The pursuit of "The Everything App" is making every app suck
Don't drink the TEA.
The pursuit of every dollar is making everything suck
Earlier in June, I shared the hypothetical Stolen Focus Summer Challenge, where I suggested that maybe we should all delete our top three favorite social media apps from our phones in order to regain our sanity and focus. I also conducted a poll to see who would actually do the challenge, which I myself am hesitant to try.
The results:
To the 18%ers, I love you.
But I continue to wonder, why do we hesitate so…? Because no one thinks the apps are great. Everyone thinks they are getting worse and there is even a name and theory around this phenomenon of worsening apps, called enshittification, coined by Canadian computer scientist, science-fiction author, and journalist, Cory Doctorow. I only recently discovered Cory, but he’s written what appears to be TONS, LOADS, of amazing books, and based on their covers, I’d like to read every single one.
This is how Cory describes “enshittification” which is a four-part process:
“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.”
Enshittification is a lot like what happens in an abusive relationship that ends in divorce.
However, I’d add to this theory the caveat that not all of them die. Some of them grow into behemoths. They do an expansionist variation of enshittification that I call TEA. The pursuit of The. Everything. App. Which, if we relate it back to relationships, instead of divorce it ends in a polygamist cult on a giant piece of land where the founder has 2.96 billion kids, aka the approx user count of Facebook in 2023.
The TEA variation is achieved by slowly making everything worse while also making it bigger and more all-encompassing, more entrenched in your daily life’s logistical needs.
Have you noticed that the biggest social media companies keep constantly adding new features, constantly trying to serve every purpose, and constantly trying to make themselves into everything? This is a big part of TEA.
Why? Because they all want to be the Walmart of our digital worlds. They all want to be The Everything App, so they can get Everyone’s Every Cent, like China already has with WeChat which is a closed-ecosystem app that does everything that all our apps do, plus banking. This is how they avoid death by enshittification.
Why? Because the stock market demands increased revenue and companies think TEA will make the most money. Also, you can’t divorce yourself from the source of your perceived needs.
But guess what? I don’t think we need or want this crap.
Imagine a world that only has Walmarts and no other stores, a world of WallyWorlds. And then please make that world stop.
Monopolies = oppression and stagnation. We want freedom, competitive innovation, and variety. We also don’t want to be addicted to a single company’s product. Nor do we want our personal lives to be their product.
Yet, social media companies won’t stop, because they want all your attention and all your money, and they will keep blatantly seeking this goal, so we must actively resist it. We must stop.
The Timeline of Evidence
In chronological order, let’s examine the evolution of big social media and their pursuit of TEA. I’m leaving off Reddit, Pinterest, Snapchat, and others because they’re not the main overlords attempting to become the Everything app. TikTok, I’ll discuss at the end, since it’s much newer.
Facebook (2004)
YouTube (2005)
Twitter (2006)
Instagram (2010)
Facebook
Facebook began as a digital High School yearbook // scrapbook. You shared your pithy little update on your timeline and maybe a photo, and maybe you wrote on your friend’s “wall.” It was simple and it was what it was: a digital yearbook//scrapbook of your life and your friends.
We used to blurt out whatever and write in the 3rd person about our day— “Charlotte is making cherry pudding!”
My first actual post on Facebook, which contained no text at all, was just a random picture at a Christmas tree farm. I remember posting this when I’d come back from Uganda to have a baby in the US in 2007 and had gotten my first cell phone with the Internet on it, a BlackBerry.
I didn’t really understand what Facebook was and hadn’t been using it, because it hadn’t taken off in Uganda, but my friends back home were urging me to get on this thing called Facebook and to share photos, so I did, with literally no explanation or preparation, just trees.
But now Facebook is full of posed, often highly-constructed and performative pictures of a life-glamorized, with detailed blog-entry like captions, or odes to loved ones, or political memes, or tirades on why we’re all going to get blown up by nuclear war.
More than a yearbook, we’ve made glossy magazines and department stores of our entire lives.
I mean, y’all know what it’s like. Bo Burnham made it into a song. But stick with me, there is more.
