look up the term En-poop-ification
but change the word poop to the word that the internet tries to protect us from.
Doctorow's Additions
With his "enpoopification" idea, Doctorow seems to add two major points to the theory: the first is his argument that "a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold(ing) each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them," as stated in his article "The Enpoopification of TikTok." A platform gets enpoopified (that is, worse to use for both individual people and advertisers/businesses) because it knows both the people on it and the businesses are trapped there. Since they won't go anywhere, more money can be extracted from them. Often, people are trapped on a platform because the platform is a monopoly, because of a network effect where it's hard to find the same amount of reach anywhere else, or because of how much of their business or life already happens through the platform.
The second point that Doctorow adds is that "enpoopification" is part of a life cycle: platforms start out not making money but attracting tons of users. Then, they take the data from those users and sell it to advertisers. At last, they exploit the advertisers and users in order to make a lot of money, becoming gradually less usable and less interesting. Then, they die. In his essay, Doctorow argues that this already happened to Facebook, and is currently happening to TikTok
