too, of course. Early Twitter helped me establish myself as a writer, and played a role in getting me my first few big breaks. Ditto Blogger and Wordpress. For a few years, Facebook fueled the success of Gawker, helping my writing reach millions of new readers. Despite some recent red flags, Discord has remained a lovely place for both Strong Songs and Triple Click listeners to gather and chat. And both Patreon and Maximum Fun have made it possible for me to generate income from my podcasts without needing to sell ads.
That being said, the overall pattern of failure and decline has been impossible to ignore. It’s hard not to view the internet as one those video game levels where the ground below your character is continually crumbling, propelling you forward. No sooner have I landed on one platform than I’m preparing to jump to the next.
In 2023, “enshittification” was named the American Dialect Society’s word of the year. Coined by Cory Doctorow as part of his perfect encapsulation of the process of platform degradation, the word caught on because it identified a widespread phenomenon and gave it a much-needed name. Facebook, Amazon, and Instagram are three of the highest profile examples, but enshittification is everywhere. Doctorow writes:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Since going independent in 2018, I’ve taken every opportunity I can to avoid platform over-reliance. I publish Strong Songs to an open RSS feed that anyone can access. I back up the email subscriber-list for this newsletter regularly, ready to depart at a moment’s notice. I don’t sell ads or endorsements, and am not under contract to anyone. I keep each aspect of my businesses—store, newsletter, bookkeeping, community, music sales, subscriptions—separate from the others, however inconvenient that may be.
At the same time, the platforms I do use and rely on—Patreon and Substack chief among them—try ever harder to entice me to commit. Patreon adds a new feature seemingly every week—podcast hosting, video hosting, merch sales, annual subscriptions, automated retention tools, live-streaming—and each one I use further enmeshes me into their ecosystem. I get reminders about Substack’s closed social media platform Notes seemingly every day, along with plenty of other platform-specific features (recommendations, comments and community features, support pledges) that would tie me more closely to them. Many of the highest profile Substack writers I follow embrace these same features.
In July, Substack raised $100 million and received a $1.1 billion valuation, doubtless increasing the pressure on them to become profitable in ways that will soon be felt even by casual, non-monetized users like me. Platformer’s Casey Newton has a dire yet wholly believable list of predictions for some ways the enshittification of Substack might play out. The seeming imminence of some of those changes, coupled with Substack’s ongoing Nazi problem, makes it easy for me to keep them at arm’s length. When I do start offering paid subscriptions, I’m planning to move this whole operation elsewhere.
As for Patreon, it’s a genuinely great product and is still controlled by a CEO/founder who seems like a cool guy. It’s also been around a lot longer than Substack, and has a more established track record. But I can still picture the end, clear as day: the headlines announcing a sale to some conglomerate or other; the email introducing the new owners; their assurances that nothing will change. Patreon has always been powered by Creators, and we look forward to supporting your passion in new ways, or some such. It’ll be fine for six months, maybe a year. And then the changes will begin.
But. But! Those platforms are not the internet. Even the good ones, like Patreon. The open internet is right there; email and RSS exist right alongside closed platforms’ proprietary formats, app-exclusive features, and platform-controlled communication. They have their issues—email will always have problems with spam, and both podcast and email delivery are dominated by middlemen like Google (Gmail) and Apple (Apple Podcasts). But I can still reach out and communicate directly with my audience by sending emails, publishing blog posts, and sending my podcasts directly from a server—any server—to their devices. The lines are still up, and functioning.
In fact, podcasts make for a solid example of how good things could be. Platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify have a lot of power—too much—but their power is not absolute. That’s because podcasters like me don’t publish to Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We publish to RSS, an open protocol.
Last year, Anil Dash rightly observed that “wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement.
…what we can take away from hearing "wherever you find podcasts" at the end of every episode we listen to is that, sometimes without us knowing, radical systems can survive and even thrive in the modern world of tech and media. They can inspire new creators to make similar systems that are unowned, uncentralized, and a little bit uncontrollable. And in this era where we're seeing the renaissance of the open web, they point the way toward a future where we can use the same tone to say "wherever you find news" or "wherever you find your friends online", and know that it means that there's a way that our lives online could be fully in our own control.
He’s absolutely right. And while podcasts and writing are already distributed openly via RSS, I’m not the only one imagining a world where videos are distributed in a similar way. Open platforms like Peertube, built on an open protocol with some novel (if not yet wholly successful) ideas for solving video’s bandwidth issues, have been around for a while now. And while YouTube’s audience monopoly is still quite strong, cracks have been showing for years. I watch my favorite music YouTubers churning out disposable Shorts to please the algorithm, lamenting as their videos are run through AI upscalers without their permission, grinding out product reviews and paid endorsements to generate income as ad revenue declines, and watching the platform’s genuinely awful ContentID program endanger the very existence of their hard-built channels, and I can’t help but think how great it would be if all of these people were publishing their videos the way I publish podcasts. I can’t be the only one.
Doctorow’s enshittification diagnosis gets the most attention, but the full essay is helpful in part because his conclusions are not as hopeless as you might think. He writes:
Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That's fine, actually. We don't need eternal rulers of the internet. It's okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn't be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other.
And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit – the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created.
None of those things is impossible; it just feels that way sometimes. An increasing amount of new legislation, much of it in Europe, focuses on enforcing interoperability, data portability, and broader antitrust. Platforms like Substack and Patreon have it in their power to make it simple for users to leave, easily transferring all their data, contact lists, and Stripe payment information to a new platform. (Substack already does this to some extent, given the relative ease with which high-profile newsletters have migrated to competitors like Beehiiv or Ghost.) The RSS protocol could support video, or video makers could adopt one of the other open platforms now available. Worker-owned platforms like Maximum Fun could continue to grow, harnessing a network’s promotional power while letting artists own and control their work. A dozen more apps like OpenVibe or Tapestry could let people pull together the articles, videos, newsletters, and podcasts that they like from any number of places. The era of closed platform dominance could slowly wane, and an era of open publication could rise in its place.
Your first instinct may be to come up with a bunch of reasons why that hasn’t happened, or why it won’t. But it could happen! To some extent, it already has. And isn’t that nice to think about, too?
Onward
That became a more involved essay than I’d planned, so that’ll suffice for this edition, I think. This week in Strong Songs, I cross-posted an episode of the You’ll Hear It podcast that I guested on earlier this year, talking about the mighty Tower of Power. The next episode in the feed will be a new interview that I think a lot of you will like. Until then, I’ll be over here, working on Season Eight and planning my next platform escape.
As always, I’m over on on Instagram and Bluesky, though lately I’ve mostly been reading books and trying to stay off my phone. It’s great, I recommend it.
I’ll leave you with this pic of Appa from earlier in the summer, when Emily had mostly drained the little pond in our side yard. Appa was pretty convinced that rock was in fact a diving board. It did not end well.
Take care, and keep listening-
~KH
8/31/2025