Now, in pursuit of TEA, Facebook wants you to share on your wall, tag your friends, be controversial, but don’t be TOO controversial, start groups, share photo albums, review locations, review pages, make pages, have chats, post long-form videos, run ads, watch long-form videos, make short videos, create an avatar, go into VR, go live, explore the metaverse, do highlights, play video games, play messaging games, watch movies and TV shows. I’m sure there are even more things I’m forgetting.
CHEESE and RICE.
What is Facebook now? It’s a Walmart with one aisle of digital yearbooks and a whole lot of other crap designed to purchase and sell your attention, designed like a Vegas casino to keep you inside forever.
YouTube
Similar story. In the beginning, you posted weird, cringy home videos. It was America’s Funniest Home Videos, but for the entire world and user-generated and online.
The now-famous, 19 second, “Me at the zoo” video was the first ever YouTube video, and “My Snowboarding Skillz” video below was the second. It kind of reminds me of my first Facebook post Christmas tree farm photo, so innocent, not trying to be anything.
At present, YouTube still has America’s funniest home videos, but they’re only one show on a gigantic cable-TV esque network that has contracts with creators, rents movies like Blockbuster, streams TV shows, wants you to do community posts (Instagram posts) make short videos, have shops, sell merch, run ads, live broadcast, retweet videos, remix videos, edit videos, share links, share text updates, create groups, run paid subscriptions, send money, review things, and the list goes on.
Being an open sourced-video experience wasn’t enough for YouTube. They also want to be everything to you—a bank, a production company, the news, the sports network, Kickstarter, GoFund Me, MTV, MGM, etc., plus offer every type of social media experience possible on their one platform.
Not to mention that YouTube is a babysitter.
Forget being raised by the TV; the most popular YouTube video currently of all time is “Baby Shark Dance,” viewed 12 BILLION times as of this post. In fact, 6 of the top 10 YouTube videos are babysitter videos for very little kids, even though mounting evidence shows that watching YouTube is harmful to little kids.
Is this the world we really want????
Twitter
Here we go again. Twitter began as an online water cooler, but it’s morphed many times. Musk has openly said he wants to turn Twitter into TEA, which he will call X, and X will solve for every variable, so you will never have to leave the casino, I mean platform.
Remember Periscope? Vines? I can’t even list them all, but polls, spaces, fleets, archives, live video, audio, long videos, short videos, multiple photos, blue checks, no blue checks, tip jar, lists, subscriptions, shops, NFTs, Live shopping, safe mode, Spaces, expanded news, long-form tweets, Circle, adding vs following, communities, groups, and newsletters. They also want you to run ads, watch ads, DM and watch Tv on the platform.
I’m sure you’ll soon be able to book your teleportation trip to Mars via Twitter.
There are so many features and options that few can keep up, not to mention the ever-changing algorithm.
Instagram
UGH. Formerly my favorite app, I now find this one to be the most reprehensible of them all.
It started as the everyday person’s photo diary and the photographer’s free photography portfolio. Now, Instagram changes its identity more than a borderline schizophrenic. It wants to be OpenSea one day and TikTok the next. Of all the platforms, it’s the most frenetic and chaotic, with constant iterations, changes, new features, destruction of new features, and confusing integrations. It keeps wifey on her toes, dancing and posting eggshells.
The most popular Instagram images of all time are mostly pictures of football(soccer) stars, or the Kardashian kids, or the famous Instagram egg—perhaps the best example of “content,” meaning something designed to circulate for the sake of circulating, for no other reason than to circulate.
The Vegas buffet where you never eat.
Then there are the Instagram videos… known now as reels.
The most popular Instagram reel ever is so confusing to me that I watched it several times and I still don’t understand it; then I realized that’s the point—the point is to get you to watch it several times.
It is confusing because confusing gets views, and content, the thing which is created purely to circulate like a fan spinning is only interested in views.
Again, is this the world we want?! Where the most people waste the most time being confused???
The current most-watched Instagram reel:
The Instagram algorithm rewards you for watching and making reels with pop music like TikTok, but it’s worse than TikTok because you can’t search the videos and the videos must be shorter than TikTok allows. It’s a mindless form of entertainment, that not only usurps your time, but controls your mind, training you to keep watching so that it can study you and sell you things. It also actively tries to shape your interests so you will buy related things.
