What enshittification can teach us about buying digital platforms
AKA ‘Be Careful Where You Plant Your BUSINESS BEANS’
I’ve been using Meetup.com since 2013. Over those years I’ve built groups, attracted members, organised events and invested a considerable amount of time creating communities on the platform.
Meetup provided the infrastructure, I brought the people together it was a perfectly reasonable exchange.
Recently, however, I’ve found myself increasingly uncomfortable with changes to that relationship.
Meetup was acquired by Bending Spoons in 2024. Since then, there have been changes to organiser pricing and the introduction of Meetup+, a separate premium membership product for members.
I’m not particularly interested in turning this into an article complaining about Meetup.
Businesses change.
Products change.
Owners change.
Commercial models change.
Meetup is entitled to decide how it wants to make money, just as I’m entitled to decide whether its product continues to represent good value for me.
What interests me much more is this:
I spent more than a decade planting seeds on somebody else’s land.
And I think businesses need to talk about that.
There’s a rather wonderful word for some of this
Yes, really.
The term was coined by writer and technology commentator Cory Doctorow to describe a pattern he observed in digital platforms.
It describes something more sophisticated than a product simply getting worse.
A platform begins by creating enormous value for users.
That attracts people.
Lots of people attract businesses, creators, sellers, advertisers and organisers.
The platform becomes increasingly valuable because everybody else is already there.
Eventually, leaving becomes difficult and that’s when the economics can change.
The platform has acquired something extremely valuable: Dependency.
It can then progressively change how the value travelling through the platform is distributed.
Users can receive less.
Businesses can pay more.
More activity can be monetised.
Features that were once included can be restricted, repackaged or moved behind another payment tier.
None of this necessarily happens overnight and that’s precisely why it matters.
The platform hasn’t just acquired customers
It has acquired switching costs. Imagine I started a Meetup group yesterday with four members. Meetup could double its price tomorrow and I could say: “No thanks.”
Very little lost.
Now imagine I’ve spent 13 years building several communities there - we don’t actually have to imagine that.
I’ve accumulated members.
Search visibility.
History.
Relationships.
Event records.
Recognition.
Habit.
People know where to find the group.
Moving isn’t simply a matter of cancelling one subscription and buying another, I have to move an ecosystem.
That’s lock-in and this isn’t some fringe theory about technology companies. Economists have studied switching costs and network effects for decades. A platform becomes more valuable as more people use it. Once enough people are there, leaving it can become progressively less attractive precisely because everybody else is still there.
That’s an extraordinarily powerful business model.
It can also create a very unequal relationship between platform and customer.
And we’re surrounded by it
Think about how much value modern businesses build on infrastructure they don’t own.
Your LinkedIn audience
Your Facebook group
Your Instagram followers
Your Amazon reviews
Your Etsy shop
Your Google visibility
Your YouTube subscribers
Your Meetup community
Your cloud infrastructure
Your software integrations
None of that automatically makes those platforms bad choices. Quite the opposite, they can give a tiny business access to technology, infrastructure and audiences that would once have required enormous investment. That’s why we use them!
But convenience and ownership aren’t the same thing.
And I don’t think we teach businesses to distinguish between them nearly enough.
Planting seeds on someone else’s land
Imagine somebody offered you a beautiful piece of land.
Thousands of people walk past it every day.
There’s water.
There are tools.
The soil is excellent.
And they’ll let you plant there for almost nothing.
Brilliant.
You plant.
Things grow.
Customers arrive.
So you plant more.
Eventually your livelihood depends on what’s growing there.
Then the landowner changes the rent.
Or changes who can visit.
Or starts charging your customers.
Or changes which plants people can see.
Or sells the land.
You might reasonably complain.
But there’s an uncomfortable question underneath it:
At what point did you forget that you didn’t own the land?
That’s the digital platform problem.
The answer isn’t “own everything”
I don’t think that’s realistic. I have been asking this questions ‘Why are UK businesses, forced to build their businesses ON TOP OF International businesses, and none of us talk about that?’ for years. I think it used to be possible to own it all but I don’t think any expert would advise you build everything yourself, at the very least it would be prohibitively expensive and, in many cases, completely pointless.
I’m not suggesting everybody abandons LinkedIn, Meetup, Microsoft, Google or anything else.
I use these platforms every day.
The better question is: What happens to my business if the rules change?
That’s a buying question and I think we need to become much better digital buyers. If you need help - you know where I am.
