Why Platforms Aren’t Your Friends

Platforms, like other systems, serve the people who profit from them.

Photo by taopaodao on Unsplash

In their unending pursuit of more and more advertising dollars, platforms’ appetites for ever-increasing amounts of human attention have become voracious. And that appetite must be sated, regardless of the side effects or consequences.

As content creators, writers, podcasters, YouTubers, and others are uniquely positioned to help platforms attract attention to their apps. But our interests will never be completely aligned with those of the platform owners.

In this story, I’m going to talk about who large systems, like platforms, actually serve, and what that means for content creators working on those platforms. Let’s go!

A different kind of system

When I practiced criminal law in northern Manitoba, Canada, it became apparent pretty quickly that the system was pretty deeply dysfunctional. Lawyers were inexperienced and overworked at best and ineffective at worst. Judges frequently didn’t know the law and, when they did, often ignored it. Sentencing hearings were rushed, bail hearings were delayed — sometimes for literal weeks at a time — timely trials were an illusion, and court orders were mostly ignored without consequence.

It was only with the passage of time that I came to understand why this state of affairs had been allowed to persist for years, even decades. While the public may not have benefited one iota from the judicial chaos, the players in the system almost certainly did. The judges, lawyers, sheriffs, clerks, and police were all being rewarded — some more handsomely than others — for keeping this lame duck system limping along.

In other words, the system wasn’t set up for the public: It was for all of us. And the sad truth is that it worked pretty well for us. We never missed paychecks and were largely insulated from any consequences for the egregious shortcomings of the system. After all, the injustices that arose from the courts in that area at that time weren’t attributable to any one person. Most of us were at least trying to do our jobs well. It was the system as a whole that was broken beyond repair.