Instagram shamelessly hops on any trend only to abandon it a few months later. Like the abusers in an abusive relationship, they strive to keep their devotees confused and in constant flux. Because again, mildly confused = more time on the app. And it’s more than mild confusion. The confusion is designed to make you feel stupid, like why don’t I get this? Why isn’t this working for me? Why don’t I look like this? The answer seems obvious to everyone but you, so you have to stay on Instagram to figure it out! And here are some helpful products to help you do just that.
Shop here!
Watch here!
Live here!
Jerk off here!
Sell stuff here! See ads here!
Holy ravioli. #MakeItStop.
(Bo Burnham sums IG up so well. LOVE him.)
Is the pursuit of TEA necessary?
Now, maybe this pursuit of TEA has saved these large corporations from going extinct like MySpace (RIP), or maybe it’s a necessary byproduct of our current economic system, but I don’t think so, because other things, like your favorite local restaurant, have stuck more to their original flavor and they’ve still survived and thrived. When something is actually useful and good, it can also survive. Yes, they innovate and change over time, but they don’t try to become Walmart.
How to Fight the Digital Walmart?
Ok, first of all, Walmart isn’t totally bad. Every now and then, I’ll go to Walmart, but I mostly try to avoid it. Many people don’t though. So, eventually, we probably will get a Walmart app. The TEA will finally steep and brew and spill out over the world and cover it in muck. It’s inevitable, especially since there is a veritable arms race for it.
But still, we should resist it. We should make sure the digital world doesn’t only have Walmarts.
We must resist the Stolen Focus!
How? By using smaller digital platforms like Substack, VRchat, Rumble, Minds, Reddit, Discord, Patreon, BeReal, Ello, Vero, (gasp, Goodreads), and more, and by protesting their mergers and acquisitions by larger companies.
I don’t know.
Delete. Delete. Delete?
What do you think the answer is?
Because just like we don’t want Starbucks putting our favorite mom and mom coffee shop out of business, we also don’t want Twitter to buy Substack or own the world.
But, But, But… I can’t because…
Yet, resistance is hard. As an indie author myself, just as I want my books to be in Amazon, Target, and Walmart as well as indie bookstores and my small, local library, I feel pressured to be everywhere, to have everything—a FB page, FB Group, IG, LinkedIn, Youtube, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, Podcast, Website, etc etc. But it’s really too much. Unless you’re a creator like Brandon Sanderson with a team and 30 employees, or have the energy and resources of Gary Vee, you’ve gotta pick and choose or risk going insane.
Plus, all this pressure to be everywhere isn’t even real. Bestselling author Sally Rooney isn’t on any social media and doesn’t even have her own website. Nor does queen Donna Tartt.
More and more, I’m thinking about taking the path of Substack author Elle Griffin, who Marie Kondoed her social media, deleted IG and Twitter, limited LinkedIn, and now only does Substack and TikTok, and it’s working just fine for her.
So, What About TikTok?
TikTok, albeit much newer, is the odd one out and maybe this is why so many people LOVE the platform. TikTok is like a video fleamarket with cool and crazy stuff from all over the world, closer to what Youtube used to be than to Walmart. I know some will disagree, but that’s how I feel.
TikTok was able to combine Google, YouTube, Omegle, and Vines in one simple app that you can also chat and live stream with and even run ads on, but in a less noticeable way than Youtube, or Facebook, etc, in a superior way, I’d say.
So while TikTok does a lot, it maintains an air of uncomplicatedness. It also runs way better on slow internet than the other apps do, making it more globally accessible, and it doesn’t change as much or as fast as the other platforms. It is what it is, and maybe that’s a Trojan horse. Maybe it becomes the digital Walmart before we can even blink because it does it so well.
Only time will tell.
Now You
Where do you see our world headed? Will the apps enshitt themselves into the sewer? Or grow forever? Have you begun any sort of stolen focus challenge?
I'm down to FB, IG and YouTube, all of which I peek at for about 5 minutes a day, and even that is becoming too much. The constant IN YOUR FACE TO BE ANNOYING AS SHIT ALL THE ADS is insane.
Great overview. I think X is the frontrunner for making TEA a reality, although I do hope they fail. I've read multiple Substackers calling for a digital fast to be put in place, I think it's a matter of getting people organized a smidgen and making it seem cool.