> First people claimed that the free market will always give the consumer what they want.
Enshittification does give consumers what they want: free stuff. People will deny it up and down and claim they would pay for non-enshittified Facebook, for example. But how many people actually would pay a subscription to use a Facebook style service? Enough to build sustain a company of Meta's size? Probably not. How many people pay for Kagi?
>Enshittification does give consumers what they want: free stuff
Nope. Enshittifition happens to paid stuff just as well, including stuff you pay more (including when inflation adjusted) from what you paid before.
It's about futher increasing the profit margins, whether it's a paid product or not, not about affording to give something for free.
Yes. And it's also about strategic lock-in.
> Enough to build sustain a company of Meta's size?
This is the problem - I'd argue we shouldn't have companies the size of Meta (or Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, etc.). It's that these companies are nation-state level huge, and operate in a system that continues to demand more growth still, that causes problems like enshitification.
Would enough people pay for Facebook to support a company of Meta's size? No, but that's OK - enough people would pay for it to support a much smaller, customer-focused company, and that would be a really good thing across all of tech.
What's so wrong about just sustaining a certain size/user base instead of endlessly growing bigger and bigger?